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| 11/11/2008 9:21:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Committee starts process to remove Daily News as county newspaper
Legal notice flap riles supervisors
The Oneida County Zoning Committee voted Wednesday to have zoning staff initiate a process to remove the Rhinelander Daily News as the county's official newspaper.
Such an action would require an ordinance amendment.
Zoning committee supervisors have been upset with the Rhinelander newspaper since July, when the committee had to cancel a public hearing for an ordinance amendment due to an inaccurate printing of the legal notice in The Daily News.
At the public hearing on July 30, zoning director Karl Jennrich told supervisors he was removing the ordinance amendment from the agenda because the notice in the Daily News was "fatally flawed and no strike through or underlines were printed in the publication."
The department subsequently published abridged notices for a rescheduled hearing, which was held on Aug. 13. For substantive ordinance amendments - this one clarified the definition of a principal structure - the department publishes legal notices in four newspapers: The Daily News, The Lakeland Times, The Vilas County (Three Lakes) News Review, and the Tomahawk Leader.
The forced postponement of a public hearing on what the committee considered an important ordinance amendment angered some supervisors, and, in September, the committee held a general discussion about how many papers the committee should use to publish such notices and about possibly changing the official newspaper.
Committee chairman Scott Holewinski asked department staff to research how many people subscribed to the Daily News in the Minocqua area as well as general circulation statistics for other newspapers.
As a result of that research, The Lakeland Times provided the zoning department with the Wisconsin Newspaper Association's latest circulation figures. Those numbers showed The Lakeland Times with a paid circulation of 11,013 and the Rhinelander Daily News with a circulation of 3,783.
Last Wednesday, after a discussion of circulation numbers, and of The Daily News' response to the printing error - which supervisor Ted Cushing said was as of much concern to him as the actual cost - Cushing moved to direct staff to take the first steps necessary to eliminate the Daily News as the county's official newspaper.
The motion passed.
Official newspapers
According to Wisconsin state statutes, when any municipality designates an official newspaper, all legal notices published in a newspaper by that municipality must be published in that newspaper, though the municipality is free to publish in other newspapers as well.
In an opinion issued this past February, Wisconsin attorney general J.B. Van Hollen determined that counties with populations of less than 250,000 do not have to designate any official newspaper.
However, that does not relieve a county of publishing certain legal notices in a newspaper, Van Hollen stated, and he struck down the notion that publication of such notices on a county's web site or in an Internet newspaper would satisfy the statutory requirements.
The statutes, Van Hollen observed, require certain legal notices to be published in a "publication appearing at regular intervals and at least once a week, containing reports of happenings of recent occurrence of a varied character, such as political, social, moral and religious subjects, designed to inform the general reader."
Counties lack statutory authority to produce publications containing such varied information, Van Hollen stated, and, he added, the general reader does not refer to a county website in order to obtain such information.
"Even if counties did possess statutory authority to publish newspapers as defined in [the statutes], I am not persuaded that such publication could occur solely on a county's website," Van Hollen wrote.
While there are now so-called Internet newspapers, he stated, they do not qualify under the statutes as an acceptable newspaper. A newspaper is statutorily defined as a publication, Van Hollen observed, and he said publication is by definition "the act or process of issuing copies ... for general distribution to the public."
" . . . providing a source of news on the Internet is not providing a source of news on paper," the attorney general stated. "Virtually anyone can buy a newspaper, but not everyone has a computer with access to the Internet. Placing a legal notice on a county's web site therefore does not constitute newspaper publication under [the statutes]."
In situations where the publication of legal notices in a newspaper is not mandatory, Van Hollen continued, the statutes do allow the county to opt for alternative publication, in some cases, or posting in public places in other situations.
But again, Van Hollen stated, the county's website or an Internet newspaper does not qualify as an alternative publication.
"The phrase 'other form of publication' in [the statutes] must be construed in the same sense as the phrase 'newspaper publication' in that statute and in contradistinction to 'posting' under [the statutes]," he wrote. "Placing a legal notice on a county's website does not involve creating copies of the notice for general distribution in a manner similar to newspaper publication. Placing a legal notice on a county's web site therefore is not an 'other form of publication' within the meaning of [the statutes]."
When posting of a legal notice is authorized in lieu of newspaper publication, Van Hollen said, the statutes require posting in three different locations, and the county's website - or an Internet newspaper - does not likely qualify as even one.
"The fact that a county's website is likely to give notice to persons affected by county proceedings does not mean that such a web site is a 'public place' within the meaning of
[the statutes]," he wrote. " . . . When that (statutory) language was enacted, the Legislature undoubtedly was referring to physical locations rather than to virtual public places such as the Internet. When Wisconsin statutes use the term 'public place,' they do so to connote a physical location."
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