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.
Local website owner argues competitor should be allowed to continue to publish notices
In an email sent to PNRC on Dec. 3, Kansas Press Association Executive Director Emily Bradbury reported the following story:
“We have a kiddo in Kansas who started a competing online newspaper (The Hutchinson Tribune) against a Gannett newspaper (The Hutchinson News).
He is 17 years old.
Tonight, for the second time, he went before the Hutchinson City Council to argue to keep printed public notices in the Hutchinson News — his competitor. He won the fight for Gannett. Amazing.
Wichita moves notices to city website but adds new “print source”
Wichita became the latest and most significant municipality in Kansas to approve a charter ordinance anointing the city’s website as its “official newspaper.” But the new ordinance came with a twist: It included a provision calling for the city to also publish its notices in a “secondary print source.”
Wichita is at least the fifth municipality in Kansas to replace its official newspaper with the city website despite a state law requiring notices to be published in a local paper. Attorney General Kris Kobach gave them the green light when he issued a legal opinion last year declaring that home-rule provisions in the state’s constitution “allows cities to exempt themselves from nonuniform acts of the Legislature.” (As the last sentence in the opinion notes, website notice isn’t sufficient when a particular type of notice is specifically mandated by statute, e.g., budget notices, treasurer’s reports, etc.)
Year-in-Review: The five best new public notice laws of 2021
We began 2021 with a sense of dread. We feared it might be the year the first state legislature moved public notice from newspapers to government websites.
But that didn’t happen.
With only a handful of state legislatures still in session and little chance any of them will pass significant public notice legislation by the end of the year, newspaper notice is still alive and mostly well in every state.
Local officials use public notice as tool of vengeance
After 30 years of serving as the official newspaper in Gardner, Kansas, the local paper is calling foul following the town’s decision to pull its public notices and place them in another publication with no print circulation in Gardner.
“The council members are trying to punish me because they don’t like the way I have been covering the city,” said Rhonda Humble, owner and publisher of The Gardner News. “They are trying to shut me up.”