Every time we have a really big paper, like this one, we get questions from readers as to why it is so big.

The answer is that every other year, Tulsa County Treasurer Dennis Semler buys space in the Tulsa Beacon to publish a list of delinquent property owners. This is done for two consecutive weeks to satisfy a state requirement to notify property owners that they owe back taxes.

In May of this year, we published a smaller list of property owners who failed to pay those taxes in a given time period and their properties were put up for auction to satisfy their tax bills.

We also publish these two sets of lists on the website of the Oklahoma Press Association so that people can access them and search for them. We are members of the OPA.

It’s expensive to print so many accounts but in truth, the county doesn’t pay for the publication costs ultimately. If you have a delinquent tax bill, when you go in to make it good, you have to pay a publication fee that covers the cost of putting the notices in our newspaper.

Every year, some lawmaker will introduce a bill to stop the paid publication of these notices and just put them online.

Here are the problems with that.

First, many people don’t have access to the Internet and if the list is not printed, they will never see it.

Secondly, when a list is printed, it cannot be altered. A listing on a website can be changed in an instant.

Thirdly, printing these lists in a newspaper give a level of accountability. If the list were simply put on a government website, there would be no outside examination.

By the way, Dennis Semler is perhaps the most honest and reliable county treasurer in the state. And his staff is meticulous when it comes to following the letter of the law. Semler never has any real problems with state audits and that should be comforting to Tulsa County citizens.

Legal notices – not just the mammoth treasurer list – are important for many reasons. Again, being printed add more accountability that just being placed on some government website.

In Tulsa County, the district court judges are excellent in making sure that filings are correct and properly dated. If there were no publicly printed versions, they would be easy to manipulate and change.

This is similar to voting. Oklahoma has paper ballots. If there is a close race – and there always seems to be one – election officials open the boxes in the presence of representatives from the Republican and Democrat parties and they count the ballots, one by one. There have been dishonest counts but it is harder to cheat with a paper trail. If Tulsa had electronic voting, the potential for fixing an election would skyrocket.

By the way, Tulsa County Election Board Secretary Gwen Freeman and her staff also are arguably the best in the state.

And here is a selfish reason to keep the requirement to publish legal notices. It helps keep newspapers afloat.

The Tulsa Beacon has three sources of income – subscription fees, display advertising and classified ads. Over the years, subscription revenue has been somewhat steady. Display advertising has taken a nosedive as businesses switch to Internet advertising and away from print. But our classified revenue has doubled, even though traditional classified ads (cars, houses, help wanted, etc.) has drifted to Internet sales sites.

There is a set of conditions to become a “legal newspaper” in Oklahoma and we have satisfied those requirements since 2003. And while we have flourished, other legal newspapers within Tulsa County have changed ownership and been shut down (including the Glenpool Post, the Bixby Bulletin, the Jenks Journal, the Broken Arrow Ledger and the Tulsa Legal News).

That pretty much leaves the Tulsa Beacon and the liberal daily paper left to publish legals. The big treasurer list rotates to us every other year. State statute outlines what you can charge for legal notices and we follow that law to the letter.

If the legal requirements were eliminated, some smaller newspapers would go out of business. In some cases, that might be a good thing because they are so liberal and out of touch with ordinary Oklahomans.

But even with the vast resources of the Internet, the largest source of local news is a local newspaper. And if you can wade through the liberal bias and fake news, you get a lot more from newspapers than from TV news.

Young people don’t read newspapers. They get their news from the Internet. That’s too bad. Most of our readers are probably 40 years old or older.

There is a broad change in America in how people get their news. The big and powerful daily newspapers are losing big chunks of subscribers and young people don’t subscribe.

It may be inconvenient to get two huge copies of the Tulsa Beacon in a row, but it really helps our bottom line and it promotes the spread of genuine news.