Dear Readers: We need your help.

With the best of intentions, our seven representatives on the Volusia County Council are on the verge of making a big costly mistake.

We need your help to convince them to avoid it.

Recently, the Florida Legislature changed the law to allow counties and cities and clerks of courts to publish some legally required notices only on the internet, on their own government-owned websites.

Before this, such notices — which run the gamut from rezonings to development plans, new laws, tax increases, elections, budget changes and more — were required to be published in newspapers.

Volusia County is considering creating its own spot on the World Wide Web for publication of these notices. The county’s legal department guesses that the county can save — drum roll, please — $70,000 a year, or .006 percent of the county’s $1.19 billion budget.

Oh, and that $70,000 savings doesn’t account for the cost of hiring a company to create and host the website, at an estimated $2,000 a month.

Of course, saving money is a good idea, and wise use of taxpayer dollars is always the goal, but we think Volusia County stands to lose, not save, with this plan. Here’s why:

The notices will be less accessible by the public. Even in this day and age, some people don’t have internet access, especially older people and low-income people.

Even those who have internet access will be required to make time to deliberately navigate to a county website and search for a notice, instead of simply running into that notice while turning the pages of the local newspaper, or browsing the newspaper’s website. You can only search on the internet for what you already know you’re looking for. How about a notice about a commercial rezoning in your neighborhood that you weren’t expecting or didn’t know anything about? Even if you miss this notice in a newspaper, it’s likely one of your neighbors will see it and tell you.

We think the county is underestimating the true costs of handling its own public notices, instead of partnering with newspapers, which have years of experience in publishing legal notices online and in print. Websites don’t just exist and fill themselves with content. There will be hosting, management, maintenance, updating, troubleshooting, coordinating and scheduling. What will happen to our $70,000-a-year in savings when the county finds it needs to add an employee — or two — to manage this new enterprise?

Additionally, the county will be required to mail a paper notice to anyone who requests one. In a county of nearly a half-million people, that’s another unknown cost.

Taxpayers at large aren’t paying for all the legal notices the government is required to publish. Often, the cost of these notices is built into the cost of application fees or permit fees paid by developers. The county has made the point that, with the new online notices, it could reduce costs for a developer who, for example, wants to rezone 100 acres in your backyard for a new housing development or shopping center. Is reducing services to the public to make things cheaper for developers really a good idea?

Cost, lack of transparency and public access aren’t the only problems with this plan. We are also saddened by the county’s apparent willingness to create more county-government bureaucracy to do a job that private businesses are already doing.

In addition to publishing its own notices, the county is also interested in contacting cities and other government agencies to offer to publish those agencies’ legal notices on the county’s new platform — for a fee. Plain and simple, that’s the county starting up a new business to compete with private businesses, and using taxpayer dollars to do it. It will further drive up the county’s costs and no doubt require another new employee or two to manage.

When newspapers publish legal notices in print, those newspapers are required by law to also publish those same notices, at no extra charge, on their own websites and on a statewide website hosted by the Florida Press Association. Maximum, searchable, statewide access is guaranteed. Legal notices published only on a county site won’t get that wide exposure, and people will know less about what their local governments are up to.

There are better solutions that both serve the public and accomplish the goal of saving money. It is possible, for example, for the county to use a private-enterprise web platform, such as The Beacon’s website, instead of spending taxpayers’ money to create a county site.

We invite Volusia County to negotiate with all of its newspaper partners to determine if savings are possible without reducing the public’s access to important notices.

And we respectfully ask you, please, to contact your representatives on the County Council to let them know what you think.

County officials need to hear what the people think. Thank you.

Your representatives on the Volusia County Council Chair Jeff Brower, jbrower@volusia.org

At-large representative Jake Johansson, jjohansson@volusia.org

District 1 representative Don Dempsey, ddempsey@volusia.org

District 2 representative Matt Reinhart, mreinhart@volusia.org

District 3 representative Vice Chair Danny Robins, drobins@volusia.org

District 4 representative Troy Kent, tkent@volusia.org

District 5 representative David Santiago, dsantiago@volusia.org

Messages may be left for members of the County Council at 386-736-5920, and mail may be sent to them at 123 W. Indiana Ave., DeLand, FL 32720-4612.