Last year on Good Friday, Alachua County announced it would begin posting public notices to its website. This meant that notices of public hearings, invitations to bid on government business, and more would appear there.

On its face, this move would have increased transparency, but, unfortunately, it was accompanied by three steps backward. Thanks to a 2023 law passed by the Florida Legislature, the county simultaneously withdrew public notices (also known as legal notices) from the Gainesville Sun newspaper, the Sun’s website, and floridapublicnotices.com, breaking with decades-long practice.

As Good Friday arrives this year, it’s a good time to revisit how this experiment is going. While there are many factors to consider—including cost, ease of use, accessibility, and more—the heart of the matter is how many people are being informed. Does this form of public notice actually notify the public?

According to numbers provided to Mainstreet in a public records request, the county’s public notice page averaged 492 pageviews per month over the site’s first 12 months. There has been no rise in the monthly numbers—and, in fact, the highest month recorded, 912 pageviews, was in April 2024.

If we assume that all of these clicks are unique individuals and that none of them were county employees, it leaves about 291,290 people uninformed about county business, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Research suggests this low number is not surprising. In March, Mason-Dixon Polling conducted an independent survey that found 71% of Florida voters said they are unlikely to seek out notices posted on a government website.

The same poll found 92% of Florida voters believe state and local government should be required to regularly publish public notices in printed and online newspapers.

That’s a staggering number. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find any public policy issue that would garner 92% support.

But the reason for those numbers should be self-evident. Citizens recognize the importance of providing notice to the public, but few have time to seek it out. You have to catch their attention while they’re doing something else—namely, reading a newspaper, which they’re reading to become informed.

If you are skeptical and think that no one reads notices in the newspaper, you don’t have to take my word for it. In a recent survey of Mainstreet readers, we asked if you read the legal notices in Mainstreet’s print edition. A whopping 62.6% of you said yes.

This, too, is an overwhelming number. It equates to 12,500 of our 20,000 weekly print readers. It’s far from everyone in the county, but it’s a good start.

Alachua County’s decision to post notices on its website was a good move. But it has proved a poor substitute for the three forms of notice the county ended at the same time.

In an era when online misinformation is thriving, we need more formal notice to the public, not less. It’s time for Alachua County to employ an “all of the above” approach to public notices.