Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach recently issued a legal opinion declaring that some cities may publish notices on their own websites despite a state law requiring them to be published in local newspapers.
“Home-rule provisions of the Kansas Constitution … allows cities to exempt themselves from nonuniform acts of the Legislature,” Kobach wrote. “We conclude that a second-class city may exempt itself by charter ordinance. And, once having done so may then choose to publish official city business on its own webpage.”
Municipalities with populations between 2,000 and 15,000 people are considered “cities of the second class” in Kansas.
Kobach issued the nonbinding opinion at the request of state House member Stephen Owens, R-Hesston. According to Kansas Press Association Executive Director Emily Bradbury, “Rep. Owens was frustrated he couldn’t get a law passed allowing cities to move their notices out of newspapers so he’s looking for a new strategy.” Owens introduced bills in the last two legislative sessions that would have made newspaper notice optional, says Bradbury. Neither got a hearing.
Nevertheless, KPA agrees with the attorney general that Kansas’ home-rule provisions allow cities to opt out of the state’s public notice laws by passing a charter ordinance. KPA has urged its members to meet the threat head-on by working to bring the issue before local voters in a special election. The association issued a toolkit to help them do that.
“There’s a huge transparency issue here,” Bradbury told some of her members in a Sept. 28 meeting covered by nonprofit news website Kansas Reflector. “No matter what (population) class you are in, you need to watch this. It’s spreading. Don’t sleep on this.”
Publisher Chris Strunk (pictured below) began executing the KPA playbook after the city council in Bel Aire voted earlier this year to move the municipality’s notices from his weekly — Ark Valley News, where they had been published for 17 years — to the City of Bel Aire website. He collected and certified the signatures necessary to authorize a special election and on Oct. 19 he filed the petition with the city clerk. The process mandated by the state constitution requires the city to hold the election within 90 days of that filing or in conjunction with its next regularly scheduled election in August 2024. It also has the option to rescind the ordinance and continue to publish its notices in the Ark Valley News. The city council plans to vote on the matter at its next meeting, which is scheduled to be held today. 
Strunk told us he didn’t know what to expect when he set up a table in a park near City Hall to collect signatures and he was surprised and gratified by the support his paper received from the community. Several readers of the Ark Valley News and its sister publication, the free monthly Bel Aire Breeze, were so fired up about the issue they volunteered to collect signatures on their own. He says about 60 percent of the signatures required under the constitution were ultimately gathered by those volunteers.
“When you talk to readers they tell you they want government accountability, and they believe the publication process is part of that accountability,” says Strunk. “It was an amazing experience to feel that kinship with readers. They feel the same obligation we feel in terms of holding the government accountable.”
Bradbury says several other cities have also approved charter ordinances to allow them to publish notices on their own websites, including Hays, Dodge City, Hillsboro and Hesston, which Rep. Owens represents. She says Kansas Publishing Venture owner Joey Young recently learned his effort to bring the issue to a vote in Hesston has succeeded, and that the Marion County Record is leading the charge to do the same in Hillsboro. (The Record made national news this summer when its office was raided by local police.)
Along with Wisconsin and Wyoming, Kansas is one of at least three states to grant home-rule powers to municipalities via a charter ordinance form of government, according to Ballotpedia. As PNRC reported in September, Lee Enterprise’s Casper Star-Tribune filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent two municipalities in Wyoming from adopting ordinances allowing them to opt-out of state laws mandating newspaper notice. The district court hearing the case stayed the proceedings to allow the two municipalities to revise the ordinances that are the subject of the lawsuit. That process appears to be nearing its conclusion, reports the Oil City News.
Counties and municipalities in other states have sought to carve out exceptions to public notice laws allowing them to circumvent newspaper-notice requirements. However, in states without a home-rule tradition local governments must seek the approval of the state legislature to obtain such an exemption.