The Florida House State Affairs Committee approved a bill
Feb. 6 that allows local governments to publish legally required notices on
publicly accessible websites in place of newspapers, if that would mean money
saved by the governmental body, the Miami Herald reported.
The public notice ads involve matters such as
tax raises, alterations to zoning law, government meetings and special
elections, among other things.
The law now mandates that all meetings of a
county, city, school board or special district at which public business is
addressed be announced in a local paper and on the paper’s website. The local
government has to buy the ad, at discounted rates, and a group of papers
publishes the notices at floridapublicnotices.com, a free website run by
the Florida Press Association, the Herald reports.
Florida Press Association President Jim Fogler
encouraged the committee to not “reinvent the wheel” by having local
governments replicate the site the papers created to gather the public notices.
“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
building this website to serve Florida government, towns, municipalities,
businesses and taxpayers, and it’s free for use by the public,’’ he told the
Herald.
Next step for the bill is a trip to the full
House for a vote. A companion bill in the Senate, SB 1340, is set for a hearing
in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, the Herald said.
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