Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield and two of the area's state legislators believe we're all stupid.
They also think they're geniuses who are about to pull a fast one, and do it with an added bonus.
Why else would they propose removing public notices from this newspaper and hiding them on the Internet so the bulk of area residents never see them? It's an attack on accountability and transparency. It's an attack on taxpayers.
The bonus is, they get to poke this newspaper in the eye for daring to ask tough questions of them.
The rationale behind this idiotic move -- led by state Rep. Vince Dean, R-East Ridge, and state Sen. Bo Watson, R-Hixson -- allegedly is to save taxpayer money.
Really? Chattanooga spends $75,000 a year to have this newspaper print the city's public notices, which range from news about public hearings and council meetings to requests for bid proposals. (Wonder what the city spends to hire lobbyists or lawyers to fight open records requests.)
Meanwhile, the city's annual budget is $185 million. The public notices expenditure represents four-hundredths of 1 percent of the city's annual budget.
Put another way, saving that money is the equivalent of saving one dollar for every $2,500 the city spends.
Would you buy a 60-inch, flat-screen LCD television just because the merchant dropped the price from $2,500 to $2,499?
In exchange for that paltry savings, which in the end won't be a savings at all, taxpayers will have to scour several Internet sites daily to find obscure public notices. Those are just the taxpayers who own computers with Internet access. Some of those computers, however, don't have broadband access and would have difficulty accessing some sites.
Who wants to spend all day hunting for municipal and county public notices hidden behind poorly designed government websites? You can say goodbye to a big chunk of your Facebook time.
A clear sign that Dean's bill, House Bill 1309, is petty and vindictive is that it "applies only to Hamilton County and municipalities in Hamilton County."
The Chattanooga Times Free Press is the only area news organization with sufficient resources to monitor local officials and their activities, including disclosing recently how city and county employees were
operating private businesses on taxpayer time.
Like us or not, and we will offend you from time to time because that's our job, this newspaper has a payroll that exceeds $16 million. That doesn't count the myriad independent contractors who derive much of their incomes from us.
If you remove those jobs from Chattanooga, each of you will pay higher taxes to cover escalating unemployment and Medicaid costs.
Dean's real beef is that he recently appeared in an article about off-color Internet jokes. Dean was merely the recipient and played no role in the e-mail, but he still didn't like being mentioned as one of the e-mail's recipients, a fact we gleaned from a public records request.
Sen. Watson's bill, meanwhile, cites a "steady decline in newspaper readership in the past several decades, while, at the same time, there has been an increase in the number of households with access to the Internet."
The Times Free Press is one of a handful of U.S. newspapers to grow circulation and perhaps the only one to grow it three years in a row. Add to our print circulation 4.5 million monthly page views on our website (a 50 percent increase in about six months) and you have a newspaper with tremendous reach.
Plus, you can sit down with a cup of coffee and access every public notice in our classified section without driving aimless miles on the information superhighway.
One out of every four Tennesseans doesn't even own a computer. Thirty-eight percent of senior citizens -- many of whom often are our most engaged taxpayers -- don't go online.
Other lawmakers have proposed bills that would hide public notices on government websites.
Lawyers and bankers are behind one such bill. Tennessee is not a judicial foreclosure state. Those notices would get lost on state websites. There would be no evidence of publication, and whatever gets posted online can be manipulated after the fact. Once it appears in print, it's there until the end of time.
A proposal to put foreclosure notices on the secretary of state website creates a government revenue stream and puts the government in competition with private businesses.
Dean and Watson should stick to important problems, such as creating more jobs instead of putting them at risk. They should be working to improve our secondary education system.
Moving public notices to government websites fosters less government transparency at a time when taxpayers have never needed it more. Is it worth a dollar for every $2,500 spent to license sneaky politicians to be even sneakier?