Bye, Bye, Bay Leaves?

From the minutes of the December 5 2016 Village Board meeting (uploaded a considerable amount of time after the actual meeting):

"4. Discussion/action regarding Bay Leaves magazine and the Village’s Communication Program.

The Village Board had a substantive discussion about the status of the Village’s communication program. The Board unanimously indicated that Bay Leaves should NOT be the “Official News Magazine of the Village of Whitefish Bay”. It will continue to investigate opportunities arising from the growth of the online weekly email newsletter."

This is pure speculation on my part, but given the push right now to increase readership of the online weekly email newsletter and this, frankly, bizarre effort to remove official endorsement of the current publication, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that eventually The Bay Leaves magazine, which has been outsourced for the past few years to a company that produces similar publications for other communities, ceases to exist. Or at the very least ceases to be a source of general Village information for those folks who are unable to avail themselves of online versions of the same.

So what happens if that should be the case? Either the abandoning of a print version altogether or taking production back in-house. IMO, more likely the latter - resuming in-house production and distribution of the printed village newsletter (perhaps under a different name so as not to muddy the water any further). It would probably be tasked to the person who's currently producing the online version.

I believe the reason for originally eliminating the quarterly, internally produced and distributed Bay Leaves and contracting with the current publisher was that doing so reduced the overall cost of providing a printed newsletter/magazine while increasing the number of issues per year from 4 to 12. Nothing wrong with bringing it back in-house as long as a) the Village isn't increasing costs to the taxpayer in order to provide a stand-alone, in-house version of the printed newsletter, b) it doesn't negatively effect the dissemination of pertinent information to those who rely on the current printed version for such and c) it's being done for practical, economic reasons and not just because someone is looking to take on additional duties in order to fill time or increase their own compensation. As it stands now, given the redundancy from issue to issue, the online newsletter could easily be cut back to biweekly (once every two weeks) distribution.