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JACKSONVILLE DAILY RECORD / JACKSONVILLE RECORD & OBSERVER
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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2021
JaxDailyRecord.com
FROM THE PUBLISHER
GOP legislators don’t do what they preach
MATT WALSH PUBLISHER
On the issue of public notice, Florida GOP lawmakers are hypocrites. They say they’re for less government, more transparency and free enterprise. That’s not what they do. Here we go again. The annual Hatfield-and-McCoy shootout between Florida’s Republican legislators and Florida’s mostly liberal daily newspapers. For the most part, Florida’s Republican lawmakers — especially those in leadership positions — despise Florida’s newspapers, especially the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post. And these lawmakers have longed to shoot enough buckshot through those newspapers to shut them down. Or at least seriously hurt them financially. This year, in the 2021 legislative session, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senate President Wilton Simpson and House Speaker Chris Sprowls appear more determined than ever. They are lined up to win, and their weapon of choice is going to be House Bill 35. The plan: Change the statutes to shift mandated public notices out of newspapers and onto government websites. It’s not an idea that’s likely to stir most unsuspecting taxpayers and voters. Indeed, it’s not a major social issue like abortion or guns or health care for the poor. But it is an important issue. It affects every Floridian every day. Indeed, it goes to the heart of making sure state and local governments and all of their agencies operate openly and transparently. It goes to the heart of giving Floridians the
ability to have a say in how their state and local governments operate. And in many instances, it also goes to the heart of due process — protecting Floridians from having their properties unfairly and illegally confiscated. But little of that matters to Republican lawmakers. The fact state and local governments and their agencies outsource the publishing of this information to newspapers and pay newspapers to publish them drives the anti-press lawmakers crazy. To them, publishing notices in newspapers is nothing but a subsidy for the businesses that constantly criticize what they do. DeSantis, Simpson, Sprowls and dozens of other Republican lawmakers are determined to end that. And what better way to do that, in this digital, online age, than to decree all notices can be published on government-controlled websites. Dear Readers, this is a bad, bad idea. Bad for taxpayers, bad for Florida. We will show you why and propose an alternative. PROTECTIONISM
Full disclosure: Our company and all of the paidsubscription newspapers in Florida generate revenue and profits from publishing government-mandated public notices. So it’s easy to conclude our company, the Daily Record & Observer LLC, and our parent, Observer Media Group Inc., have a vested interest in protecting the status quo. But in fact, our company has been lobbying for more than a decade that the state’s public notice laws need reforming and updating. In part, we’ve been making the same argument lawmakers have made — that the Legislature decades ago crafted public notice laws in a way that gives daily newspapers and paid-subscription newspapers a protected monopoly on the publishing of public notices (and the taxpayer dollars governments pay to have them published). In fact, we’ve argued, and continue to do so, that the state’s daily newspapers are exactly what their editorials often criticize: They’re a special interest that uses the Legislature for special protectionism. While lawmakers complain about the cost to taxpayers of
Special to Daily Record
Some of Florida’s Republican lawmakers want the state to stop paying to print public notices in newspapers and instead put them on government websites.
publishing public notices, a portion of that cost is a direct result of the lack of competition they created to begin with. At the risk of too much regulatory mumbo jumbo, here’s the deal: To qualify to publish public notices, newspapers, among other things, must publish five or more days a week. They also must have a periodical permit from the U.S. Postal Service, which requires more than 50% of the paper’s distribution to be paid subscribers. That means free weekly newspapers are ineligible for public notices — if the government body wants to meet its requirements for valid public notices. Many municipalities still publish notices in their communities’ free weeklies because they know the notices reach and are read by the taxpayers the cities and counties want to reach. So here’s one of the conundrums of the statutes: The laws apply to a changed marketplace. Readership and circulation of free weeklies now surpass the readership of paid dailies in many of Florida’s markets. What’s more, the cost to publish in free weeklies often is less than the cost to publish in the local paid daily. Stand-alone websites are also prohibited from qualifying to publish public notices. The newspaper industry thwarted the threat of these potential competitors’ websites when it lobbied the Legislature to modify the statutes by requiring papers that publish public notices in print to post all notices on their websites
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NO PUBLIC OUTCRY
Here’s another barometer: Not once in a quarter-century has a consumer group or mobs of angry citizens lobbied lawmakers for changes in public notice laws. There is no public outcry for changing the state’s public notice laws. The only groups that complain are local governments and one-off lawmakers who want revenge and retribution against their local newspaper for having published critical and/or unflattering reports about them. Local government bureaucrats complain primarily during recessions, when they must cut their budgets. They say they will save taxpayers millions of dollars by not having to publish notices in newspapers — if only they could post public notices on their own websites. This is baloney. The cost of public notice advertising for most local governments is hardly noticeable in the scheme of annual spending. One example: Two years ago, when we measured public notice spending for Sarasota County, it amounted to 0.02% of a $1 billion budget —
DANGERS OF ONLINE ONLY
The issue is much more than that. There are multiple issues. Let’s parse them and finish with a recommendation. A dramatic subsidy? Perhaps a more precise depiction would be a government-sanctioned monopoly. Lawmakers did this. They gave paid-subscription daily newspapers a monopoly. No one in his right mind today would consider starting a daily newspaper for the purpose of
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as well — at no charge. The industry also created floridapublicnotices.com, a site that aggregates all notices from around the state — at no charge. Those two steps made Florida’s public notice laws a national model. Indeed, to a large extent, you can argue Florida public notice laws are working — except for the lack of competition.
$267,000. That’s typical. These local government officials should be honest. The money is a cover for their real objections. Many of these officials don’t like paying to do business with what they regard as an adversary and enemy. They think public notices are a nuisance, a time suck for staff. They believe their lives would be much easier if they handled public notices on their own websites. After all, isn’t that where the world is — online? Who reads newspapers? the argument goes. Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay, agrees with all of this. Fine is regarded as one of the Legislature’s Republican bulls and bullies. If he comes up with a legislative proposal, he cares little about anyone’s objections. He showed this last session when, seemingly out of nowhere, he proposed that New College of Florida, based in Sarasota, be merged with one of the other larger state universities. That totally surprised Sarasota-Bradenton lawmakers and the New College administration. Two years ago, after the Florida Today newspaper published critical stories about Fine, he responded by filing a bill that no longer would require public notices to be published in newspapers. The law would allow them to be published on “publicly accessible websites,” e.g. government-operated websites. The bill died. It died in the Senate in 2020. Now, it’s back again. Last year, while speaking in committee on behalf of the bill, Fine told his colleagues: “The problem is the dramatic subsidy and cost that we’re putting on local governments by requiring them to buy these ads that people aren’t reading at vastly inflated prices. That is where the issue is.”
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