Menu
- New nursing home rules threaten rural communities (4/23/24)
- Human wages, robot purchases in lock-step (4/11/24)
- Heed the call for caution this year in road work zones (4/9/24)
- This year, heed the call for caution in highway work zones (4/9/24)
- Railroad safety should not be left to contract negotiations (4/5/24)
- Rejecting LB764 upholds fairness in Nebraska (4/4/24)
- A wake-up call for young adults: Get your cancer checkups (4/2/24)
Editorial
Horror stories from moving legals to the web
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
While the Legislature considers proposals that could move legal notices to the Internet, results of a survey by the national Public Notice Resource Center should be taken into account:
* Only 66 percent of all Americans 18 and over use the Internet.
* Only 50 percent of African-Americans use the Internet.
* Only 45 percent of Hispanic-Americans over the age of 65 use the Internet.
* Only 15 percent of Americans visit a government web site on the average day.
* Some 89 percent of the U.S. adult population did not view a government web site yesterday.
* And more than 40 percent of Americans have never visited a government web site.
A recent survey in Wisconsin, with more than 500 respondents, found that government web sites receive relatively little traffic. About 37 percent said they never read information on government web sites, 15 percent said they did so once a year and 8 percent several times a year. On the other hand, 82 percent of those in Wisconsin read a paper once a week.
And there is anecdotal evidence as well:
* In a northeastern U.S. town, after the town switched to Internet legals, the city clerk neglected to renew their URL, the site was eventually unplugged and all of the legal notices evaporated. Talk about a legal morass!
* In 2008, the Utah Legislature passed a law requiring all government entities to post all legal notices on the state-run web site. As one clerk noted, the site was very slow and took up to an hour to load an agenda -- causing some people to give up altogether.
* In Madison, Wisconsin, the school district put its legal notices online before sending them to the newspaper. Someone read them on the web and complained to the school administrator, who then pulled the notice from the web site before it went to the newspaper. After the newspaper found out the school was doctoring up its legal business, it published the original notice as it should have been published in the first place.
* In Lovell, Wyoming, the city was sued because it alleged that city officials had falsified some historic public records on a zoning issue 20 years prior. The plaintiff discovered the falsification in the original public record published in the local newspaper. The city was forced to pass a new ordinance and properly publish it in the local newspaper.
Again, we have to conclude, when it comes to a long-lasting, legal document, nothing can replace hard-copy, ink on paper.