Senate passes bill to move legal notices to Web

The Senate on Monday approved a bill to move all legally required public notifications from local newspapers onto the Internet in the state's largest counties.

SB208, sponsored by Sen. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, requires all hearing notices, calls for bids, financial reports, government activities and the like to be posted on a state-run Web site and removes the existing requirement that they be posted in local newspapers. In smaller counties in the state, the proposal requires notices to be published both online and in print.

During preliminary debate on his bill Friday, Urquhart told lawmakers it would make legal notices more accessible and much less expensive. He called the existing system of notification "extremely fragmented" and said it makes sense to put everything into one "central repository" where it can be stored in easily searchable archives and made available for RSS feeds.

"Far more people use the Internet than subscribe to newspapers," Urquhart said. "Yet we require legal notices to be put in newspapers."

Urquhart said the state has grown 32 percent in the past 10 years while newspaper circulation has only gone up 1 percent.

"Readers are getting their news online more and more," Urquhart said. "This is the direction we are heading. Newspapers see this."

If signed into law, the new requirements will become effective starting in January 2011 to allow newspapers time to plan for the loss of what is currently a large source of their revenue.

Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said newspapers could have avoided those losses "if they had been willing to move into the 21st century" by offering online notice postings.

All Senate Democrats voted against the measure, with several saying they felt it would be better to require that notices be posted both online and in print in all of the state's counties rather than just the smaller ones. Senate Minority Leader Patricia Jones, D-Salt Lake, pointed out that older residents are much less likely to use the Internet.

The proposal now heads to the House for consideration.E-MAIL: dservatius@desnews.com