SEASONS GREETING
and HAPPY NEW YEAR.
This time of year, legislative activity tends to be at a slower pace. PNRC anticipates the new year will bring increased activity as legislators aim to move bills before they enter the election cycle.
If you have a public notice story
or a bill that may be of interest.Please send information to
Jim Tarrant at: admin@pnrc.net.
Three-legged stool of government transparency – #2 FOIA
AG Brown proposes Model Public Records Act Rules to improve government transparency
Oct 3 2025
In a move to make all levels of government more transparent, Attorney General Nick Brown [WA] has proposed changes to the model rules that guide governments’ responses to Public Records Act requests.
“Concerns about transparency and integrity in government are at an all-time high, and officials have an obligation to uphold the spirit of the Public Records Act,” Attorney General Nick Brown said. “We welcome the public’s input into these model rules aimed at helping agencies across the state increase transparency and responsiveness to requests.”
The process of developing new model rules kicked off with a rulemaking petition last year from news organizations saying they faced “extreme backlogs” in agencies fulfilling public records requests. The Attorney General’s Office then worked with state media leaders, open government advocates, and local jurisdictions to develop draft model rules emphasizing timely and diligent responses to records requests.
The proposed rules encourage agencies to:
Triage requests into simple and complex tracks to ensure that processing times are proportionate to the difficulty of each request.
Provide records with their initial five-day response where the request is for a single, specific, identifiable record.
Make sure the agency has a reasonable belief that the records are arguably exempt from disclosure before issuing a third-party notice.
The model rules also say agencies should:
Address the need for making public records accessible for search and production.
Send requesters a closure letter, consistent with a recent court case, to let them know when an agency is no longer working on a response and the one-year timeframe for judicial review has begun.
The AGO has initiated a formal rulemaking process with the proposal and will hold a public hearing on the proposed changes on Nov. 6, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the John A. Cherberg Building, Rooms ABC, 304 15th Avenue SW, in Olympia.
The AGO provides model rules that public agencies at any level of government across the state can adopt, in whole or in part, as part of their work to meet their legal obligations under the Public Records Act.
In August 2024, The Seattle Times and other media organizations submitted a rulemaking petition requesting that the model rules be revised to address delays journalists encountered in requesting public records. The AGO began an informal rulemaking process, publicized on the agency’s website and via email, to welcome input from the public and the news media to inform development of the proposed revised rules now open for public comment.
Washington’s Public Records Act, which originally passed as a ballot initiative in 1972, is designed to prioritize transparency in government. It states that “the people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.”
Washington’s Attorney General serves the people and the state of Washington. As the state’s largest law firm, the Attorney General’s Office provides legal representation to every state agency, board, and commission in Washington. Additionally, the Office serves the people directly by enforcing consumer protection, civil rights, and environmental protection laws.
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-brown-proposes-model-public-records-act-rules-improve-government-transparency
PNRC Webinar
The PNRC was pleased to present the attached at a recent “Keeping Public Notices Where the Public Notices” webinar. If you missed it, you can find some tips and tricks for best practices:
County considers self-publishing legal notices
With Times now weekly, BOCC explores options
By Owen Perkins News Editor
Nov 11, 2025,
The presses hadn’t started running on the final edition of the Telluride Daily Planet last week when San Miguel County Manager Mike Bordogna floated the idea of moving away from using the paper’s new iteration, The Telluride Times, as the county’s “official posting place” in response to the shift in the newspaper’s publication schedule.
The county is required to print public notices in the “paper of record” to inform the public about upcoming legal matters, and the Planet, now Times, has a long history as the paper of record in San Miguel County.
Bordogna suggested the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) schedule the topic for further discussion at an upcoming meeting.
“Knowing that the Daily Planet is proposing to go from three issues per week to one, this could lead to delays in when we would be able to schedule public hearings for land use matters because of the new deadlines, as well as the lesser frequency of publication,” Bordogna said at the Nov. 4 BOCC meeting.
Bordogna asked the commissioners if they would like county staff to craft a resolution naming the county website as its official posting place.
“We would still continue to use the Daily Planet, but if we had issues that needed to come before the Planning Commission or the Board of Commissioners relatively quickly, if the website was the official venue, you could advertise it there.”
