Republican domination of Kentucky’s statehouse has not been a positive development for the Bluegrass State’s public notice laws, which have been under siege for the better part of the last decade. The fight came to a head in 2017, when the GOP assumed majority-party status in both chambers for the first time in the state’s modern history.
After failing to move public notice legislation via the normal committee process in 2017, state Senator Chris McDaniel (R-Covington) added language to a budget bill authorizing local governments in counties over 90,000 in population to publish most government notices on their own websites. McDaniel’s amendment also allowed school districts in the state to publish annual financial statements on their websites instead of newspapers. The bill eventually passed both the House and Senate, but former Governor Matt Bevin vetoed it because it raised taxes. His veto was overridden.
Two newspapers that get creative with notice
Print circulation has been declining for years, so newspapers must become creative if they expect to continue to attract eyeballs to their public notice ads.
In Ketchum, Idaho, the Idaho Mountain Express has for many years maintained a pretty simple strategy for drawing attention to their public notices: The 45-year-old newspaper publishes a “Cliff Notes” summary of notices in the news section of its print edition (see graphic below); the summary points readers to the complete, official notices published in its “local life” section. The Mountain Express also publishes the summary in its e-edition along with instructions for where readers can find the official public notices in the print issue and online.