The Wet Mountain Tribune in December settled its slam-dunk federal lawsuit against the Custer County Board of Commissioner (BOCC) and will once again run the county’s public notices. The lawsuit claimed the BOCC violated the Tribune’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against it by awarding the county’s public notice contract to another local newspaper that is openly partisan.

In addition to making the Tribune the county’s official newspaper again for the next four years, Custer County also agreed to pay the Tribune $50,000. That’s about three times as much as the county spends annually on its notices, according to Tribune owner Jordan Hedberg’s (photo above) estimate.

“I cannot imagine supporting a newspaper that bad-mouths how we do business,” acknowledged one of the commissioners 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.”

At the same meeting the other commissioner who voted to reassign the contract said, “It’s hard for me to imagine working with a newspaper, that for a lack of better term, is combative.”

The Tribune filed its complaint last August, alleging the BOCC punished 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.”

“I feel like the justice system upheld our First Amendment rights as newspapers in a pretty blatant case,” Hedberg told the Inside the News in Colorado newsletter.