Nobody reads the paper anymore?
Tell that to Moore County Tax Administrator Gary Briggs, whose office recently collected 60 percent of the $1.37 million it was owed by delinquent taxpayers after publishing their names in the local newspaper, The Pilot.
Briggs published the list on March 8 as a 12-page special section in The Pilot, at a cost of $8,000. A month later his office had collected almost $821,000 of its outstanding tax debt, according to The Pilot.
NY Development Directors Recommend Publishing Notice in Multiple Newspapers
At its March 23 meeting, the Empire State Development Board of Directors was discussing a Staten Island development project when the issue of public notice arose. The board had satisfied its statutory obligation by posting notice of the project in the New York Daily News, but had received complaints that notice should also have been published in the Staten Island Advance.
During a brief discussion of the matter, Director Robert Dyson (on far right in photo) encouraged the Board to exceed the legislative mandate by publishing notices of its projects in multiple newspapers. “We should endeavor to make sure we never hear … that people didn’t get enough notice,” said Dyson, who later added, “It’s not a costly thing” to run public notices in newspapers.
Christie’s Effort to Eliminate Newspaper Notice in NJ Stalls
It isn’t unusual for politicians seeking revenge for negative press coverage to retaliate by sponsoring legislation that would eliminate public notice advertising in newspapers. It is unprecedented, however, for the press to openly acknowledge the lawmaker’s intentions and to dub the legislation a “newspaper revenge bill.”
Such is the bruising nature of politics in New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie’s effort to move all public notices in the state to government websites was withdrawn from consideration on Monday afternoon. But the newspaper industry isn’t out of the woods yet. The bill remains active and Christie has vowed to make it his “top priority” in 2017. The speaker of the General Assembly has also announced his intention to return to the issue “very soon.”
Government Website Notice Inadequate, Admits Environmental Agency
The director of the same Michigan environmental agency under fire for dismissing concerns about the contamination of Flint’s water supply admitted her department failed to provide sufficient notice of another recent water proposal in the state, according to MLive Media Group.
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) director Heidi Grether (pictured on the left) told an air and waste management law conference last week that 42 days on MDEQ’s website “probably” wasn’t sufficient to properly notify the public about a request by Nestle Waters North America to increase the amount of groundwater it pumps in Osceola County. Grether was named director of MDEQ in August after her predecessor was forced to resign in the wake of the Flint crisis.