Jones County supervisors twice now decided to abandon a long standing practice of publishing notices of county business in the Laurel Leader-Call. Supervisors have opted instead to publish these notices, the county’s legal advertisements, in a competing newspaper. The other paper publishes just once a week, not daily like the Leader-Call. It circulates, at best, a third of the copies of the Leader-Call.

This is bad news for the Leader-Call, of course. It is also a poor choice for Jones County and its citizens. We continue to urge our elected supervisors to publish these notices in the newspaper you hold in your hands.

Our supervisors first decided to publish the legals elsewhere during a meeting on Feb. 17. They later changed their minds. But they decided yet again last week to abandon advertising in this newspaper, except in rare emergency cases.

Supervisors apparently feel they have saved the county and its taxpayers thousands of dollars. We normally applaud such fiscal responsibility, but this time the sacrifice is much too great. In publishing these notices elsewhere, supervisors commit themselves to informing fewer citizens of the government's work less frequently. While this may satisfy the letter of the law, it abandons the fundamental principle of our democracy that government is conducted in full view of the public.

This is a matter of basic math. A periodical that circulates each week a third of the copies published every day by another simply cannot reach the same number of people. Put another way, supervisors are shutting down a public address system that serves the entire county to instead shout at small crowd. This choice is most certainly not worth the savings the supervisors think they will realize.

We also have serious concerns with the way our leaders arrived at this decision. At no point did they solicit bids or commit to a process of deciding where to place these advertisements. They did not announce their intention of taking up this topic in published agendas.

No, there was no process. There was no notice, in apparent defiance of our state’s open meetings law. Supervisors instead reacted to the informal overtures of our competitor, who himself describes theirs as a “gentleman's agreement.”

This is no way to run a county. Consider what would happen if all government business was performed with little advanced warning. What would happen if all supervisors’ decisions were made with handshakes, rather than deliberations and duly recorded votes? The implications of such a precedent are frightening.

So, absent a formal process, the Leader-Call will return to the supervisors on Monday to again make our case. We will urge them again to publish notices of the county’s business in this newspaper. We will do so for the benefit of our business, to be sure, but more significantly for the benefit of Jones County and all of its citizens.

— Chris Zimmerman, Publisher