The Iowa Legislature is at it again, trying to eliminate publication of legal notices in newspapers. And it will cost Iowa’s citizens way more money than it saves.

Republican sponsors say it will save money for cities and counties, but as editor Art Cullen noted in his editorial last week, scrapping public notices will keep Iowans in the dark about the public’s business.

Legal notices are the minutes of city council and board of supervisors meetings, the bills that they pay, the people that they hire and other official actions they take. They are the notices that alert you if a hog buying station is going in next to your home or a pipeline is going under your property. They inform you about what is in the government’s budget for the next year, and what your tax rate will be. They are set in small type but contain big news. That’s why they have been required for publication in newspapers since the earliest days of our nation.

For all of their importance, legal notice costs in Iowa newspapers are minuscule. For example, the City of Storm Lake, with a budget of $77.7 million last year and an ending fund balance of $20.4 million in the bank, paid just $13,431 to the Times Pilot to inform taxpayers how their money was spent. That expense is a mere 0.000173% of Storm Lake’s total budget. We know this because the city was required to publish its budget in the May 9, 2025 Times Pilot.

The price for legal notices is set by the state each year and, in the case of the Times Pilot, represents a discount of about 25% off our normal advertising rate.

That not only covers publication in the print edition of the Times Pilot, but also online on www.stormlake.com and on www.iowapublicnotices.com, which includes every legal notice in the state. This newspaper also provides printed notarized copies as proof of publications.

Publishing legal notices online would likely cost more than having newspapers do it. The City of Storm Lake and Buena Vista County do not presently publish their notices online, so they would have to devote an employee to that task. A government employee would have to devote at least a fourth of their time managing legals. For the typical clerk in city hall or courthouse, that would likely represent an annual expense of more than $20,000 when salary, employment taxes, insurance, IPERS and other benefits are factored. Additional website expenses would also probably be incurred to provide a searchable database and other necessary features.

Legal notices are already free to read on our local and state websites, and people can visit our office to look at printed copies for free. We maintain all public notices for Buena Vista County and the City of Storm Lake going back 156 years, predating Storm Lake’s founding by three years. Neither the city nor the county can provide easy access to records from even a year or two ago, while newspapers can retrieve records dating back decades in a few minutes.

If you go to a government office you will probably be charged to look at your public records. All of Iowa’s court documents are now filed exclusively online, so we have to pay $300 per year to access these public records. When we asked to look at Storm Lake’s legal bills in the city’s TIF multi-million dollar lawsuit against Buena Vista County, we were told by the city we would have to pay $500.

If Storm Lake and Buena Vista County taxpayers had been better informed by their governments through adequate legal notice publications, we may have avoided the multi-million dollar lawsuit over lost tax revenues they are now wrangling over in court. Legal notices are well-read, and a sharp-eyed farmer or business owner, relaxing in their easy chair at night perusing the legal notices in the paper, might well have caught the TIF misappropriations that escaped the eyes of city and county officials — and their outside auditors — for years.

There would be additional costs to killing off legal notices. A third of Iowa’s newspapers might be put out of business because the few thousand dollars they receive from the government are in many towns the difference between profit and loss. Small towns would lose another business that pays taxes and employs people who pay taxes. That lost tax revenue would easily offset any savings from killing legal notices.

In the past year, area papers in Schaller and Aurelia and four more in nearby Clay and O’Brien counties closed. Another closed newspaper is another empty storefront on a rural main street full of empty banks, implement dealers, cafes, farm supply stores and schools. Our legislature doles out multi-year multi-million dollar tax breaks to Apple and Google and Microsoft for sprawling data centers in Des Moines that employ almost no one, while starving small town newspapers over a few thousand dollars.

And there would be fewer nosy reporters informing taxpayers about what’s going on at city hall and the courthouse.

So the Legislature’s quest to save money on legal notices will actually increase costs. And reduce public access to the public’s business.

If you think publication of legal notices in newspapers is important to a democracy, let our legislators know that you are opposed to Senate File 2434.

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John Cullen is president of the Storm Lake Times Pilot.