On Thursday, August 11, in a rare instance, the City of Westmoreland, Kansas, decided to reverse its previous decision to remove public notices from its local paper and onto the municipal government website.

Ned Seaton, publisher of the Manhattan Mercury, a daily newspaper in Manhattan, Kansas, testified in front of the Westmoreland City Council and addressed three key implications of their original choice to take notices away from newspapers: budget, transparency and liability.

After Seaton’s statement, the Westmoreland City Council agreed that its local paper-of-record, the Times of Pottawatomie County, owned by Seaton Publishing, is best equipped to handle the public notice process, and they renounced their previous decision.

Read Seaton’s statement below.

Dear Council members,

First, thanks for your service. Takes guts, some thick skin, and a sacrifice of time and energy to do what you’re doing, and I appreciate it. I don’t live in Westmoreland, but having observed one heckuva lot of public meetings over the years, I like to think I know enough to be grateful.

I am sure you want to enact good public policy, and so I am telephonically coming before you tonight in that spirit, to ask you to reconsider a recent action you took that I believe was, on balance, a mistake. I’m referring to your decision to stop notifying the public about the actions you take through the long-established method of publishing legal notices in an independent print newspaper.

As I’m sure your capable city attorney has told you, the spirit of the law in Kansas is that the government is supposed to publish public notices in order to notify voters, residents and taxpayers about substantial actions the government is taking or contemplating. That law says that local governments have to publish such notices in printed newspapers published in their jurisdiction.

There’s a loophole in the state law right now that allows certain city governments to more or less opt out of that law, and I can understand your urge to drive through that loophole. Let’s note first of all that neither school districts nor counties nor other government agencies have such a loophole; the existence of it is probably due to some lobbyist slipping it through somewhere in the last-minute flurry of dealmaking, pizza boxes and 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew that occurs at the end of the legislative session every year in Topeka.

I say I can understand the urge, because by choosing to opt out, you save the cost of buying space in a printed newspaper. Budgeting involves tough choices, always.

Since 2019, the Westmoreland city government has spent $9,009.58 on publishing these legal notices in the Times of Pottawatomie County. The Times is the designated medium through which these notices get published; it’s also the official legal publication for the Pottawatomie County government, as well as the Wamego and Rock Creek school districts.

Westmoreland has also published some of those legal notices in the Smoke Signal, which the city was not required to do. I assume that you did so because the city staff believed it was important or beneficial to get those items out to a broader audience. The Smoke Signal is distributed across the county for free, and has a larger press run than the Times, so that makes sense if you are going by the spirit of the law. The letter of the law does not allow a free-distribution paper to be the designated source for legal notices, which makes sense, because you could never be sure how many of those things were actually published, much less read.

At the risk of sounding patronizing, I’ll take just a minute to explain the concept. The whole idea is that the public has a right – indeed, a need – to know about certain things the government does. For instance, the budget. For instance, the dunning of people for delinquent taxes. The rezoning of property. The enactment of new ordinances. And so on. Some private businesses and citizens are also required to publish such notices – when a storage business takes possession of abandoned property, for example, or when a person changes his name.

The idea is simply that such things need to be disclosed to the public in a democratic society. Without the public knowing such things, how can they cast informed votes, how can they know what their government is up to?

Surely, assuming that politicians you don’t trust are in power, you can understand at the gut level why they ought to be legally required to disclose what they’re doing, right? And we have to have a system that assumes the worst, so as to prevent it. Right? That’s the concept of checks and balances.

So, why a printed newspaper? Well, for one, newspapers provide a tangible, verifiable record. For another, they are independent of the government itself.

You can imagine that if, say, the Nixon White House was in charge of disclosures, we would have thought that they really were just plumbers at the Watergate hotel. If the Clintons had to do it, you suppose they’d voluntarily disclose Monica Lewinsky? Again, assuming that the people in charge are susceptible to the temptation to put themselves in the best possible light, you can imagine that the government would be tempted to say, “Oh, sure, we disclosed that we were rezoning your neighborhood. It was on our website. Didn’t you see it?” And if you didn’t see it until it was too late, could anybody ever really verify that it actually had been published before? Nope. Not on a government website. It’s just inherently the fox guarding the henhouse.

