After following a convoluted path that included two different bills, half a dozen amendments, five floor votes and a grand compromise, the Kentucky legislature passed a bill last week ensuring that the state’s public notice law would remain mostly unchanged.

The original public notice provisions of both HB195 and HB351 would have moved all government notice in the Bluegrass State from newspapers to government websites. Following a compromise earlier this year between the Kentucky Press Association (KPA) and the associations representing cities and counties in the state, HB195 was amended to exclude counties with population under 80,000. That amendment brought it closer to the state’s current law — passed two years ago and due to sunset this summer — which allows counties with population above 90,000 to run notices on their own websites; decreasing the population threshold by 10,000 would have increased the number of website-notice-only counties from eight to ten.

HB195 passed both chambers but Gov. Andy Beshear (D) vetoed the bill on March 27, explaining in his veto statement that “requiring internet-only publication would negatively affect the ability of citizens to receive complete notice and information about a local government’s action.” Although Republicans had the votes to override the veto, the legislature didn’t take it up.

Meanwhile, emergency tax measure HB351 passed the House in early March with its notice-by-government-website provisions intact. But the version approved by the Senate last Wednesday didn’t include those provisions so the differences between the two bills had to be worked out in conference. The language that ultimately passed both chambers included a provision replicating the state’s current public notice law — the one that contains a population threshold of 90,000 and is due to sunset on June 30. HB351 also added a new mandate to the law, requiring every government notice published in a newspaper in Kentucky to include the following sentence:

“This advertisement was paid for by [insert the name of the governmental body required to advertise in a newspaper] using taxpayer dollars in the amount of $ [insert the amount paid for the advertisement].” South Dakota is the only other state we are aware of whose public notice law includes a similar requirement.

KPA Executive Director David Thompson assumes the sentence was added behind closed doors by legislators trying to make the point that public notice in newspapers is too expensive. “We say it’s not too costly. Their own legislative study says it’s not. But that didn’t stop them,” said Thompson. 

The Governor isn’t expected to veto the tax measure and it’s not clear whether he has authority to use a line-item veto to strike only the public notice provisions.

Thompson and KPA can live with the outcome, which ensures government notice will continue to be published in newspapers in 112 counties in Kentucky. But he’s not content to simply wait for the next shoe to drop. “We’re going whole hog in 2021,” he said. “We’re going on the offensive.” KPA plans to work out its legislative strategy at a public notice summit this fall.

In Florida, Rep. Randy Fine’s (R-Brevard) bill to move all government and private notice to government websites suffered the same fate as it did in 2019. After passing the House, the companion to Fine’s HB7 died in the Senate when it was withdrawn from consideration on the final day of this year’s legislative session. Newspapers in Florida expect Fine to be back with another public-notice-killing piece of legislation in 2021.

Indiana and New York both lost important notices in behind-closed-doors maneuvering on the last day of their sessions. 

In New York, the New York News Publishers Association lost a battle it has been waging for several years with Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), to prevent him from including a provision in the state budget that would eliminate competitive bidding on state agency public works projects, obviating the need for public notice. According to NYNPA President Diane Kennedy, the legislature in the past had always scaled back the proposal to allow the Governor to use discretionary contracting processes on only a handful of urgent projects. But when the budget passed at 3:30am on Friday morning, lawmakers gave Gov. Cuomo everything he asked for. Most major building construction projects involving state agencies will no longer be competitively bid. 

Language in the budget bill sunsets the contracting provision at the end of 2022, but Kennedy acknowledged it will be “extremely difficult to persuade the Governor to cede this authority”. She also noted the state’s financial condition is so dire there may be few public works projects launched in the next two and half years regardless of the process used to select contractors.

When HB1003 passed the Indiana House on Jan. 28, it contained a provision reducing the newspaper publication of annual school academic performance reports to a summary and a reference to a website address where the full report could be read. But when the education bill reached the Senate, the public notice language was stripped from it by the chairman of the committee the bill was referred to; that provision was still absent when the Senate version of HB1003 passed the upper chamber early last month.

So the Hoosier State Press Association (HSPA) was shocked to learn the ensuing conference committee report on HB1003 included a provision reducing information contained in notices about schools’ academic achievement reports and in notices about their annual financial statements. The new language turning financial-performance notices into summaries with a web link was never introduced nor considered by a committee in either the House or the Senate. Nevertheless, it wasn’t discovered in time for anyone to ask whether it violated rules preventing the inclusion of language in a conference report that had not been passed by either chamber. The conference report passed the House and Senate and was signed by the governor on March 18.

HSPA Executive Director Steve Key is concerned that the legislative kneecapping of the schools’ financial reports will embolden other government units required to publish annual financial statements. “It will open the door for every other local government unit to argue its financial report publication should be reduced to a summary,” said Key. “I expect they’ll be lined up to make that request before the 2021 General Assembly.”