The business of government doesn’t extend to advertising

There’s a provision in the pro- posed Ohio budget that takes the phrase “running government like a business” to a whole different level.

It would encourage government to go into business.

We’ll stipulate that this hits close to home, because the business government would be getting into is one of the ones we’re in: selling advertising.

And perhaps we’re especially sensitive on this issue because, in case you haven’t heard, it’s getting tougher and tougher these days for newspapers to make ends meet. One of the ways they’ve done so is by developing electronic websites such as ours, Vindy.com, which depend on advertising sales to balance the bottom line.

And that’s where the proposed budget working its way through the General Assembly. In just 44 lines of the massive bill, the state of Ohio would allow government entities to begin selling advertising on their websites. Those websites were established to help keep their citizens informed (and, we might even suspect, to help burnish the image of the elected and appointed officials whose names appear on the sites). They were not created as business ventures.

It’s not just newspapers that find a breakdown in the line between government and business troubling. In addition to the Ohio Newspaper Association, the Ohio Association of Broadcasters and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce have voiced their opposition.

A foot in the door

We can understand if most folks dismiss this opposition as self-serving. To those who ask, “Why should I care?” consider the pressure that local business owners could feel when the advertising salesman who knocks on their door is, in effect, a government agent. The businessman might well wonder if he’ll get the same response from a township trustee, for instance, the next time he has a complaint if he doesn’t advertise on the township website.

It’s one thing to tell the Fuller Brush man you’re not interested in his wares, quite another to indirectly turn down the opportunity to buy advertising from the people who might be deciding your future zone variance or a request for additional police patrols.

Now isn’t the time to be creating new potential conflicts of interest.

Gov. John Kasich has built his political brand on the idea of smaller, less intrusive government.

It doesn’t make sense for his budget to encourage government to get into a previously uncharted area, competing with local media — daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations — all of which are trying to make a living selling advertising on their websites.

For an administration that espouses reducing the size of government and encouraging the creation of private-sector jobs, the expansion of government websites into commercial enterprises seems out of character.

There is still time to amend the budget, and legislators should strike lines 788 through 832 in Section 9.031.

Let government go about the business of governing. When that’s been mastered, there will be time for entertaining suggestions on how local and state government might want to compete with the private companies that provide government with its lifeblood.