The Wet Mountain Tribune filed a federal lawsuit last month accusing the local Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) of punishing it by awarding Custer County’s public notice contract to another newspaper. The lawsuit alleges the BOCC violated the Tribune’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against it for reporting factual matters the Board would have preferred to keep hidden.

The paper appears to have a very strong case.

“I cannot imagine supporting a newspaper that bad-mouths how we do business,” Commissioner Bill Canda acknowledged during the January 2022 meeting at which he voted to assign the contract to the Tribune’s competitor. “I looked up what we paid the Tribune, and while I cannot find it right here it was around $40,000. I am not going to take good money and chase it after bad.” (Tribune Publisher Jordan Hedberg — pictured above — tells us the county annually spends about $15,000 to publish its notices.)

Commissioner Kevin Day agreed with Canda. “It’s hard for me to imagine working with a newspaper, that for a lack of better term, is combative,” he confessed.

Commissioner Tom Flower cast the sole vote in favor maintaining the Tribune as the county’s official newspaper. “This contract is about legal publishing, not editorial content,” he noted. “It defies logic and reason to select the highest bidder that has the lowest circulation. These notices are meant to notify the public.”

The BOCC granted the contract to the Sangre de Cristo Sentinel, an openly partisan publication that calls itself “The Voice of Conservative Colorado.” The Sentinel also publishes ridiculous claims of election fraud, has life-size cardboard cutouts of John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, Tonto and Donald J. Trump in its conference room, and is clearly dedicated to owning as many libs as possible.

According to Hedberg, the Sentinel’s bid was more than twice as high as the Tribune’s — 19 cents per line versus 9 cents per line. The Sentinel is also a much smaller paper than the Tribune. According to the audit report the Sentinel filed last year with the U.S. Postal Service, its average weekly circulation is 1,125. The Tribune reported circulation of 2,075. Custer County’s 2021 population was 5,045, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“The Tribune has been the newspaper of record since 1883, except for two years when it was not the lowest bidder,” the paper reported after it lost the contract. “Both of those times, the Tribune came back with a lower bid and won back the newspaper of record designation.”

The Tribune’s complaint alleges the BOCC retaliated against it for publishing “a series of news reports that accurately exposed resume fraud by a county official and otherwise were critical of county government administration.” Among the news stories the complaint cites is an April 1, 2021 Tribune article that reported Canda continued to work unmasked even when he knew he was sick with COVID-19, “exposing everyone in the county building.”

The lawsuit seeks monetary and injunctive relief. According to Hedberg, the monetary damages should include more than the lost revenue the county pays for the service of publicizing its notices. Punishing his paper, he says, also eliminated the “halo effect of being the paper of record.”

“We are starting to see law firms and other legals go to the Sentinel, and this can be very profitable, coming in at $1.10 per line,” says Hedberg. “The damage will keep building over time.”

Just as important, he says, is that his readers will be deprived of important content most of them care deeply about. “When I bought the paper it surprised me to learn that many people here pour over every notice,” says the 35-year-old journalist and beef rancher who has owned the Tribune for four years. “I want to make sure our local news report is comprehensive and we can’t do that without the notices.” He cites water rights notices as news that is particularly valuable to many residents.

“The commissioners know what we publish is important,” he says. “It’s why they took the notices away from us.”