Legal notices once again under scrutiny

It’s a conversation that’s come up in the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature before — and has been sent back to the drawing board every time.

It’s become a “political football,” as one legislator put it in 2019.

In a Dec. 13 meeting between Ada County commissioners and state legislators, Republican Commissioner Ryan Davidson threw that football back into play. At the meeting, held annually before the legislative session, he urged legislators to renew efforts to change the state’s law about how the government informs citizens of legal notices.

Under Idaho law, government entities in Idaho are required to place public notices — of foreclosure, name changes and bankruptcies, among other things — in the local newspaper with the highest circulation.

With print journalism on the decline, Davidson said, these notifications are of little use to the public. Forcing counties to spend resources on preparing and placing the notices amounts to asking taxpayers to subsidize local news, he said.

“We believe that it is no longer necessary for taxpayers to have to pay to print government ads in local newspapers,” he told legislators. “We don’t feel that it’s fair to the taxpayers, in this day and age, to basically have to subsidize physical newspapers with their hard-earned money.”

Leaders of the Newspaper Association of Idaho pushed back on this characterization. Publishing these notices is not about the money, they said, but about “public transparency and openness — sunshine for all residents,” said Nathan Alford, the group’s vice president, and the editor and publisher of The Lewiston Tribune and Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

As for the cost, any savings gained from stopping the publication of these ads would be “nominal,” said Clint Schroeder, the organization’s president and the head of the media group that owns the Coeur d’Alene Press and Bonners Ferry Herald, among other outlets. The state sets the rate counties must pay for these ads based on their length, and the rate hasn’t changed since 2007.

From the beginning, that rate was significantly lower than what newspapers charged for normal ads.

“This is a minimal expense in the budget, and being willing to sacrifice the public access is a little astounding,” Schroeder said.

In fiscal year 2024, Ada County spent about $48,000 on placing public notices in the Idaho Press, said Nicole Newby, a spokesperson for the Ada County Clerk’s Office. It spent similar amounts in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, when notices were placed in the Idaho Statesman, she told the Statesman by email.

Idaho association offers online access to public notices

But there are hidden costs, too, in staff time required to prepare and send out the notices, Davidson told legislators.

“Every year, counties are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on publishing various items in newspapers,” he said. “I tend to believe that the day the internet was invented, this law became obsolete. But we are now about 25 to 30 years into the internet, and the way people digest information has radically changed.”

He told the Statesman after the meeting that he didn’t have a specific alternative in mind, but proposed something such as a centralized county database that would publish all government notices in one place.

Newspaper leaders said they’ve already created a private-sector version of that solution. Since 2012, news outlets in the state have published government notices on a searchable website the association created with funding from the state’s newspapers, the association said.

The site serves as a single source for residents to learn about all government actions, rather than needing to check individual government websites, Alford said. Having newspapers document these notices, rather than posting them on a government-run website, as Davidson and others have proposed, allows for an independent record of government actions, he added.

Association leaders pushed back, too, on claims that lower print news readership has rendered the public notice law obsolete. The state’s 38 newspapers distribute a combined 180,000 print copies, and their websites, which all link to the association’s public notices site, get nearly 2 million impressions every day, Alford said.

Idaho ranks 40th among states for internet coverage, speed and availability, according to BroadbandNow, a data aggregation site that compares internet providers. Idahoans face “pervasive barriers to digital access,” according to a 2023 report by the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.

“The digital divide impacts our citizenry far more than most other states,” Alford told the Statesman. “And it’s our rural residents that suffer the most.”

And for many of the state’s elderly residents — those 65 and older make up 17.4% of Idaho’s population — print papers remain their primary source of news, Rep. Steve Berch, D-Boise, told Davidson at the meeting. Berch raised concerns about whether doing away with the public notice law would be “discriminating against” those people.

The cost of the notices, he said, was likely no more than a “rounding error” relative to an overall county budget — and he said he believed cost was beside the point.

“If all you do is look at the cost of something, you will never appreciate or respect the value that it provides. That value isn’t always necessarily in the form of a return on investment,” he told the Statesman by phone. “It’s about providing a service, and that’s what government is responsible for: providing services to its constituents. All its constituents, not (just) the ones that are the least expensive to service.”

Readers can find Idaho public notices at idahopublicnotices.com.