Two nearly identical public notice bills have been introduced in North Carolina. Both bills would allow multiple counties, and the municipalities within those counties, to adopt ordinances authorizing them to move their notices from newspapers to the county website. H35 would apply to 11 counties and HB51 would impact 13 others.
Their Republican sponsors (one co-sponsor is a Democrat) structured the bills so oddly to avoid the almost-certain veto of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper. In North Carolina, the governor can’t veto legislation filed as a “local bill”, and local bills are limited to 14 counties.
“These are not local bills, but a trojan horse for a larger statewide campaign … only to avoid the veto of the governor,” Phil Lucey, North Carolina Press Association Executive Director told the Winston-Salem Journal last month. “This is not about cost savings for the counties. This is about hiding the business of the people and an attempt to strike back at newspapers for doing their job.”
If all this sounds vaguely familiar it’s because the pattern was set back in 2017, when former Sen. Trudy Wade managed to get a bill passed that would have moved newspaper notice in the state to county government websites. Gov. Cooper vetoed the bill and the state GOP didn’t have the votes to override it. So Wade redrafted the legislation as a “local bill” affecting only her home county, Guilford (that’s the Old Guilford County Courthouse in Greensboro pictured above). It passed both chambers and took effect on Dec. 1, 2017.
Raleigh’s News & Observer last month reviewed the experiment in detail. What it found is revealing. In a nutshell, what started with a bang quickly turned into a whimper.
Whatever one might say about Wade’s legislation, there’s no denying it was ambitious and detailed in a manner that is lacking in most bills designed primarily to hurt newspapers. Rather than spreading local notice across multiple government websites, it designated the county’s website as the locus for both government and court-ordered private notice. It also authorized the county to charge third parties up to $450 for the publication of each notice and it earmarked half of those funds for teacher’s salaries.
However, once the bill passed the county appears to have lost all interest in Wade’s vision or in informing citizens about official actions. For residents of the municipalities within Guilford and users of the local court system that turned out to be a blessing. Three years after the county’s public notice website debuted, municipal and judicial notices continue to be published in local newspapers because Guilford hasn’t gotten around to what it calls the second and third “phases” of the project.
But it also means that in return for shaving approximately .005 percent of the county’s $633 million annual budget, far fewer residents have seen official county notices.
“Since its inception in 2018, the public notices page on the county website has been viewed 16,029 times, with the main county homepage garnering about 535,000 hits over the same time period,” reported the News & Observer. According to SimilarWeb.com, the News & Record’s greensboro.com gets almost twice as many pageviews as that in a single month, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of print copies the paper distributes every day.
The county site also doesn’t have a way for users to sign up for email notifications.
Sen. Michael Garrett (D-Greensboro), who defeated Wade in the 2018 election, filed a bill the following year to repeal her public notice legislation. He plans to file it again this session, reported the News & Observer.
“Guilford County publications have been dealing with the impact of my predecessor’s vindictive, anti-journalism law for years now,” Garrett told the News & Observer. “I am deeply concerned to see similar efforts to financially starve newspapers popping up across the state. Politicians weaponizing their legislative power against a free press has no place in our democratic republic.”
Guilford newspapers filed suit after Wade’s bill passed in 2017. The lawsuit is still pending.