The effort to reduce the amount of money municipalities spend on public notices printed in newspapers is back at the state legislature.
It's an issue that has repeatedly come up over the past few years. Municipal leaders want to save money by printing only shortened notices for things like contract bids, foreclosures and public hearings. And the rest could be found online. But newspapers have long pushed back, saying it would hurt both transparency and their bottom lines.
Now, a new bill would allow for the shortened printed notices, and would keep the full notices on a newspaper website. John Bailey is a lobbyist for the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association, which supports the bill.
"That's a compromise," Bailey said. "The municipalities will be charged less and then the papers will be receiving less revenue."
Kevin Maloney is the spokesman for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. He said his organization also supports the bill, as long as it guarantees that the online notice won't come with an extra cost.
"The compromise is that you pay for a truncated version but there would still be a complete text on the newspaper's website, in a non-firewalled area," Maloney said. "But we want a guarantee that towns are not going to be hit with an additional cost. Otherwise, it's going to defeat the whole purpose of the compromise."
The bill has passed out of the legislature's Planning and Development Committee.
