Just when Pennsylvania crawled out of the dark ages of government secrecy with the Right to Know Act, the General Assembly appears poised to allow municipalities and school districts to slip into the shadows.

For as long as anyone can remember, those government entities have been required to publish Legal Notices in newspapers and publications of general circulation to inform the public of such things as meeting schedules, important pending actions like budgets (read that as changing your taxes) and other information important to their constituents.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Creighton, R-Lancaster, would let municipalities and school boards post their legal notices on-line. On-line? Where on-line? Their own web sites? Someone else's? The front page of a website, or some page buried six levels below "home?"

How do you find the Eldred Township web site, for instance? Answer:?You don't. There is none.

Don't have a computer? You're out of luck and disenfranchised by the system that Mr. Creighton and those in the House Judiciary Committee who voted to move the bill forward would like to establish.

Each day the Times Observer and more than 100 other daily and weekly newspapers in Pennsylvania deliver more than a million copies to individual businesses and residences. Each of those newspapers sets aside a specific place for legal notices where people have known for years where to find that legally mandated public information.

Under the guise of frugality, the Pennsylvania General Assembly is tinkering with the public's right to know, and we think it's a bad idea.