Read the public notices

This Thermopolis Independent Record contains two and a half pages of public notices. We suggest you read them.

Included on those pages are notices about another request from Rocky Mountain Power for a rate increase, an invitation to bid, board vacancies, notices of Sheriff sales, commissioner and council minutes and more.

These are required to run by state statute and there is a good reason for that. The information included in these notices must be accessible to the public for a variety of reasons. One of the most important is that our city and county governments are required to keep their citizen informed about their actions and spending of tax dollars.

Public notices have been around since the first Congress, and newspapers have been the designated recipient of public notices since the beginning, when radio, TV and the internet didn’t exist.

There have been several attempts to change the law in Wyoming so that public notices are no longer required to be published in newspapers. Many supporters of that idea cite money savings as a motivator.

That may make sense at first glance, but when you look at the overall impact on the community, the costs are minimal and worth the investment. The lost transparency and the ability to then hide how your money is being spent could be much more costly than that of a public notice.

We occasionally run ads reminding you to read the public notices for your protection and we mean it.