To find Rep. Terry Hayes’ explanation of LD 1878, one must locate her MySpace page (search for a 49-year-old Taurus in Buckfield, Maine), find her blogs, and click “Terry’s latest blog entry.”

One could have found it easily from a link on Hayes’ personal Web site – hayesforhouse.com – but the freshman Democrat allowed her domain name to expire. Now, hayesforhouse.com offers e-mail marketing solutions, credit cards, how to cheat at video games, and, predictably, plans for building houses.

It seems the Information Superhighway has some wicked potholes.

On May 16, the State and Local Government Committee (upon which Hayes serves) approved an amended version of LD 1878, which would phase out newspaper publication of state notices, in favor of a central, online-only warehouse of notice information managed by the state.

A plan to have an accompanying toll-free telephone number, where residents could request mailings of notices, was scrapped because of cost. Hayes estimates savings of more than $1 million annually from ceasing newspaper publication, even though the state spends only about $450,000 for it now.

The bill now also contains a provision where the state could publish a newspaper notice only if it believed the issue warranted such attention. This is frightening, a “trust us, we’re the government” approach to information access that violates every ideal of open governance.

Hayes submitted LD 1878, in part, because she thinks nobody reads the notices. (But she admits not surveying newspaper readers whether they do.) And since her opinion is that the system is an ineffective use of resources, she believes it should be eliminated for a presumptive cheaper, unproven replacement.

Let’s hope the domain doesn’t expire.

Or that the server doesn’t crash.

Perish the thought of a computer virus, or hacker, wreaking havoc to the archive of notices for committee hearings and legislative actions, maliciously crippling a vulnerable system without a redundancy.

Consolidating the fragmented online availability of state notices is smart, but only as a parallel to the current system. There isn’t a fragment of evidence that a Web site for notices will be a panacea for cost savings and improved public access to information. We only have the word of Hayes and her co-sponsors.

Criticism of publishing public notices is valid – the system has been unchanged for decades. If the concern, as voiced by Hayes, is the state isn’t getting a bang for our bucks, the best course is trying to improve the system to increase its value, not throwing it away.

The cost of public notices is the cost of informing the public.

In this task, however, cheaper doesn’t mean better. Especially when the alternative is unproven and vulnerable.

To read Hayes’ essay on LD 1878, visit www.sunjournal.com/EditorialPage.