At an additional Special Budget Work Session last night, Council reached consensus to amend the FY27 budget to increase The Laurel Independent service contract from $30k to $45k (compared to its FY26 level of $50k).

This will allow the City to continue reaching every resident with its monthly four-page printed insert of key information. And combined with the paper’s other service contracts, ad revenue, donor contributions, and grant funding, will enable The Laurel Independent to continue its work sharing news and stories about and throughout the Laurel community.

I know many residents had reached out to myself and fellow Councilmembers about this issue, and I’m happy to have been able to collaborate with my colleagues to help see this item through.

Some of my comments shared during last night’s conversation:

There’s a few questions I think help unpack the decision before us:

First, is this a grant or a service contract? Based on the fact that we sign a service contract, and the fact that we receive goods and services in exchange, to me it’s clear it’s a service contract. And that distinction is important in my mind.

Since if it’s service contract, the second question becomes are we receiving our money’s worth at $50k? There’s a couple angles to answer this question from. One of which is that we as a City have lots of information we need and want to be sharing with our residents on a host of topics – Being able to reach every household once a month with a printed message seems to be a very valuable communication tool to me. Another is that if we in-sourced a comparable operation, it would easily cost us $67,500+ for the year ($37.5k in postage and $30k in printing). So from that angle we’re actually getting a discount.

On a related front, it’s true that we have our City website and social media channels to share information through as well. But as many residents have shared, it’s not an equivalent or full substitute. There’s a difference from having to constantly be online scrolling to pickup all the tidbits across multiple sources -vs.- having all the key information synthesized for you in one place you can reference each month. There’s also the added questions of accessibility, equity, and impact. In my mind, a good City communication strategy leverages multiple channels and uses the uniqueness of each.

Lastly, I think the third question is: What are the intangibles we’re getting that aren’t even purely economic? And in this arena, I see two - We get the benefit of distribution to 13,700 additional households in PG Laurel for no extra cost to us (since PG Council is covering). And second, resident-after-resident stood up to tell us how the paper helps build a sense of community, how those newly moved into town more rapidly can get integrated into their new neighborhood, how the feature articles about residents around town links us to each other, how they wouldn’t have found out any other way if they hadn’t seen it in the paper, how they see and patronize local businesses they see in the paper, etc. To me, this is almost worth the price of admission alone.

So in closing, I think that if we look through this lens, we can see this line item for what it truly is: an investment in our City and a cost-effective communication tool to reach our residents in a way no other tool can. And with that perspective, $50k of a $50 million operating budget for the degree of impact is a good deal for the City and an effective use of taxpayer dollars.