The Jacksonville Planning Commission voted 5-0 on April 6 to approve the staff recommendation to support Ordinance 2023-187 allowing the city to begin posting public notices on its website instead of using private newspaper companies.
In recent years, the state has made changes to its public information laws to allow news organizations to post legal notices on the internet and later allow county and municipal governments to post them on government websites as long as the cost to do so is less expensive than posting through a private company.
Mayor Lenny Curry has asked that the city’s Information Technology division maintain a website for posting public notices.
The Jacksonville Daily Record has been the newspaper of record for Duval County for 111 years and posts legal notices both on jaxdailyrecord.com and weekly in a print edition provided free to the public. The city also publishes notices in The Florida Times-Union.
Charles Moreland, Curry’s deputy chief executive officer, told the commission the city has been working to upgrade its www.coj.net website to handle legal notices.
Moreland told the commission the cost would be less than the $400,000 the city has spent publishing legal notices in the Daily Record and Times-Union from 2020 through this year.
A spreadsheet Moreland provided the auditor’s office shows the city paid the Daily Record and the Times-Union a total of $166,823 for legal advertising in 2022.
“We feel confident that it’s going to save the taxpayers dollars,” he said.
“We feel pretty confident that we will meet every legal obligation that we need to be able to roll that out.”
He said the rollout would be gradual and would not happen overnight, saying some departments would face greater challenges than others.
City employees involved in the legal notice process would be trained to take on the new responsibilities of posting on a city platform, he said.
However, Moreland could not answer how much money had been spent to date by the city pursuing the project.
When asked about the cost of mailing legal notices to any resident requesting them, Moreland again did not offer a number.
“We don’t know what that number is going to look like. So we can’t give you a cost analysis of what to expect with that until it is rolled out,” he said.
Daily Record Publisher Angela Campbell said during the public hearing portion that the city is allowed to place legal notices on its website in conjunction with the Daily Record and the Times-Union.
Legal notices are available online at jaxdailyrecord.com and floridapublicnotices.com, a website operated by the Florida Press Association. She told the commission that the Daily Record reaches more than 50% of the households in Duval County.
“I don’t believe that you have a broader readership than the Jacksonville Daily Record,” she said.
Commissioner Marshall Adkison voiced doubt about the city’s ability to take on this responsibility. He complained of his recent experience when engaging coj.net several times over three days to get an address assigned and another four days with jea.com to make a water and sewage connection.
“Going through the website I am doing all the stuff where it used to take less than 20 minutes,” Adkison said.
Moreland offered assistance to the commissioner. “I can assure you this, if you need my help to try to connect some of that, I’ll be happy to do that for you.”
The Planning Commission vote is a preliminary step. It will next be heard by the City Council Finance, Rules and Land Use & Zoning committees and then be voted on by the full Council.
The bill was deferred in all three committees during meetings April 3 and April 4.