Graham’s city council has decided not to pursue one councilman’s suggestion of stripping the city’s legal advertising from The Alamance News and placing it in The (Burlington) Times-News, instead.
Mayor pro tem Ricky Hall had proposed at the council’s April meeting that an agenda item be included for its May 12 meeting to remove the city government’s legal advertising from The Alamance News.
Alamance News publisher Tom Boney, Jr. sent council members a nine-page letter Monday prior to this week’s Tuesday meeting, outlining the reasons the city should leave its advertising with the locally-owned hometown newspaper rather than putting it in a corporate paper in an adjacent city.
Boney was also allowed to address the council briefly on Tuesday night as the council turned to the agenda item and summarized what he considered to be the key issues from the letter.
Boney emphasized that the Graham-based newspaper has two-and-a-half times the circulation of the Burlington newspaper, based on annual Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation filed with the U.S. Postal Service each October. The most recent reports filed by the two newspapers show that The Alamance News had a paid distribution of 3,737 each edition, while The Times-News had only 1,429.
Meanwhile, The Alamance News legal advertising rates are substantially lower than those for The Times-News. Boney took legal ads that were run in the Burlington paper and compared the prices charged with those that would have been charged for the same ads. The Graham paper’s charge would have been 40 percent lower than the invoices submitted by the Burlington newspaper.
“Changing the city’s preferred vendor to The Times-News,” Boney said, “would thus increase the cost to the city and its taxpayers, by approximately 40 percent while at the same time reaching 60 percent fewer people.”
Boney also underscored the hometown advantage of The Alamance News. “ From a strictly parochial view, we find it ironic, indeed, that the Graham city council would consider deliberately undertaking to penalize a locally owned, Graham business by choosing, instead, to spend its citizens’ tax dollars with a corporate-owned newspaper, headquartered in Kentucky.”
He also noted that The Alamance News is the only newspaper in the county that fully complies with all the requirements of state law regarding its eligibility to publish legal advertising.
Boney said the council’s consideration of changing its legal advertising was entirely a retaliatory response. “It seems quite clear from the manner in which this agenda item arose,” Boney wrote the council, “that the underlying rationale is, in actuality, a disagreement by at least one member of the city council with the news coverage provided by the newspaper and/or the opinions voiced by the publisher on the editorial page of the newspaper.”
The publisher also questioned the council’s involvement in the decision-making about which newspaper the city should use. “In every other city and town in the county, I am unaware of any local governing body that has stepped in to determine where such advertising is placed. This is usually an administrative decision,” he said.
“In every other occasion of which I am aware where a public body has gotten involved across North Carolina in intervening to make such a decision,” Boney said, “it is precisely as in this case: by a desire to punish a local newspaper” with which the members of the public body disagreed.
For her part, council member Bonnie Whitaker noted that she had asked city manager Megan Garner and city clerk Renee Ward whether “we’ve had any problems [with The Alamance News]. They said, ‘no,’” Whitaker reported.
“I don’t believe the city council should be regulating” where the city’s legal advertising is placed, she said.
Whitaker ultimately made the motion to leave to the discretion of the city manager and her staff where to place the city’s legal advertising. The motion was seconded by Hall.
Then councilman Jim Young weighed in, first to criticize the newspaper for what he considered to be some of its unfair and harsh treatment of city council members both in its news stories and editorials, he said.
But Young said that the council’s duty was to ensure that “we inform as many residents of Graham” as possible. On that score, Young concluded, “The Alamance News is the better choice.”
Young then seconded Whitaker’s motion (which Hall had also done). The council voted unanimously, 5-0, for the motion that the decision should be left up to the staff. Councilman Bobby Chin joined mayor Chelsea Dickey, mayor pro tem Hall, and council members Whitaker and Young in approving the motion.
