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[Note: This material is copyright by the Press-Citizen, and is reproduced here as a matter of "fair use" for non-commercial, educational purposes only. Any other use may require the prior approval of the Iowa City Press-Citizen.]

This year, taxpayer-funded lobbyists from the Iowa School Board Association, League of Iowa Cities and Iowa State Association of Counties have been trying to convince our legislators that such notices belong on government-controlled Web sites rather than in newspapers.

That goes against the results of a statewide readership survey, funded by the Iowa Newspaper Association in December, which found that public notices proved as well read as national sports. Iowans said they prefer to see such notices in their newspapers; more than half of those surveyed, in fact, said they have never visited a government Web site for any reason.

Lobbyists complain that the law is a financial burden on such agencies. But the survey also found that local governments, on average, spend about one-twentieth of one percent of their budgets on public notices. That's a pretty inexpensive way to ensure that these agencies are staying above board.

Moving this information from the printed pages of local newspaper into the back alleys of cyberspace would help ensure that scandals like CIETC and other government abuses go unnoticed for far too long. If legislators are serious about having such information available to public scrutiny, they need to require the bureaucrats to print the information where people actually read it.