Every January, we are inundated with a firehose of public notice bills gushing from legislatures ranging from Connecticut to California and most states in-between. This year has been no different. PNRC is now following 83 separate pieces of legislation which almost certainly doesn’t include many other most-likely minor bills we haven’t been able to catch up with yet.

Some of the usual-suspect states have seen bills introduced that allow many or most notices to be published on government websites instead of local newspapers, by which we mean Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey (see story posted above), Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. All of these states have engaged in this same exercise on multiple occasions in the past, yet none have yet to succumb and newspaper notice continues to mostly flourish in all of them. Moreover, only two of these bills have even been scheduled for a hearing and some have already been killed by committee vote (Idaho) or died when legislative inertia met with unforgiving calendar rules (Mississippi, Virginia and Wyoming).

That isn’t to say there’s nothing to worry about. There will be other bad bills to contend with in 2025 and in the past few years we’ve already seen a couple of states begin moving towards government-website notice.

A bill that seems particularly worrisome is Indiana HB-1312, which requires the Hoosier State’s Archives and Records Administration (ARA) to establish a statewide public notice website by mid-2026, at which time all state-agency and small-county notices could be posted on the ARA website instead of local newspapers. Other local governments would be allowed to publish notices on the ARA site by mid-2027. The bill also allows notices to be published on newspaper websites as an alternative to their print editions and authorizes papers to charge the same rates for website notices that they are paid for print. But it prohibits ARA from charging fees for posting notices so it forces private newspaper businesses to compete with a website completely subsidized by the citizens of Indiana.

What makes HB-1312 especially unsettling is that its primary sponsor is Rep. Jennifer Meltzer, who last year sponsored a bill adopting digital-newspaper notice that was ultimately supported by the Hoosier State Press Association. HB-1312 was approved unanimously on Monday by the Government and Regulatory Reform, after which it was recommitted to the House Ways and Means Committee.

In Oklahoma, two sweeping bills were introduced that would, among other things, expand official-newspaper eligibility requirements, raise fees for newspaper notices and require newspapers to supplement notices published in print by posting them free-of-charge on their website and the Oklahoma Press Association (OPA) statewide public notice site. OPA supports both bills. Meanwhile, bills in Texas, Oregon, Nebraska and New York allow local news websites to publish notices. The bill in Texas, which is supported by the Texas Press Association, applies only in situations where an official newspaper isn’t available to publish notices in a particular jurisdiction.

Last but not least, you will not be surprised to learn that the self-storage industry hasn’t given up its longstanding objective of seizing its customers’ property on the cheap without independent oversight. The largely private-equity backed industry is supporting bills in Florida, Georgia, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas that allow self-storage operators to conduct lien sales without informing the communities they operate in by publishing newspaper notices.