The Jacksonville City Council is poised to allow city departments to change how legal and public notices are published in Duval County.
Two Council committees voted April 18 to approve Mayor Lenny Curry’s bill that would allow notices to be pulled from local newspapers in favor of publishing on a city-controlled website.
Ordinance 2023-0187 does not require or mandate city departments to pull notices from Duval County’s papers of record, the Jacksonville Daily Record and The Florida Times-Union.
But the bill gives local officials the option to publish them on a publicly accessible website that would be maintained and managed by the city’s Information Technology department.
City Chief Administrative Office Brian Hughes and proponents on Council say the legislation brings city code in line with state statute and publishing notices online will save the city money.
The Curry administration’s push is in response to Florida House Bill 7049 approved during the 2022 legislative session that revised requirements in Chapter 50 of Florida Statutes to allow counties and municipalities to operate “publicly accessible websites” for its notices and legal ads if it provides a cost savings.
Council members opposed to the bill said removing notices from print would be less transparent and accessible for certain Duval County residents, expose the city to additional legal liability and require more city staff.
The legislation is expected to be up for a final vote at the April 25 Council meeting.
The Finance Committee voted 5-1 to advance legislation and the Land Use and Zoning Committee signed off on the bill 5-0.
The Council Rules Committee voted 3-2 in favor of the ordinance April 17, but its report will be deferred because the legislation required a super majority of the committee to pass.
Council members Al Ferraro and Matt Carlucci voted against the bill. Brenda Priestly Jackson voted “no” in Rules but switched her vote in the LUZ committee.
The committees passed a wider-reaching substitute bill this week that allows government agency notices on the city website.
The language in the original bill introduced March 14 was narrower in scope, although Hughes said in March that the intent of administration officials was to capture all city public notices.
The latest version includes language requesting the mayoral administration provide Council with quarterly reports stating which departments have switched to in-house online notices.
Council members inserted an amendment recommended by the City Council Auditor that will require city departments to file a 30-day notice with Council before they switch from newspapers to the public website and include a cost comparison analysis.
Another amendment by Priestly Jackson allows Council members the ability to request any notice be published in the newspapers as well as online.
According to an email April 11 from city Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Charles Moreland to the Council Auditor, the city was adding features to its initial public notice webpage, which he said is complete. It will be embedded in its official website, coj.net, Moreland said.
But city officials say the switch won’t happen immediately.
“It does not mandate upon enactment (to) turn the spigot off on one and turn the spigot on another,” Hughes said. “A sense of phasing this has always been contemplated.”
Although the bill does not give a timeline for transition, Council Vice President Ron Salem said after the Finance Committee meeting he thinks it won’t happen until after Jacksonville’s next mayor is seated July 1.
As of right now, “nothing is changing,” Salem said.
“I can’t imagine with the change of administration going on that this will even be addressed until well into (fiscal year 20)23-24,” Salem said. “When you’re talking about transition, hiring, all these (city department) chiefs and directors evaluating, I would think this would not be a high priority.”
Cost-savings required
Throughout the process, the Council Auditor has questioned whether the spreadsheets provided by the Curry administration detailing how much it spent with local newspapers on public notices over a three-year period satisfied the state’s cost analysis requirement.
Curry officials maintained it does, although they supported the change to the bill requiring a financial analysis from city departments before a transition.
The spreadsheet says the city paid the Daily Record and the Times-Union a total of $166,823 for legal advertising in 2022.
From fiscal year 2020 through March 13, 2023, the spreadsheets show the city spent a total of $512,582 on notices in the newspapers.
According to Moreland’s email, it cost the city $11,165 to develop the public notice interface on the city’s website.
Hughes told Council members April 18 that because the number of public notices the city publishes fluctuates from year to year, it is difficult to determine exact cost.
The city also will have to determine the cost of creating and maintaining a registry of people who request notices by first-class mail and email, also required by state law.
The Daily Record has published legal notices in Duval County since the newspaper’s inception in 1912 and is paid for that service.
Angela Campbell, the newspaper’s publisher, estimated in a March 30 editorial that labor; materials; postage based on 1% of households in Duval County requesting notices by first-class mail; and liability costs brought by private parties impacted by noticing mistakes, could cost the city $375,440.
Council member Randy DeFoor, who does not sit on the committees that heard the bill, said during the Rules Committee debate that she expects the additional compliance responsibilities from removing a third-party contractor will take more personnel and increase, not lower, the city’s public notice costs.
“I think this is more difficult than it appears,” DeFoor said. “It’s not just putting a notice on a digital platform. You have to manage the process.”
Failed compromise
Finance Committee members voted down a proposed compromise from Council member Matt Carlucci that would have allowed the city to establish the public notices website while keeping the mandate to publish in newspapers in city code for at least three years.
The substitute failed 2-4 with Carlucci and Joyce Morgan voting in favor.
It would have required the next mayoral administration to file a three-year financial report to determine whether newspaper publishing or a city government online-only option was more cost-effective.
Carlucci said removing notices from print takes away a tool frequently used by Jacksonville’s business community including Realtors, developers and attorneys.
“It’s a publication (Daily Record) that has had certainty of form for decades,” he said.
“I think without a certain period of time it’s a real disruptor to our business community. Some may adapt to it fine but a lot won’t, is my prediction.”
Carlucci said the alternative bill would also benefit Duval County residents who don’t have access to computers or internet access while adding an option for residents.
“I don’t think you play games with transparency. I think transparency should have certainty. You add transparency. You don’t switch one for the other,” he said.
According to Carlucci, the defined timeline would have provided “a longer off-ramp” for the Daily Record and Times-Union to make adjustments and handle impacts to revenue and personnel.
Hughes said the mandate in Carlucci’s substitute to continue publishing city notices in print media does not align with current digital information trends and would have “guaranteed two for-profit companies a role in this.”
“Which is fine because it’s worked in an old technological model for many years. The times they are a-changing,” Hughes said.
“Digital platforms now exist in my pocket, (in) your pocket. We have more workstations with free internet access at public libraries and community centers than the Daily Record has free distribution points for their newspapers. The T-U exists behind a paywall. Our website doesn’t.”
But both newspapers currently publish Duval County public notices on publicly accessible websites that are not restricted by paywalls.
Campbell told Council members during the Finance Committee debate that the newspaper posts the city legal notices on two searchable, publicly accessible websites at no additional cost to the city.
The first is jaxdailyrecord.com and the second is the statewide floridapublicnotices.com, which is facilitated by the Florida Press Association at no cost to local Florida governments.
“I just wanted to lend that clarification. Everything that the city is looking to do with this bill is already given in that cost,” Campbell said.
DeFoor said changing public noticing policy “is an answer looking for a problem and the problem doesn’t exist.”
DeFoor, who is national agency counsel for Fidelity National Financial Inc., said taking on public notices will bring with it legal liability for the city.
She said compliance with state statute and ensuring items are properly noticed on time, edited and communicated with the public will add risk to the city without a third party to manage the process.
“One thing that is nice about the Daily Record is you’re shifting the liability to them in terms of notice,” DeFoor said.
“That is one of the number one issues that is litigated is failure to provide proper notice. If we don’t do this right, we’re going to not only increase our cost, our hard cost just to get the notice out, we’re going to increase our liability cost,” she said.
“And I promise you, we’re not going to do this right because it is a lot more difficult than it appears.”