Local Blog Offers Services to Avoid Future Mishaps
Ouch! There goes another chunk of your taxes. The city was to sell bonds for the new pool yesterday. However, that sale can't happen until the city has published notices for two consecutive weeks. Alas, the city's paper of record, the mighty Madison Daily Leader, didn't publish those notices according to the proper timeline. KJAM reports that MDL posted a notice on the 12th, but somehow missed the notice that should have appeared on the 19th.
The city thus will not be able to deposit the proceeds from the bond sale until December 11. The loss in interest over those two weeks: $7000.
In the spirit of civic duty, the Madville Times gladly offers its services to the City of Madison and any other governmental entity that wish to avoid such problems in the future. The Madville Times would be happy to serve as the publication of record for your legal notice needs. We'd probably have to check statute to make sure blogs can legally perform that function, but if there's any legal hang-up, I'm sure we can get our friend Representative Olson to introduce some enabling legislation come January.
Give me a call, Mr. Heinemeyer! I'll bet we could arrange a fee schedule that would help the city make that $7000 back in publication cost savings in no time! Satisfaction guaranteed!
Jon Hunter should stand the cost of his mistake, not we taxpayers. Doesn't he have insurance that would cover an error like that? On the other issue, getting the legal publication changed from a newspaper to a website is an uphill battle as the newspaper association lobbies pretty hard in Pierre. Talk to your legislators. It would be nice if the City, School and County could publish their legals on their own public websites and maybe provide free copies of the legal notifications at the public library for people to pick up, rather than pay for all that expensive hard to read advertising in the Legals section of the newspaper, which has less subscribers every year. I don't think people realize that those legals are not free and young people are not subscribing to newspapers anymore. They are ALL electronic media. It needs to change soon to keep people informed. Good Luck!
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about that insurance thing. I wonder what the law says about publisher's obligations to customer on this one!
ReplyDeleteLobbyists? Pshaw! State Rep. Russ would never let lobbyists keep him from doing what's right, right? ;-)
Of course, I don't want to put our man Hunter out of business -- his people provide me with a lot my material! And I don't have the capital to hire Elisa and Chuck to report for me (at least not yet). Of course, with Joe Prostrollo banging at the media gates again, I may have to go big time and compete with him. LakeHermanNews.com, anyone?
You seem to love to give Russell Olson --- all the time. What about the other representative and senator we have also? Could it be that your bias is showing against Republicans??!
ReplyDeleteBiased? Moi? ;-)
ReplyDeleteHeck no! It just so happens that Russ is another Madison guy, another lake guy (the parallels are actuall kind of scary). I was talking about a technological issue, and given Russ's record on tech issues that can benefit local voters (remember that bill on DSU selling old laptops to students? Russ was the big mover and shaker on that one), he naturally popped to mind on this issue.
But don't worry... the Legislative session is coming fast. Expect plenty of ---, as I do love to give --- to Rep. Olson... and Rep. Gassman, and Sen. Sutton, and anyone else who has it coming. Stay tuned!
Cory, you're always taking shots at Russ Olson, the Big Money Guy who knocked out your pal, Gerry Lange, but that's okay. After all, it's your blog and we believe in free and equal speech, right? Here's another thought. Lange, Sutton and Gassman have been in there much longer and have done nothing to address the issue of legal publication requirements in newspapers. See if they would bring forward a bill with Russ signing on. I wonder if Hunter is going to charge the City for the legal ads they had to run in spite of costing the city over SEVEN GRAND.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, those shots! Thanks for reminding me... and the voters! ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for the relevant comment. If legislation would help, then yes, it would be all the better to have all three of our legislators working together to promote it.