The brief discussion created some confusion — during and after the meeting — and those watching or listening to the meeting online might welcome some clarification about the county’s exploration of the idea and the relevant legal requirements.
Most importantly, as Bordogna later clarified with the Times, his use of the term “official posting place” was not meant to be synonymous with “paper of record,” and he emphasized that he was not suggesting the county stop using the Times as its paper of record.
Bordogna also stressed that he was not suggesting the county refrain from publishing notices in the Times, but simply that it could provide an avenue to legally post notices on the sanmiguelcountyco.gov website when the timing of running notices in a weekly paper would slow down their proceedings.
Bordogna cited Colorado Revised Statute (C.R.S.) 19-1087, which, he said, allows local governments to use their free and publicly accessible website as their official posting place.
That statute only covers public meetings, however, with C.R.S. 24-70-103 and C.R.S. 24-70-106 dictating that legal notices must be published in a qualifying newspaper of general circulation. The Times fully meets that requirement.
Upon looking into the additional statutes cited above by The Times, Bordogna acknowledged that his proposal may be more complicated than he initially anticipated.
“Moving notices solely to a county website would not comply with state law,” Telluride Times Publisher Maureen Pelisson said. “These public notices exist to ensure transparency and accessibility and newspapers remain the legally recognized and most reliable way to reach the entire community.”
Pelisson added, “Our goal has always been to uphold the public’s right to know, and we’ll continue to do that responsibly.”
Colorado Press Association (CPA) Executive Director Tim Regan-Porter is well-versed in issues around noticing and papers of public record and said the organization stands ready to defend the practices.
“They are bound by law to do the public notices in a legal newspaper,” Regan-Porter told The Times. “The law is already built with weeklies being very common, if not predominant, throughout the state. Nothing should take place sooner than a weekly can notice people on those types of things. Certainly, lots of counties have long had weeklies only and they do notice for all the same things.”
After a brief discussion at the BOCC meeting, and before much of the follow-up conversations covered here, the commissioners agreed to proceed with the drafting of a resolution to consider the shift.
“Off the cuff, I support this concept, because I think that it would create more accessibility for residents regionally throughout the county and (they would) have a consistent place to go to for public postings,” Commissioner Galena Gleason said. “It would be published regularly, in real time, and that would give people an option to access that information daily, or in real time, rather than waiting for it to be released in the paper.”
On the flip side, not everyone has easy internet access and web content is not necessarily accessible to all.
The Town of Mountain Village sought to use its own website as its paper of record, putting a proposed charter amendment on the June ballot earlier this year, which would have enabled the town to stop publishing notices in the printed newspaper. The measure lost with 53% of Mountain Village voters opposing it.
Organizations like the CPA and the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists (CSPJ) have long endorsed maintaining papers of record, a long-standing tradition in this county, with a primary focus on third-party accountability as a check ensuring government transparency in a permanent, accessible record.
“Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of all levels of government, providing the public with information about actions being taken,” CSPJ President Deb Hurley Brobst and then-Co-President Doug Bell said in a statement to the Daily Planet regarding the Mountain Village ballot measure. “The requirement to publish notices in a third-party publication — in this case the Telluride Daily Planet — ensures that nothing is hidden.”
While San Miguel County is concerned about timing, Regan-Porter mentioned another reason he’s seen for attempting to move away from newspapers.
“If a government entity doesn’t like what’s written about them and they retaliate by (placing their public notices elsewhere), it has a chilling effect on free speech,” Regan-Porter said.
There’s no whiff of ill will in this case, but there is a certain irony in floating the idea as the final Planet publication made way for the inaugural edition of The Times.
“In San Miguel County, the Telluride Times and KOTO radio remain the sources for the community to access news,” Pelisson said. “By self-publishing notices, the county would reduce its audience for notices and reduce the transparency of the process by removing the newspaper as the trusted record keeper.
“When pro-democracy norms like the First Amendment’s protection of speech and the press are already under attack, a shift from the paper of record to a government website seems counter intuitive,” Pelisson added.
Note: As the Times was going to press with this story, we heard from County Manager Mike Bordogna that “due to the legal ambiguity, we have decided not to pursue this idea any further. We are notifying applicants that they should expect longer time frames for their matters to be heard if they involve legal noticing.”
