Almost 40 percent of the counties, cities, villages, and towns in Wisconsin don’t post their local ordinances on a website or, at best, have posted an “obviously incomplete listing of ordinances,” according to a report issued late this summer by the state’s Department of Administration (DOA).

The agency also noted that many local governments that do post their ordinances on the web make it difficult or impossible to find them or to determine how comprehensive they are.

The report was designed to analyze the interplay between the “comprehensive plans” and local land regulations adopted by local governments. State law requires local governments to update their plans at least every ten years. It also requires them to maintain consistency between their comprehensive plans and any changes they make to their zoning, subdivision or official mapping ordinances.

“If a local government with an outdated plan wants to rezone land, for example, it must first go through a public planning process to update its comprehensive plan, which could be a time-consuming process,” explained DOA in the report. “If the local government proceeds without an updated comprehensive plan, a citizen or organization could bring a lawsuit to void the action, because it lacks consistency with a valid comprehensive plan.”

DOA found that despite those statutory mandates, most of the state’s 1,922 local government units have not comprehensively updated or even amended their plans in the last 10 years. Nevertheless, at least 25 percent took the risk of passing zoning or subdivision regulations without having a valid comprehensive plan, leaving those regulations vulnerable to being overturned by lawsuit.

Although DOA didn’t explain why so many local governments in the state fail to publish their ordinances online or comply with the state’s Comprehensive Planning Law, their findings strongly suggest it’s a matter of resources. Larger government units usually comply with the mandates; all 72 counties in the state and 93 percent of the cities post ordinances on their websites. Compliance drops precipitously for villages (69%) and towns (51%), which generally are far less populous and have smaller tax bases and spottier internet access than cities and counties.

Moreover, the 25 percent of local government units that don’t have a website are all towns (34 percent have no website) and villages (14%).

These findings suggest most municipalities in the U.S. are unprepared to discharge the publishing duties and acquire the expertise required to provide public notice to their residents via the internet.

The report is a veritable compendium of small-town government dysfunction, perhaps best summarized by what DOA found in the City of Montreal (pop. 807). The preface to the code of ordinances posted on the city’s website states, “Good democracy requires not only good laws, but laws which are readily available in written form to all who are subject to them, to the public officials and police officers who must administer them and to the judges and attorneys who must interpret and apply them.”

As DOA noted, the code Montreal provides on its website is a “scanned PDF of the original (1989) hardcopy … posted in a non-searchable format, so (it) does not exactly meet today’s expectations for ‘readily available in written form.’”

That same PDF is still posted on Montreal’s website almost four months after the small city was called out in the DOA report.