The newspaper business has had a tough year but not because of public notice.
PNRC has been tracking about 360 distinct public-notice-related bills introduced in 2019, including 80 that passed and were signed into law. Most of these bills added new notice requirements. Moreover, the only one that will have an arguably significant impact on a state’s public notice statute — an eligibility law in Virginia — was supported by that state’s press association.
None of the real stinkers — i.e., bills introduced in 11 states that would have removed most public notice from newspapers — even made it out of committee. That number is about the same as last year but compares favorably to 2017, when lawmakers in 26 states introduced legislation to eliminate newspaper notice. The only close call this year came in Indiana, where a bill that would have moved mortgage foreclosure notices to municipal websites passed the House before it was killed in the Senate.
And to borrow a phrase from financial analysts, the year-over-year comparisons were good.
One of the metrics we view as a rough proxy for the general health of newspaper notice in the state capitals turned sharply positive this year. Bills that would add a newspaper notice in a specific category — for instance, in connection with newly mandated public hearings or financial reports — outnumbered those that would eliminate a category of notice by approximately three to one. (That ratio was roughly the same both for bills that were merely introduced as well as those that were enacted.) That compares favorably to the 2018 ratio of roughly 1.5 to 1.
We also saw a marked increase this year in public notice “eligibility” bills, i.e., legislation that would revise the conditions under which newspapers qualify to publish notices, and/or that would mandate the terms of publication. Almost thirty eligibility bills were introduced this year — more than three times as many as 2018, the first year PNRC began assigning bill types to each piece of public-notice-related legislation. Most of these bills appear to have been introduced to address concerns raised by the fact that many small towns and counties no longer have a local newspaper in which to publish their notices.