Public Notices Bill Dies In Committee
Towns and cities wanted to save money. Newspapers feared losing it.
By Jeff Cohen - WNPR
Published: Apr 28, 2011
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Public Notices
Towns and cities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to print public notices in area newspapers. This week, a bill aimed at scaling back that mandate died in the state legislature.
As WNPR's Jeff Cohen reports, newspaper publishers are happy, and local government advocates aren't.
State Senator Steve Cassano was working on a compromise. It was a bill that would have reduced, but not eliminated, the size and frequency of public notices that towns and cities have to run in their local newspapers. But he was surprised to learn this week that the bill didn't make it out of a legislative committee.
"It's absurd the taxpayers have to pay over a millions dollars to put all of their notices in newspapers when in fact newspaper readership is down and people are using computers on a daily basis."
But while Cassano saw the bill as a way to save money for towns and cities, Senator Gayle Slossberg saw it as bad government. The bill died in a committee she chairs.
"We have a belief in our country that people should have a right to know how their government makes a decision and why they make a decision and that they should make a decision in broad daylight. And the only way that people know about that is that if they get a notice, and they're properly notified as to what their government is doing. There's lots of ways to save money, but that doesn't make something right."
Still, Cassano says he'll try to find a way to move the bill forward in the interest of local taxpayers. But, for now at least, the bill is dead.
"I don't know how dead dead means in the legislature quite honestly."
A lobbyist for the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association praised the bill's demise.
For WNPR, I'm Jeff Cohen.
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Comments
Online public notice bill dies in committee
Years ago I went to when he was newly elected Mr. Ken Burke, Clerk of the Court, Pinellas County and showed him a way the county could save funds, unfortunately, he quoted the law. The big newspapers, do not want to lose the revenue, and they will lobby this until we bring the information to public domain.
Legal Notice Requirements on Towns
This is horrible - this measure would save a small CT town like mine thousands of dollars. A simple blog system would work for the purpose and be more effective. Bad Government is one that maintains these unfunded mandates that only benefit a well funded lobbying group.
legal notice rates
I have an idea for State Senator Cassano. Propose an independent web site to host the notices. Than, the "bad government" argument goes away. Our local governments are broke. We have to make choices based on cost. Luckily there is a solution that porvides independence from governments controlling the notices and lower pricing. Look at this site http://tinyurl.com/4gw4dfw .
It is FREE-You don’t have to subscribe to a newspaper to receive the notices THE NOTICES COME TO YOU-. No more hunting for notices in the back of the newspaper. They e-mail alerts based on preference of both type of notice and locality. (“Please e-mail me whenever there is a zoning hearing in Camden".
Set it up once and forget it. -IMMEDIATE-The local government doesn’t have to wait for the notice to be published in the newspaper for it to be published on line. The government employees can upload it straight to the site.
-BETTER DISCLOSURE-They link to the original documents (zoning maps, bid specifications, providing way more information than a notice in print. In addition, they map to the localities-DOCUMENTATION- they provide affidavits of publishing. -GREEN- No cutting down trees to publish these notices. -PERMANENCE- The notices stay on line forever. In newspapers, they are published in a few editions and then are gone. COST SAVINGS- The local governments will save 90% of what they spend in notices. The newspaper’s publish the notices for only a few weeks.This issue is playing out all over the country. Read legal-notice.org/blog . Newspapers do a lot of things really well. But so do a lot of businesses. It doesn’t mean as taxpayers we should overspend for a service that is now inferior.
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