Last year, I wrote a blog post about bills before the Government Administrations and Elections Committee of the CT General Assembly. One bill would have delayed the implementation of a requirement that municipalities post their minutes on their websites. Another bill would have allowed municipalities to post legal notices on their websites instead of in local papers. The issue of legal notices has come up again this year, and I’ve recently written about it in public notices and covering the news and in Lebanon CT rejects budget ordinance.

In my blog post from last year, I noted that I found it interesting that people who supported delaying the requirement that municipalities post their minutes online were the same people that supported allowing municipalities to post legal notices.

This year, the bill looks much better. It links the two together in an appropriate manner:

Any town, city or borough that is in compliance with the provisions of subsection (a) of section 1-225, as amended by this act, concerning the posting of minutes may post any advertisement of a legal notice described in subsection (a) of this section in a conspicuous place on such town's, city's or borough's Internet web site in lieu of insertion of such advertisement in a daily or weekly newspaper.

Today, there is the public hearing about the proposed bill. I’m told that the publisher of the Willimantic Chronicle is testifying against the bill. I’m not particularly impressed with their website, but they do have a link to a very interesting website, Connecticut Public Notices. This site appears to aggregate public notices published in newspapers from across the state and make them easy to search. The site is part of MyPublicNotices which is a unit of Legacy.com. “Founded in 1998, Legacy.com is backed by several individual investors and the Tribune Company”.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. I think there is benefit to municipalities being able to publish their legal notices online. I had previously written:

Perhaps instead of simply doing away with the requirement that municipalities publish notices in local papers, we should allow them to publish them on online sites as well, providing the online sites get sufficient traffic. Municipalities that have vibrant websites might be able to use their own websites. Municipalities with lackluster websites that do not attract traffic might find it more efficient to post their notices on some of the online news sites that are rapidly growing in the state.

The language of SB 365 seems to move us in that direction, but other issues remain, such as with this loss of revenue for local papers, how will local news coverage be supported? Will there be sufficient tools to aggregate the public notices? Is there the possibility of an open standard for posting such notices and open software to facilitate posting such notices? Whatever happens, SB 365 seems to be just another small step in the long journey of news organizations and municipalities adopting to the age of the Internet.

Update: Via Text messages, I’ve been told that the First Selectman of Lyme was testifying in favor of SB 365. So, I went to take a look at their website. I could find a website for the town of Old Lyme. I could find a website for the town of East Lyme. I could even find a website for the Lyme Public Library. But I could not find the Lyme Town Website. It turns out that the Public Library website has a like to the town website, but the link is broken.

Apparently, in further testimony, the First Selectman has acknowledged that their site is down for upgrades but will be back online soon. Of course, being online is not enough. It must be easy to find. In addition, the First Selectman has apparently complained about the cost of maintaining town websites. It seems like they need to make a choice, have a town website, or pay local papers to post legal notices.