If the New Mexico Municipal League has their way, public legal notices will no longer have to appear in a newspaper.
A measure introduced by Española Mayor Joseph Maestas Sept. 4 at the League’s annual conference would allow entities required by law to publicly post legal notices to include television, radio and Internet as allowable media for posting. Currently, only newspapers of general circulation in a given area qualify under the state Administrative Code.
The League’s reasoning for passing the measure was a matter both of logistics and economy, District 1 Española City Councilor Danielle Duran said. Duran is the alternate voting member for the city, and would have taken Maestas’ place had he been unable to attend.
“Most of it was supported by small rural communities served by one newspaper or less,” she said. “They were saying, ‘We need to be able to follow the law,’ but they have no real way to do that. Those kinds of stories were really compelling to me.”
Smaller communities also cited the cost of placing long ads in newspapers as a reason to support the measure.
Legal ads are used to advertise such events as pending lawsuits, public meetings, public construction and services bids and impending votes on ordinances or elections. In the Rio Grande SUN, these ads run between 100 and 1,000 words and cost between $20 and $200 each, depending on their ad.
Opponents of the measure call it a flawed idea. Radio and television spots cost more than newspaper ads, with a high risk that most residents of a community will simply not receive the information, said Dana Bowley, the executive director of the New Mexico Press Association.
“It’s just a bad idea on so many levels,” he said. “The thing about legal ads in a paper is they’re right there. You don’t have to already know to look for them to find out what’s going on. Radio and TV are chiefly entertainment medias, they’re not information-providing media. Whose going to sit through someone reading a thousand-word legal ad or hunt through every community’s web site to find that information?”
The League will push to sponsor a bill on this issue in the 2010 legislative session.