Starting last Saturday, Arizona cities, towns and counties have a new option for telling you what they are about to do.

Senate Bill 1167, signed by Gov. Katie Hobbs on June 19, lets a local government satisfy certain legal advertising requirements by posting a notice on its own website and on the website of a newspaper qualified to run legal notices. Both, not one or the other. The notice must reach the newspaper at least one full business day before the deadline and a government that takes this route must carry a “Public Notices” link on its homepage, sorted by category.

We have an obvious stake in this. Legal advertising is revenue for this paper. But the reason the compromise matters is not our ad rate. A public notice does two jobs: it puts information in front of you, and it creates a record that exists outside the control of the government that issued it — and once it is in print, it cannot be changed after the fact. Bills introduced this session would have cut newspapers out entirely and left city hall as the sole keeper of the evidence that it warned you. Those failed. This one passed and that effort is largely due to the Arizona Media Association, which has fought efforts to weaken public notices.

The new law is an option, not a mandate, and it is narrower than the headlines suggested: election notices, budget hearings, probate and trustee’s sales sit elsewhere in state law and are unchanged.

And print is not going anywhere. Household internet is not a given across our county and a transparency system that assumes a connection writes off the people who can least afford it. So here is our commitment to you. A local government that takes this new route no longer has to buy print space from us. We are going to print every notice we receive anyway, on our own dime as a community service. A page that is already in a thousand mailboxes cannot be quietly revised six months later and somebody in this county ought to be holding that copy. It should not be the same people who wrote it.

So go look at your city or county homepage this week. Is the notices link findable? Does the search work? The law requires the link. It does not require that any of it be good. Reader complaints, not publisher complaints, decide how far above that floor anyone builds.