To bring it closer to home, you might recall Rich Vargo’s $1 house? A bank foreclosed on a home in west Manhattan, and, as required by law, put a legal notice in a newspaper. They actually found a different loophole and ran it in a weekly paper called the Riley Countian, which nobody in Manhattan reads. Except, evidently, the elected county clerk. So he showed up for the auction, and nobody else did, and he picked up a $126,000 home for $1. A judge eventually overturned that sale on the grounds that it was fundamentally unfair, which it was. It was bad enough that the legal notice was in an obscure newspaper; can you imagine if it was on the government website, at least partially overseen by Rich Vargo? That’s the fox guarding the henhouse.

A printed newspaper, with verifiable paid circulation? Yes, we can prove the public’s been notified. it’s right there in print. We’ll provide you a signed affidavit to document that it was published. You can go back and find that, five years after the fact. Nobody – not Mark Zuckerberg, not any politician, not anybody – can fudge that.

I presume we can all agree on the philosophy, the basic idea. Nobody here is in favor of hiding. Everybody can understand the difference between a verifiable printed document, published by an independent private business – and on the other hand, something existing only in cyberspace, where things get faked all the time, on a website owned and operated by the government itself, which of course nobody goes to look at.

Now, about the money.

Yes, the newspaper charges the government money to publish these notices. That is because they are handled as advertisements, and you – the government – are our customer. We publish exactly the words you provide us, exactly as you write them, exactly when you want them to be published, and we provide you with a signed affidavit to prove that they were published. Just as we charge, say, Dillons, to insert their ad exactly as they want, we charge for this service. It’s the basic premise of our business that allows us to pay reporters and editors to provide the information service that we provide.

You’re thinking, oh, sure, Seaton is here arguing this because it benefits his pocketbook, and that is true. I am individually a small-percentage owner of our family business, a family business that’s been operating a newspaper in Manhattan since 1915. When Mark Portell decided to retire, he sold the Times to Chris Walker, who also bought the Smoke Signal and the Junction City Union from the Montgomery’s in Junction City. All of them gave up. We’re still here, still trying to serve our region’s information needs. It’s an uphill battle, with the coastal billionaires at Facebook and Google sucking up the local advertising revenue that used to support local family-owned businesses like the late great Westmoreland Recorder, like the Wamego Times, like KMAN radio, and so on.

I have a vested interest. True.

But I also believe strongly in the principle, and I imagine you do, too. If you didn’t believe in the principle, I could say, what are you doing here? But perhaps more relevantly, if you didn’t believe in the principal, why did the city spend about $548 on ads to notify the public in the Smoke Signal, when the city wasn’t even legally required to do that?

The question before you at the moment – the nub of the question I’m asking – is, do you believe in it to the tune of, say, $4,000 per year?

In a $1 million city budget? Four thousand dollars is four-tenths of one percent of that budget. It is a rounding error. It is the cost of, what, replacing a couple of stop signs?

I don’t mean to sound highfalutin about it, because pennies add up.

Think of it in this context: I assume, like nearly all governments that I’m aware of, you all are about to exceed the “revenue-neutral rate” in your next city budget. You know the origin of that rule, of course – and this year, the Legislature, in its infinite wisdom is requiring you to send a letter to all property owners notifying them of that fact. Do you know what Pottawatomie County taxpayers are going to have to spend for the mailing of those letters? About $12,000.

You could pay for three years of your legal notices – three years worth of providing independent, verifiable proof that you’ve notified the public about what their government is up to – for the cost of sending a letter that nobody will understand. In Riley County, they’re going to spend $30,000 sending those letters. In Johnson County, it’s well north of $100,000. I can tell you that you could buy lots and lots and lots of full-page ads in the paper for that amount, and you’d accomplish more than that.

But that’s slightly off-topic.

By the way, why did the Legislature require the mailing of a hard-copy letter? Couldn’t you just put that on your website? Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, let Laura Kelly or, say, Kris Kobach be in charge of putting that on THEIR websites?

So what am I asking you to do? I am asking you to reverse your vote last month, and instead continue to stand for transparency. I am asking you to designate – as your predecessors have designated for decades – an independent, subscription-supported printed newspaper as the verifiable method of notifying the public of what you’re doing. By doing so, you’ll be not only supporting a regional family-owned business, and its employees who actually cover your meetings, and you’ll not only be using a cost-effective medium, you’ll also be making a statement that you value government accountability, at least to the extent of four-tenths of one percent of your budget.