We all know there are some people in government who don't want us to know what they are doing and that it occurs at all levels.

Transparency is a word that is thrown around continually, particularly by our legislature. In talking with legislators, I believe most them really want to have transparency, but on their terms.

The idea of the government controlling their own information and the output of it to the public smacks of big brotherism. We are seeing that in our state. Officials want to turn more and more to putting information online and bypassing any kind of oversight by watchdogs who may be lurking in what they see as the media jungle.

The Utah Press Association started up the Utah Legals website as a way of controlling some of this fox-in-the-chicken-house thinking. The state legislature and some of its agencies have begun to believe that newspapers, even the media in general, have become irrelevant. Their reasoning (or at least what they say their reasoning is) is that if legal notices and other documents are online, why should they have to be put in newspapers. They believe everyone has access or the ability to access online information.

There are a lot of problems with this belief. First, not everyone has access, particularly in rural areas. Many people don't even have a computer. But even if those suppositions were true there is one big problem with believing this is the know-all, see-all solution to letting the public know about what is going on in their community.

It's what I call serendipity.

Serendipity as it applies to legal notices is the propensity for making fortuitous discoveries while looking for or at something unrelated. Let's say someone is reading the sports page in a newspaper and next to it is the legal page. As they are reading about their little Johnny's Babe Ruth league home run they notice on the next page there is a map of their neighborhood. As they begin to read the legal they notice that someone wants to rezone a piece of property on their quiet street to an industrial zone that would permit huge trucks to be parked there. These trucks would be rolling up and down the road in front of the reader's house all day. He looks at the date of the zoning meeting, calls his neighbors (some of which have also seen it in the paper) and they get together to go to the planning and zoning meeting in their community that was announced in that legal. They have a voice in what is going on because they saw that notice.

Now imagine if that entire legal had been online and not in the newspaper. Would that person have seen it by running into it? Would any of his neighbors have seen it? And even if the paper had a small notice in it that there is a legal issue online dealing with a zoning issue in his part of town, would he have noticed that? Probably not, because the map and the full notice is what caught his attention.

This is the world citizens could face if online only notices are allowed to go into effect. They would be that much more hidden from public eyes. There would be little serendipity.

Some think the move to this idea of online only is a conspiracy, but I just see it as a way the government thinks it can save money. Online could be cheaper; but more importantly would it achieve the same purpose of what legal notices were created for in the first place?

This fight for transparency and public information will never end. There will aways be more ways that government will find to make it harder for John Q. Public to find information, even though in their mind it may seem they are making it easier.

Members of the Utah Press Association need to start talking to their legislators, county and city officials and anyone else that will listen about this now; that means all members no matter what community they are in or what kind of relationship they have with their officials need to express the problems with this kind of system.

We just can't wait to bring it up at the last minute during the legislative session. Now is the time to discuss it.