The members of the New Jersey State Legislature, facing a huge budget deficit, are trying to correct past wrongs by making new ones.

On February 25 the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee passed Assembly Bill A1105 out of committee and on to the full Assembly. This troubling piece of legislation allows government agencies to forego placing public notice (legal) advertisements in newspapers and instead place them on government websites. We know, your first reaction is, "You’re a newspaper. You are just upset because you are going to lose revenue." It is true we would lose revenue. And we don’t expect you to care about that. We do, however, count on you to understand the outright foolishness of authorizing local governments to fulfill their public notice responsibilities in a "Do It Yourself" manner; one fraught with potential for slipshod administration and abuse.

Public notices are in newspapers for many reasons. First and foremost newspapers provide vital third-party verification that timely and accurate notice has been provided to the public. Printed notices can’t be "revised" or "enhanced" or, heaven forbid, "removed" after they’ve been posted. The importance of "permanence" seems to be lost on the sponsors of this bill. Newspapers fulfill that third-party verification and provide a medium the public can rely upon.

At the same time, newspapers aren’t stuck in the last century! Public notices from New Jersey’s newspapers are already on the web! Five years ago, the New Jersey Press Association established njpublicnotices.com, a website where newspapers from throughout the state upload their public notices daily. The notices are searchable by subject, county, municipality, government agency, dates of publication and more. The unfortunate outcome of Assembly Bill A1105 would be this site’s elimination in favor of more than 1,000 individual sites where citizens would have to go to retrieve this same information – if they even bother! The public deserves better than this. A1105 should not be passed by the Assembly, but if it is, the Senate should make sure a companion bill never sees the light of day.