California Governor Gavin Newsom this weekend vetoed a public notice bill that was supported by the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA) and passed both houses of the legislature by wide margins. Like legislation that has already been approved in 20 other states, Assembly Bill 2095 would have required official newspapers to ensure that notices published in their print editions would also be posted free of charge on their own website and on their press associations’ statewide public notice site.

In a statement issued Saturday, Newsom said he vetoed AB-2095 because he was concerned it “may require the state’s small community newspapers to hire additional personnel to upload notices and/or to pay for software tools to manage these uploads

“Neither of these are costs that these small businesses, a vital and valuable source of local journalism, can bear,” said Newsom.

Oddly enough, AB-2095 included an exemption for papers with five or fewer employees. For those smaller papers, the web-posting requirements in the bill were waived until 2028. The exemption was added to the bill in the Assembly before it passed that body in May by a 73-0 margin. (It passed the Assembly again in August, on a 73-1 vote, when the lower chamber was required to concur to amendments added in the Senate, where it had passed 39-0.)

In fact, if Newsom had signed the measure it would have been the first web-posting bill in the U.S. to include protection for smaller papers. None of the web-posting bills approved in other states have included such a provision.

In his veto statement, Newsom applauded the bill’s “attempt to provide an online repository to inform the public of the important matters covered in these legal notices.” He encouraged the legislature “to revisit this issue in subsequent legislation that achieves this bill’s objectives, while also addressing the potential financial burden on small community newspapers.”