State May Allow For Online Public Notices
Towns and Cities say it would save money. Newspapers fear losing it.
By Jeff Cohen - WNPR
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Image
GiantsFanatic/Flickr Creative Commons
Audio Playlist
Public Notices
Connecticut towns and cities are mandated by law to publish public notices in local newspapers. But that could soon change.
The state legislature is working on a bill to reduce the length and frequency of the printed notices in an effort to save money. But while the measure could hurt the bottom lines of state newspapers, state Senator Steve Cassano says that’s not his intent.
“You know, it’s not our business to kill the newspapers and put them or put them out of business, but it is our obligation to try and find savings. And so I think the print media recognizes that, they’re willing to compromise with us, so I think we can make something work that will benefit both of us.”
Jim Finley is the head of the Connecticut Conference of Muncipalities, which has been pushing a measure to scale those notices back because it could save taxpayers serious money.
“With all due respect to the print newspapers, we know that legal notices are a big chunk of their income – the fact of the matter is that more and more people are looking for alternative news sources – blogs, radio, television. …we’re just asking for the state to give us some relief from this."
Chris VanDeHoef is executive director of the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association. He says that online notices alone are not enough to keep the public informed.
“Not everybody has access to the Internet. Not everybody knows how to use the Internet. If they do have access to it, not everybody knows where to look where to go."
But VanDeHoef also says the obvious – for the newspapers, this is about money. For those that rely heavily on public notices, it’s about survival.
Take, for instance, Michael Schroeder -- the publisher of the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press.
“One of the main sources of revenue for that paper, above general advertising, is the advertising of notices. And if you remove the complete section of revenue from his paper I’d imagine it would have a very damaging effect.”
The bill that passed out of committee would allow all advertising to go online. But Senator Cassano says a compromise that allows for some print and online will likely prevail.
Send to friend
Printer-friendly version
Comments
Public notices ought to be free
Our local governments are broke. In a perfect world we would publish notices on radio because there is an underserved part of the community that can not read. But that would be ridiculously expensive. We have to make choices based on cost. Luckily there is a solution that lowers costs to almost nothing which appeals to the taxpayers and is an independent voice which appeals to the taxpayers. 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.
Post new comment