One NC county no longer has to put notices in the newspaper. How it’s going so far.

As state legislators debate whether to move public notices from newspapers to government websites, one county has already made the switch.

Guilford County’s move — authorized by a local bill in the legislature in 2017 — has prompted a lawsuit and has been partly delayed. By using its own website to notify residents of public hearings and other matters, Guilford has saved about $109,000, but fewer people regularly visit the website than the number of people who read the local paper. The county’s state senator wants to repeal the law and put public notices back in the newspapers.

Guilford serves as the case study for the proposals in House Bill 35 and House Bill 51, which would expand the change to a total of 24 counties. The move has prompted outcry from newspapers, who argue that the change would make it harder for residents to learn about important government actions that affect them. One publisher said county leaders could use the tool to punish newspapers for coverage they don’t like.

But Rep. Harry Warren, a Rowan County Republican and the sponsor of one bill, said the goal is to help cash-strapped local governments save money so they don’t have to cut services or raise taxes.

What happened in Greensboro

Similar legislation has been considered for years, but only one bill became law. That 2017 bill was sponsored by then-Sen. Trudy Wade, a Guilford County Republican and a frequent critic of her local newspaper, The News & Record. Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the first version, calling it a “misguided philosophy meant to specifically threaten and harm the media.”

Republicans held a veto-proof majority that year, but bipartisan opposition meant leadership lacked the votes to override Cooper’s veto. So they instead passed the measure as a local bill, which the governor can’t sign or veto.

In March 2018, Guilford County government moved most of its public notices to a page on its website and significantly reduced its use of newspaper ads.

Anyone who wanted to know about, for example, a recent public hearing about economic development grants would need to be regularly checking that website. The site does not have a way to sign up for email notifications.

Guilford County Clerk Robin Keller said she’s heard no complaints about the change and the county “continues to have strong community participation in our public hearings and publicly noticed events.”

The ads that would have run in The News & Record and the High Point Enterprise would have cost the county a total of $109,000 over roughly three years. Those savings represent a tiny fraction of the county’s $633 million annual budget. But Keller said the website is more effective than the newspaper ads because with multiple papers in the county, “it was a little challenging for our residents to keep track of where things were going to be placed,” she said.

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.

By contrast, The News & Record distributes tens of thousands of copies each day, with hundreds of thousands more visiting the newspaper’s website regularly. It’s unclear, though, how many of those readers routinely read the classified ad section where public notices appear.

Print newspaper readers

Afrique Kilimanjaro, editor of the Carolina Peacemaker newspaper in Greensboro, worries about print readers who lack internet access or the technology skills to find information on the county website.

Her paper has served the Black community in Guilford since the 1960s. She worries those readers could be “disenfranchised” if they miss out on announcements about proposed neighborhood rezonings and highway construction projects. “Those areas tend to be areas where there is a working class, poor community,” she said.

Kilimanjaro described the county’s website as “cumbersome” to navigate, and she worries it could enable county leaders to hide certain actions.

“It’s kind of like the fox watching the henhouse,” she said. “It’s not a transparent position. They can make it as difficult as possible to find.”

Keller said Guilford officials occasionally still run newspaper ads when the topic is of particular interest to older residents who might not have internet access.

Public notices and legal notices

The 2017 law also allows Guilford municipalities to post public notices on the county website instead of using newspapers. So far, that hasn’t happened because the second phase of the county site has been delayed, in part due to staffing challenges as a result of COVID-19.

Keller said that will launch in the coming months, and while Greensboro and the suburban Guilford towns haven’t yet confirmed if they’ll use the site, they’ve expressed interest. She said it could be particularly helpful to the smaller towns like Stokesdale and Pleasant Garden, where the cost of newspaper ads amounts to a higher percentage of their small operating budgets.

A third phase of the project could be to allow attorneys and others outside government to move their required legal notice newspaper ads to the county website — something that’s allowed in the 2017 law and in this year’s bills for other counties. That’s less of a priority, Keller said.

“Our intent was not to turn this into a profit-driven business, our intent was to save taxpayer money,” she said.

In Guilford, many of those legal notices run in the weekly Jamestown News, where publisher Charles Womack said attorneys who place frequent ads there are happy with the current process. It results in a printed record that they’ve fulfilled legally mandated notice requirements, and his staff is able to accommodate last-minute adjustments for advertisers, he said.

Expand or repeal?

Even as House Republicans seek to expand the Guilford model to about a quarter of the state, one Guilford senator wants to repeal the existing law and put notices back in newspapers.

Democratic Sen. Michael Garrett unseated Wade, the sponsor of the law, in 2018. He filed repeal legislation in 2019 titled “Fair Treatment for Journalism,” and while that bill never got a committee hearing, he plans to file it again in the coming weeks.

“Guilford County publications have been dealing with the impact of my predecessor’s vindictive, anti-journalism law for years now,” Garrett said in an email. “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 also filed a lawsuit in 2018 to block the law as unconstitutional. That lawsuit is still awaiting a hearing from a three-judge panel, according to an attorney representing the papers.

The pair of bills to expand the website notices passed a House judiciary committee last week and is scheduled for a Tuesday hearing in the House Local Government Committee.