We continue to underestimate the disdain, annoyance, even vitriol expressed by some Graham city councilmen aimed at their constituents, now including this newspaper.
It’s clear the council resents its residents’ disagreement with their decision to relocate the Sesquicentennial Park, and now they’ve decided to widen their target of retaliatory punishment to this newspaper.
For decades, the newspaper has provided the service to most local governments of printing legal notices – notices of public hearings, budget meetings, or other state-required notices of scheduled council or board actions. We serve most local municipalities, most of county government, as well as many private sector attorneys (here and across the state), as well as individual citizens, mostly with handling estate notices.
Among our municipal customers is the city of Graham.
But this week, in apparently retaliation against the newspaper, mayor pro tem Ricky Hall raised the specter of putting on next month’s council agenda an item to strip advertising from The Alamance News and placing it, instead, in The Burlington Times-News.
Hall clearly isn’t keeping up very well with the Times-News, which he referred to as publishing three times a week, thus, he claimed providing greater flexibility for placing Graham’s legal notice advertising.
What he apparently missed is that the Times-News has reduced its publication schedule (in February) even further, now publishing only two days a week (Tuesday and Saturday), having eliminated the third day Hall claimed to still exist.
We would think even a hostile Graham city council would take some pride in its locally-owned hometown newspaper, as opposed to the out-of-state corporate ownership of Burlington’s. But we may be proven wrong.
We wanted to ask Hall more of the background or reasons for his position. But when the newspaper’s publisher sought out Hall after the council meeting to get more details on the reasoning behind his proposal, Hall responded, “I’m not talking to you,” as he turned and walked away from the publisher. Hall also apparently ignores other relevant facts in his rush to inflict some financial pain on this newspaper, even at greater city expense:
- The Alamance News is the most widely circulated newspaper based in the county – by a wide margin. Newspapers are required to file each year with the U.S. Postal Service a statement of their circulation.
The most recent reports filed with the U.S. Postal Service by both newspapers last fall confirm that The Alamance News now has more than 2½ times the paid circulation of the Burlington paper (ours: 3,737 vs. theirs: 1,429) – so the advertising dollars spent with us reach far more people.
- Yet our ad rates are typically about 30% lower than The Times-News.
No doubt, these facts have contributed to why our newspaper publishes far more legal advertising (for government and private entities) than the Burlington paper. It’s where businesses, municipalities, and others look for legal notices on a host of issues.
So, if Graham’s city council ultimately decides it wants to waste its citizens’ precious tax dollars by spending more tax dollars to reach fewer people, we certainly can’t stop them. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is apparently Hall’s approach; the only question remaining is will he get the rest of the council to go along?
The council may also want to do a little research, however, where they will also discover that our newspaper is the only one in the county that meets all statutory requirements for running legal notices.
So if the council doesn’t want to get ensnared with future legal challenges because public hearing or other public notices weren’t properly advertised in a legally-authorized newspaper, they would do well to continue using our newspaper.
We’ll save, for now, our pontifications on the importance of the First Amendment (perhaps in another week), and the illogic and dangers of retaliatory actions against this newspaper, pressing instead (above) the very practical taxpayer and legal implications of Hall’s boycott idea.
