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Dan MacLeod is president of Maine Press Association and executive editor of the Bangor Daily News.
There exists a quiet, and not at all flashy, section of your local paper that’s been protecting towns and taxpayers for hundreds of years. It’s called public notices. If you’re a typical newspaper reader or web surfer, you probably don’t think much about public notices. But a bill now being debated in the Legislature, LD 2042, threatens the way public notices are issued, with implications for every Mainer.
The bill would allow any municipality in Maine to publish public notices on its local website rather than being required to publish the notices in newspapers or at any independent media. Public notices include requests for proposals by towns throughout Maine to solicit bids on crucial work that taxpayers fund — such as repairing roads, or bridges, or schools. The reason these RFPs have been required to be published by independent media (for literally centuries) is to protect the public.
By limiting opportunities for cronyism and corruption, the current public notices structure protects taxpayers. Independent, third-party publication ensures any given town can’t manipulate the RFP process to direct local tax revenue towards favored contractors. By making all RFPs public, every contractor has an equal opportunity to bid on a town’s work. Maine has a long and valued history of laws protecting transparency in governance. The current public notice system provides an additional safeguard.
Limiting opportunities for malfeasance is just one way the current public notices requirement benefits local taxpayers. The law also helps taxpayers in other ways. For example, the current requirement (by encouraging a one-stop publishing outlet for all the public notices) encourages competition. Contractors from across the state can find most RFPs in one place rather than having to search across numerous municipal websites in a timely fashion to find the jobs for bidding. Two of the largest web referrals to mainenotices.com are the Dodge Construction Network and ConstructConnect.com, which are clearinghouses designed to alert contractors about job opportunities. The current structure of public notices in Maine effectively centralizes information, which generates more competitive bidding, giving towns more choices and saving taxpayer money.
The current system also benefits municipalities by making posting easy. Shifting the labor involved in posting public notices to the municipalities will add to the responsibilities and requirements for towns across Maine, many of which are already overburdened. It also threatens to raise internet hosting costs for towns, whereas Mainenotices.com covers the distribution, hosting and archiving involved.
Ultimately, the bidding process for public works requires a modicum of trust. By making sure that public notices are published through independent media, the process builds in a layer of protection for Maine’s taxpayers. We have recently seen how budget crises in Washington and Penobscot counties have placed new burdens on local municipalities and right now it seems that we should be maintaining, rather than possibly killing, transparency in government contracting. With controversies throughout Maine about transparency in how towns spend taxpayer funds, now is not the time to make the process more opaque.
The public notices system isn’t broken. It works well, and shouldn’t be added to municipal responsibilities. The proposed law is a solution in search of a problem. In today’s political environment, there seem to be far more important and pressing issues for the Legislature to address.
