When Florida legislators claim they are safeguarding the public’s right to know, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Republican senators on Thursday rushed through a last-minute bill (HB 7049) that allows legal notices to shift from printed newspapers to publicly accessible websites run by county governments — an idea fraught with potential problems and rejected in previous sessions.
These fine print notices notify the public about foreclosures, divorce petitions, new construction projects, government meetings and bid proposals. If your neighbor’s home is being converted to a law office, your first and perhaps only official notification of it will be through a public notice in your local newspaper.
Lawmakers have decided that the public would be better served if these important notices disappear from newspapers permanently and migrate to county-run websites. If the goal is to hide information from the public, it’s hard to think of a more effective way to do it than this.
The first of many reasons to be suspicious is that there has been no public clamor for this bill.
In fact, lawmakers struck a compromise last year with the Florida Press Association, a statewide lobby group for the newspaper industry. That compromise (HB 35), which required quarterly reports and included a revamped statewide legal notices website, floridapublicnotices.com, became law Jan. 1. Barely two months later, the same lawmakers unraveled last year’s work and replaced it with more change that will only confuse consumers.
The obvious question is why. The obvious answer is that Tallahassee politicians want to retaliate in the only way they can, by going after the precarious bottom lines of newspapers — including this one — that cover them, investigate them and editorially hold them accountable for their decisions.
The perennial legislative meddling in how legal notices are published goes back at least a decade. It borders on an obsession, especially in the House, with its greater number of thin-skinned politicians nursing grudges over critical stories in their hometown papers.
But this session, not a single senator agreed to sponsor a version of the bill. It was no one’s priority. So Senate President Wilton Simpson had to use procedural tricks to move the 40-page bill in position for a vote.
The House bill passed March 2 on a 78-39 vote and it went to the Senate, where Simpson steered it to one committee, where it was debated Tuesday and passed on a 9-6 vote, with nine Republicans voting yes and Republican Sen. Jeff Brandes and five Democrats voting no.
Typically, a Senate bill is sent to two or three committees, but this bill got as little scrutiny as possible with one perfunctory Senate hearing in the session’s frantic final week. Some senators didn’t even grasp the irony that they were minimizing public input on a bill while claiming they were protecting the public right to know.
“More people will be able to see more notices for less money than we’ve ever had in history,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford, who criticized his hometown paper, The Orlando Sentinel, during a Rules Committee hearing for “burying” public notices on its website below games and puzzles.
Brodeur called his bill a step forward because it will allow people to peruse legal ads for free on a laptop in a library, rather than having to buy a newspaper.
But even Florida TaxWatch warns against more reliance on the internet for public notices, especially in rural and low-income areas where service is spotty or residents don’t own computers or can’t afford high-speed Internet. At the Senate hearing, a publisher from rural Madison, east of Tallahassee, described “turtle slow internet” that blocks many citizens from seeing the notices.
In a Senate emotionally spent after debates about race, homophobia and book censorship in schools, the bill drew little attention Thursday and passed 26 to 13 with the support of Democrats Janet Cruz of Tampa and Darryl Rouson of St. Petersburg. Cruz cited a provision exempting free papers from the bill’s changes, such as La Gaceta, which is widely read in her diverse district.
Last-minute legislative deals are almost always not in the public interest. By habitually expanding the number of public records exemptions and by conducting so much business in secret, the Legislature has forfeited any claims of expertise in the public’s right to know.
That includes deciding how legal notices reach the general public.
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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
