Our original headline for this story was “Newspaper notice off to good start in 2022.” But late last night we learned that Florida — a state that last year passed a progressive bill paving the way for the eventual migration of statutory notice to newspaper websites — was in play once again.
We haven’t had time to digest the 40-page bill, but it’s clearly designed to undo the work that went into last year’s historic legislation by moving public notice to government websites. The committee bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee this morning with GOP backing on a straight party-line vote.
Prior to the hearing, Florida Press Association President and CEO Jim Fogler told the Tallahassee Democrat he was perplexed by these new developments.
“We thought we all agreed that we needed to give the marketplace time to see if our legislation worked, to bring more players to the table to create competition and protect the interest of the taxpayer but also keep the government’s activities in the public,” Fogler said.
Sources in Florida tell us it is widely believed that new House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R-Pinellas) backs the effort.
Aside from Florida, legislative matters in the public notice realm were looking pretty good so far in 2022.
We have fielded the customary firehose of early-session legislation relating directly or tangentially to public notice, with our tracking software turning up about 100 distinct bills introduced in 31 states through the end of January.
That volume of legislation isn’t particularly unusual.
What is atypical, however, is the relative paucity of legislation seeking to move all or a significant percentage of statutory notice from newspapers to government websites. By this time last year such bills had been introduced in 10 states. So far in 2022, we’ve seen them in only four states — Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, and now Florida. (A similar set of companion bills introduced in Pennsylvania in 2021 carried over into the new year.)
Perhaps the best news is that Indiana, the state we were most concerned about when the year began, appears to have delayed any action on public notice legislation until 2023.
Why the heightened alarm in Indiana? Start with the fact that the Hoosier State has seen at least 91 bad public notice bills in the previous 21 legislative sessions. Then consider that Sen. Jim Buck (R-Kokomo) introduced another bill this year (SB-283) that would allow government units in the state to publish notices on their own websites as an alternative to local newspapers.
Last year, Sen. Buck sponsored a bill that eliminated all laws in the state requiring multiple publications of a newspaper notice, authorizing government agencies to publish all but the first notice on their own websites instead.
His effort to move most of the remaining newspaper notice in the state to government websites met with less success this year. Although SB-283 was heard last week in the Local Government Committee that Sen. Buck chairs, it faced resistance and stalled. According to Hoosier State Press Association (HSPA) Executive Director Steve Key, when the senator realized he didn’t have the votes to pass his bill, he amended it to request a summer study committee on “the publication of public notices in print publications and digital publications.” That version of SB-283 was approved by the committee and is now moving forward.
Key, who announced last year that he plans to retire at the end of the 2022 session, was happy about the win in the Local Government Committee. But he was disappointed to also learn last week that the “Modernizing Public Notice in Indiana” bill HSPA has spent the last two years developing won’t get a hearing in the House Committee on Government and Regulatory Reform. The bill is likely to remain mired in that committee until the session ends in March.
West Virginia, another state with perennial public notice challenges, once again finds itself fighting several bad bills this year, although none would completely eliminate newspaper notice.
The West Virginia Press Association (WVPA) is primarily focused on stopping Delegate Brandon Steele’s (R-Raleigh) HB-4260, which would allow the second and third notices in all laws requiring multiple newspaper publications to be published instead on a State Central Legal Advertising website. The bill would also require the State Auditor to establish and maintain that statewide government notice website and would permit all notices required by law to be published on it free of charge.
Del. Steele introduced a similar bill last year but the multiple-publication clause was stripped from it before it was passed and signed into law. That bill also authorized the creation of a statewide public notice website, but in its final form it was designed to supplement newspaper notice, not replace it.
In a hearing last week that WVPA Executive Director Don Smith says “got very heated,” the House Government Organization Committee — which is chaired by Del. Steele — approved HB-4260 and sent it on to the House Judiciary Committee. Smith says Steele, who owns a conservative news website, attacked newspapers during the hearing.
Another bill in West Virginia, HB-4044, would maintain public notice ad rates for papers under 5,000 circulation but reduce rates by up to 2.5 cents per word for all of the other official newspapers in the state.