Groups urge study committee to loosen legal notice requirements

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Several organizations are urging a group charged with studying the state’s legal notices statutes to do away with a requirement that has the notices published in newspapers.

Under current statutes, cities must designate a newspaper in which to publish legal notices. Villages and towns, in contrast, are no longer under the same obligation. Legislation passed last year lets them simply either publish legal notices in three public places or in one public place and the village’s website.

Curt Witynski, assistant director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, said his group, which represents Wisconsin’s 190 cities and most of its 411 villages, is urging the committee to extend that exception to cities.

He listed three reasons: cost savings, fairness and national surveys the show that more people have access to the Internet than read newspapers.

“Cities should not be limited solely to the most expensive and arguably least effective option for complying with publication requirements,” he said.

Other groups echoed Witynski’s comments Tuesday. Among those calling for the elimination of the newspaper-publishing requirement were representatives of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards and the Wisconsin Towns Association.

Officials at the Wisconsin Newspaper Association responded by arguing that newspapers serve as a third party that can vouch that legal notices have been published in their original form and not altered subsequently. Newspaper also provide an archiving function that might prove costly to local governments.

All 50 states still require newspaper publication of legal notices, said Beth Bennett, executive director of the WNA. Utah is the lone state to attempt to do away with the publication of legal notices in newspapers. That state passed a five-year plan to withdraw completely from requiring local governments to publish legal notices in newspapers.

“The plan was a total failure,” she said. “It was repealed after two years.”

She also noted that the cost of public notices is not borne solely by government. The tab is often instead picked up by the subjects of legal notices. Banks and lawyers, for instance, often cover the cost of having foreclosure notices published.

Others who spoke at the meeting in favor of requiring newspaper publication of legal notices included Gregg Walker, publisher of Lakeland Publishing in Minocqua, and Andrew Johnson, publisher of the Wisconsin Free Press Group. Both are WNA members.

Mark Stodder — a former publisher of the Wisconsin Law Journal and its sister paper, The Daily Reporter, which publishes Milwaukee city and county legal notices — wanted more information about authentication standards being used in other states and jurisdictions, and how local governments go about updating and building their websites.

“How do Wisconsin town and city websites match up to those standards?” he said. “And how are websites done by towns and villages. What are their practical standards?” Follow @erikastrebel