AN EDITORIAL BY
LAWRENCE SOBCZAK
PUBLISHER
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Those famous words were spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet play. After meeting Romeo at the party her father has thrown to celebrate her engagement to Paris, Juliet goes up to her room. She steps out onto her balcony and, not being able to get the handsome young Romeo Montague out of her mind she sighs, and speaks her mind out loud.
Nowadays, Juliet may be speaking about the search for public notices in the newspaper about everyday business going on in the Village of Romeo.
The answer is now so silly in Romeo that the response channels the writings of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss:
Are they on the window? Taped to door? Or on the floor?
Should we look under a rock? Could we ask Dr. Spock?
In government, transparency is absolutely essential.
That’s why Michigan has laws on the books that require government bodies to publish information about meetings, public hearings and other government actions in a local newspaper.
Notices published in a newspaper cannot be deleted or edited. If a mistake is made, it has to be corrected in the newspaper, in full public view.
Professionals such as consultants, project bidders and attorneys as well as the average Jane or Joe look in the newspaper to see what’s going on in the community beyond the headlines and often find it in a public notice.
“Is that activity in the empty lot down the street a new Meijer’s store or is it just a house?” The public notice is where the question is often answered first.
For more than 150 years, Romeo’s village councils and clerks knew the importance of publishing a public notice in the local newspaper.
In 2017, the Romeo Board of Trustees reaffirmed their instructions to the Romeo Village Clerk to publish meeting minutes and other notices in The Record.
The board discussed the matter of public notices after Trustee Bob Hart made a motion suggesting that the meeting minutes simply be posted on the village hall window, the Community Center on Morton Street and the library to meet the bare minimum of legal requirements.
The board disagreed and public notices continued to appear in The Record until early 2020 when they mysteriously disappeared during the pandemic.
Was this a board decision?
On the surface, it appears that the Village Clerk, Katherine Trapp, has dismissed the board’s direction regarding public notices.
Is it possible that these notices appear elsewhere? We looked around for online Romeo’s public notices to find the answers.
After some clicking around, we found public notices on The Macomb Daily website for communities mostly located in the southern portion of the county.
Unfortunately, The Record, The Macomb Daily and The Voice are the only legal newspapers in the county. The other newspapers that once served the rest of the county are either no longer in business or no longer print at a frequency that classifies them as a newspaper under state law.
After scrolling and clicking, we could not find any notices for Romeo in The Macomb Daily. No dice either at The Voice, a sister publication to The Daily.
Where are the public notices being published and when? I subscribe to The Macomb Daily and have only sporadically seen them published there.
The hunt continued on to the village’s website where a click on the “public records” tab produces a web page with just the village’s header and some default menu options. There are no public records. A click over to minutes and agendas produced an error — only the agenda for the Aug. 15 board of trustees meeting.
A few more clicks produce a notice for a public hearing for June 28, 2021 — the only one listed.
The point is that it is a hunt and it is a mess.
To go on this online hunt, you have to have an Internet service, a computer and knowledge on how to use the Internet. You also need a website that is constructed in a competent way.
With a newspaper such as The Record, you pay $1 and page through it. If there is some sort of important public notice, it’s right there on the page for you to easily find and to easily see. No hunt.
Elected clerks are the record keepers, a sort of public document librarian, for the community.
The clerk should strive to make information to the public accessible. Publish it in as many periodicals as possible. Post it everywhere. The website should be easy to use and a thorough archive, not as a primary way to get a message out.
Could this lack of government transparency initiated by Trapp be attributed to willful neglect of duty or is she taking her direction from someone else in the village offices?
We think this is a feeling a lot of people get when government is not functioning as transparent as possible. Her lack of transparency in her office over the past four years do not dispel these feelings.
© 2022
