The status of newspaper notice in New Jersey was thrown into uncertainty when Advance Publications announced on Oct. 30 that early next year it plans to close a production facility and the print editions of several significant newspapers in the state, including the state’s largest paper, the Star-Ledger.
Although it isn’t clear how many local government units were using the three daily papers and one weekly newspaper that will cease publication in the wake of Advance’s announcement, the scale of the closure’s impact began to come into focus when rural Warren County filed a lawsuit seeking a new outlet for its notices. Warren County has been publishing its notices in the Star-Ledger even though the paper is based in Newark, which is located two counties and 63 miles from the county seat.
Court invalidates election over public notice issue
In a unanimous decision this summer, the Oklahoma Supreme Court invalidated the results of a November 2022 lodging-tax election in McCurtain County for failure to follow statutory publication requirements.
Statute Title 19 O.S. 2021 §383 requires questions to the people “to be published at least four (4) weeks in some newspaper published in the county” if there is such a newspaper.
(This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of The Oklahoma Publisher, the monthly newsletter of the Oklahoma Press Association. It is reprinted here courtesy of OPA.)
Town’s choice of official newspaper upheld in Connecticut
The Connecticut Supreme Court held last month that a newspaper used for decades by the tiny borough of Fenwick to issue its public notices qualified as an official newspaper even though the paper had no subscribers there.
The ruling overturned an appellate court decision invalidating a zoning regulation for lack of sufficient notice because the paper failed to satisfy a state law requiring official newspapers to have “substantial circulation in the municipality.”
N.Y. paper sues county over pulled notices
A newspaper based in Delaware County, N.Y. sued county officials in December, claiming they unlawfully canceled its public notice contract in retaliation for unfavorable news coverage. The Reporter, a weekly newspaper based in the county seat of Delhi, also alleges the county violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by ordering its employees to refer all questions from the paper to the county attorney’s office.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Decker Advertising, the agency that owns The Reporter.
Connecticut Supreme Court to hear public notice case
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.
AG supports newspaper notice in Wyoming lawsuit
Two municipalities in Wyoming passed nearly identical ordinances in 2021 exempting themselves from state statutes mandating the publication of various notices in their local paper of record. A lawsuit subsequently filed by that paper — Lee Enterprise’s Casper Star-Tribune — seeks to compel the cities of Mills and Bar Nunn to publish those notices within its pages.
The Star-Tribune is the official newspaper of Natrona County. Mills and Bar Nunn are small but growing communities within the county.
Last month, the state of Wyoming weighed in on the side of the Star-Tribune. The attorney general’s office filed a brief in the case, arguing the state’s public notice laws are valid and must be followed by both local governments.
About those Disney notices …
You may have heard that the Walt Disney Co. recently took steps to frustrate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempt to strip the entertainment conglomerate of its power to appoint members of the board that provides oversight for Disney World.
According to a story published last week in the New York Times, the Disney-appointed Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID) Board of Supervisors “quietly pushed through a development agreement” preventing the governor from replacing them with his allies, thereby maintaining Disney’s governance of the world’s largest theme park. The Board proposed the agreement at a public meeting on Jan. 25 and approved it at a follow-up meeting on Feb. 8.