What is your opinion about local government soliciting sponsorships (i.e. ads on website) for services beyond what is required by statute?
Background
I work for a county government that is facing an immediate “surprise” revenue reduction by way of the Dept of the Interior. In recalculating their payment in lieu of (property) taxes (PILT) to the counties, they cut the payment to my county in half. In a community of less than 7000 people and more than 60% public lands, this has a serious impact. We’ve all been scrambling for money-saving ideas since the downturn anyway, and the easy cuts were already made for the 2010 budget – no travel, no training, no slush funds, all that jazz.
I manage the county website and our interactive mapping website, the latter being one of the most popular services we’ve ever provided. We also provide a lot of info through the regular website that used to require a visit to the offices, such as foreclosure lists (natch!), assessor property info, tax info, recorded documents, meeting records, etc. I think we’ve improved our level of public service tremendously over the 10 years I’ve been there and people are used to it. It does cost $$, although our IT/GIS staff (myself and two IT guys) has developed a lot of the services in-house or with open source, including the website itself. That said, it’s all basically discretionary and could go away without any violation of statute.
Finally, the question
What if we put click-through links to local businesses on the mapping website entry page, or around search boxes? Is it wrong for a government to seek private funds to support a public service?
(I have found out that it is a violation of the terms of a ‘dot gov’ website, but we’re a ‘dot org’.)
It would make me see the government as greedy and at least tacky.
I would either never click an ad or I’d click them all to give fake resuts to the advertisers so they’d pay without getting any business.
The whole thing of trust is shot with ads. I wouldn’t put any trust in it. Then again, from my experience with Chicago government, there isn’t any guarantee a “non-ad” site would be any better.
You coud always try it and see. I am assuming you all have looked into legal aspects. IANAL but who knows if someone could bring a suit saying the government is favouring one over another? As long as your legal says it’s OK, what’s it gonna hurt. You could do it as an experiement and keep the ads simple and unobtrusive
I work for municipal government administration, and I think that in theory, your idea for advertising is a WONDERFUL way to generate additional revenue to reduce the tax burden on the property-owners.
However, allowing private businesses to advertise on a government website might give the appearance of impropriety; that is, it might appear that the government entity is “endorsing” or “recommending” that particular business over another.
And, it may give the appearance that the business would receive (or expect) preferential treatment from the government because they paid money, much like a political donation. “Pay to Play” laws are intended to prevent businesses and organizations from making political contributions in order to influence government - in order to be awarded lucrative government contracts, etc.
For instance, a developer or contractor might pay to have an ad linked to your website - if he then receives a contract from the county that pays him $1,500,000 to build a community center, would that look suspicious to the developers who DIDN’T buy an ad? Even if that had nothing to do with the decision to award a contract, it could appear to be improper.