The City of Austin (TX) cancelled its budget meeting
The meeting was cancelled after a challenge that Notice did not comply with the Texas Open Meetings Act.
Jenny LaCoste-Daputo, deputy director of communications, issued this statement on November 12, 2025:
“The City of Austin believes that the budget work session meeting noticed for November 13, 2025, was posted correctly and appropriately. The City Attorney’s Office consulted with outside legal experts prior to posting the agenda and believes it meets all legal requirements. However, our goal with the budget is to restore trust in the City, so we are willing to take additional steps to achieve that goal.
We will cancel the meeting for tomorrow, November 13, and will re-post an agenda for the Tuesday work session and subsequent meetings related to the budget.”
Commissioners to consider support for legislation protecting homeowners facing foreclosure
November 7, 2025
The Berrien County Board of Commissioners will consider a resolution next week expressing its support for legislation intended to protect the rights of property owners facing mortgage foreclosure in Michigan.
County corporate counsel Thaddeus Hackworth told commissioners this week that when a homeowner is facing mortgage foreclosure, they have the right to any surplus funds generated by a foreclosure auction. However, others try to take advantage of them.
“There are firms who do business which includes getting homeowners to sign over the
rights to those surplus proceeds,” Hackworth said. “The bill would make that illegal.”
Hackworth said a homeowner also has a right to continue occupying a foreclosed property, even after it’s been sent to auction. The legislation seeks to preserve that right.
“That right of the homeowners would also not be transferable to a third party. So a firm
couldn’t come in and say, I want to buy the right to redeem your property. I’ll give you a few hundred dollars in exchange for that right. That would no longer be permissible under the
law.”
The legislation would also require that homeowners facing foreclosure be provided notice of their rights prior to any sale of the property to anyone else, including companies seeking to buy it. Hackworth said this gives the homeowners more time to pay off their bill and retain the property.
The legislation has the backing of both Democratic state Representative Joey Andrews and Republican state Representative Brad Paquette. The county board of commissioners will consider its resolution of support next week.
https://www.wsjm.com/2025/11/07/commissioners-to-consider-support-for-legislation-protecting-homeowners-facing-foreclosure/
LEGISLATION OF INTEREST
OH HB458 Regards real property foreclosures
This bill amends several sections of Ohio’s Revised Code related to real property foreclosures, introducing several key changes to the foreclosure process. The bill modifies provisions around property auctions, including creating a new definition for “sale date” and “start date” in foreclosure proceedings, and establishing more specific rules for online and in-person auctions. Notably, the bill reduces the minimum bidding period for online auctions from seven to three calendar days and provides more flexibility for judgment creditors in postponing or canceling sales. The bill also changes appraisal requirements, particularly for residential properties, by mandating exterior-only appraisals conducted by licensed professionals and shortening the timeframe for appraisal completion from twenty-one to fourteen calendar days. Additionally, the bill introduces new provisions around private selling officers, including stricter independence requirements and guidelines for their involvement in property sales. The changes aim to modernize the foreclosure process, increase transparency, and provide more efficient mechanisms for conducting judicial sales of real estate, with particular attention to online auction processes and notice requirements.
House Development Committee – 2nd Hearing
FL S0380 Legal Notices
This bill modifies Florida’s legal notice publication requirements by expanding the definition of “governmental agency” to include additional local government entities like the clerk of the circuit court and tax collector. It allows governmental agencies to publish legally required advertisements and public notices on their own publicly accessible websites or the county’s website if doing so is less expensive than publishing in a newspaper. The bill clarifies that these website publications must be searchable and include the date of first publication. The legislation updates numerous existing statutes to incorporate this new website publication option across various contexts, including judicial sales, educational unit notices, retirement system notifications, code enforcement board communications, community development district establishment, school district budget hearings, and other official notifications. By providing more flexible and potentially cost-effective publication methods, the bill aims to modernize how local governments communicate important public information, recognizing the increasing role of online platforms in disseminating official notices. The changes will take effect on July 1, 2026, giving governmental agencies time to prepare for the new publication options. Senate Judiciary Hearing 12/2/2025