I was wrong in comments I made in a story in Wednesday’s paper about a problem with public bodies being late in publishing their minutes, when I inaccurately included Acadiana Fairgrounds and SugArena Commission, and the Iberia Parish Mosquito Abatement District, among area public bodies that are routinely late in publishing the minutes of their meetings, as state law requires.

I misinterpreted information I saw and incorrectly included these agencies.

I apologize for my error and hope this sets their record straight.

I do think the overall issue is important and am troubled that the Iberia Parish Council’s minutes have been late frequently, including a batch submitted recently that included minutes from a meeting April 2011, which we published Tuesday, and others from June, July and August, and three meetings from December.

In the old days a public body had 10 days to get its minutes to the local official journal (the designated newspaper), and it was supposed to be published within 30 days. In recent years, the law was extended to allow the agency 20 days to submit their minutes.

Interestingly, it was rare years ago there was a problem getting the minutes in promptly, but in recent years, despite more modern devices like computers, word processors and email, minutes from many public bodies have frequently been late.

We understand there will be issues from time to time that catch any organization by surprise and create an occasional problem. But sometimes it appears there’s not much appreciation for why these minutes are important, more than just an exercise to meet the technical requirements of the law.

We and other news outlets are unable to report on the complete details of every action at a public meeting, much less are we able to cover every meeting of every body.

The idea of publishing the minutes is a great one, giving anyone an opportunity to check the overall proceedings of a public agency, able to get the gist of what it’s doing on issues that might not otherwise get much attention.

Maybe a public body is considering some action that affects your neighborhood, but it’s not one big enough to get regular news coverage in the paper.

If you see the minutes of the meeting about this issue, you’d presumably have a chance to contact your representative, or perhaps attend the next meeting to speak in favor of or against the issue.

But if the minutes aren’t available until well after that next meeting, they’re not doing much good, much less if several meetings take place before you see the minutes where this first comes up.

I don’t think there’s any intentional effort to delay the publication of minutes, but I’d sure like to see more zeal for getting them done and published more quickly, to make the effort more effective for the public.

Indeed, everyone doesn’t read the paper, though the public notices we publish are also posted and accessible on the Web.

But distribution in the newspaper increases the opportunity for even infrequent notice-readers to stumble across them, after something catches their eye and they realize, “Hey, this stuff is important.”

WILL CHAPMAN is publisher of The Daily Iberian.