In 2019, the tiny Connecticut borough of Fenwick amended its zoning regulations to limit Airbnb-type temporary rentals of local homes. Two property owners in Fenwick opposed the new regulation so they sued to stop it, arguing the local zoning commission violated the state’s statutory notice requirements. Even though Fenwick published timely, substantively sufficient notice in a local newspaper it had used for decades for that purpose, the trial court found the notice didn’t comply with the state’s public notice law and granted the property owners’ motion for summary judgment.

The decision was upheld by an appellate court earlier this year. The Connecticut Supreme Court agreed to hear Fenwick’s appeal of the ruling.

Connecticut’s general public notice statute requires a newspaper to have “substantial circulation” in a town to qualify to publish notice there. The trial court found that The Middletown Press, a Hearst newspaper based about 30 miles outside of Fenwick, didn’t meet that standard because it had no subscribers among the 83 households in the seaside borough, which serves as a summer home for most of its residents.

The court said the defendant failed to provide evidence that may have buttressed its case. For instance, the president and publisher of Hearst’s Connecticut Media Group testified there are nine locations in neighboring Old Saybrook where single copies of the Press are sold, but Fenwick was silent about whether any of those sales were made to its residents. The court also noted the borough failed to present any evidence of the paper’s online traffic data even though the Press publishes notices on its website.

Moreover, the appellate court noted that although it wasn’t relevant to its decision an exhibit filed by the plaintiffs indicated that a different paper publishing in the same area had 16 subscribers in Fenwick.

Now that the case will be heard by the Supreme Court, several associations representing government officials in Connecticut want to drive a truck through the narrow issues presented by this unprecedented set of facts. They filed amicus briefs hoping to achieve by judicial fiat what they have repeatedly failed to convince state legislators to do: Allow them to post notice on the internet instead of local newspapers. The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities even urged the court to allow its members to post notices on their own websites in lieu of newspaper publication.

The Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association didn’t file an amicus. CDNA Executive Director Chris VanDeHoef told the Waterbury, Conn.-based Republican-American, “We’re certainly monitoring the case … but resources are not there to file a brief at the Supreme Court level.”

A date for oral arguments hasn’t been set.