The County Is Moving Its Legal Notices Online, and Two Weeklies Do the Math
A 6-3 commission vote saves $214,000 a year and removes roughly a third of the revenue holding up the region’s smallest newsrooms.
Meridian County commissioners voted 6-3 on Tuesday to end the requirement that public notices be published in a newspaper of general circulation, replacing it with posting on a county-run web portal beginning January 1.
The notices in question are the least-read prose in the county and among the most consequential: foreclosure filings, tax delinquency lists, zoning hearing dates, unclaimed property rolls, bid solicitations, probate calls for creditors. They run in six-point type in the back pages of the region’s papers, and they are paid for at a statutory rate of $11.40 per column inch.
For the county, that rate produced a bill of $214,000 last year. For the South Basin Weekly, the notices produced 31 percent of gross revenue. For the Cordage Island Beacon, a 1,900-circulation paper that has published continuously since 1948, the figure is closer to 44 percent.
“I want to be honest about what this is,” said Mira Sol, editor of the South Basin Weekly, who testified against the ordinance and then stayed through four hours of unrelated business to hear the vote. “It is not a subsidy I am proud of. It is the floor under a newsroom of three people. Remove the floor and I am not publishing a smaller paper. I am publishing for about nine more months.”
## The clerk’s argument
The case for the change was made by County Clerk Adaeze Oyelaran, and it is not easily waved off.
Her office commissioned a readership audit last autumn that placed a unique code in 40 published notices across four papers and tracked responses to a dedicated phone line. Over eleven weeks the line received 27 calls. In the same period, the county’s existing voluntary web postings of the same notices drew 4,180 unique visits, with a median time on page of 51 seconds — long enough, Oyelaran argued, to indicate actual reading rather than accidental arrival.
“We are spending two hundred fourteen thousand dollars a year to satisfy a definition of public that stopped describing the public sometime around 2009,” Oyelaran told the commission. “If the argument is that local newspapers deserve public support, I agree with it, and I will help write that appropriation. But it should be an appropriation with a line item and an oversight hearing, not a printing invoice that we all pretend is a notice requirement.”
She also raised a point that publishers concede in private. Because the statutory rate is set per column inch, papers have a financial interest in notices that are longer rather than clearer, and county attorneys have for years drafted notices in a dense idiom that no ordinary reader could parse. Moving to a portal, Oyelaran said, lets the clerk’s office rewrite the standard templates in plain language with structured fields — searchable by parcel number, by name, by hearing date.
The record survives the paper only if somebody funds the archive.
## The dissent, and the islands
The three no votes came from commissioners representing the outer islands and the upper valley, and their objection was less about journalism than about connectivity.
Roughly 11 percent of Meridian County households still lack a fixed broadband connection at the threshold the state uses for its own service maps, a figure that rises to 29 percent on the outer islands, where the Harbor Fiber Co-op’s second phase is not scheduled to reach the northern settlements until late 2027. A foreclosure notice on a portal is, for those households, a notice that did not happen.
“You are describing a system that works beautifully for the people who were already going to be fine,” said Commissioner Rilla Teague, whose district covers Cordage and South Haven. Teague proposed an amendment that would have kept print publication for any notice affecting real property until the co-op’s build-out was certified complete. It failed 5-4, picking up one vote from the majority.
The adopted ordinance includes a partial concession: notices affecting property in census blocks designated as underserved must also be posted physically at the relevant town hall or post office and mailed to the affected owner of record. County staff estimate the mailing requirement will cost about $19,000 a year, which is real money and is roughly nine percent of what print publication cost.
## The archive nobody budgeted
The complication that has drawn the most attention since Tuesday is not economic. It is archival.
Bound newspaper volumes are, for most of Meridian County’s history, the only surviving continuous record of notices published. Harbor University’s special collections library holds runs of the Beacon back to 1948 and of the Weekly’s predecessor back to 1911, and the property-records research desk uses them constantly — title searches, tribal land claims, historic district designations, and, twice in the last decade, litigation in which a 1960s condemnation notice was the dispositive document.
“A web portal is not an archive,” said Ondine Krause, who runs special collections. “It is a publication. Portals get migrated, restructured, and pruned by people optimizing for load times. I have watched three state agencies lose a decade each in a CMS transition, and every one of them thought they had backups.”
Krause has asked the county to commit to depositing an annual immutable export of all published notices with the university library under a written agreement, with checksums and a designated successor custodian. The clerk’s office says it is willing. The ordinance does not require it, and no funding was attached.
The Coastal Independent Press Association will take up a counterproposal at its autumn meeting: a “notice of record” model in which the county portal is the legal venue but a small per-notice fee funds an independent archive and a syndication feed that any publisher may reprint free. Association director Halden Fry estimates the fee would need to be about $1.15 per notice to be self-sustaining.
At the Weekly’s office on Tuesday night, Sol did what editors do with bad news, which is to convert it into a layout problem. She pulled the December pages forward on the production calendar, sketched what the back section looks like without four pages of six-point type, and found that the paper gets shorter by exactly one signature.
Then she started a list on the whiteboard of what could fill it — school board minutes rendered readable, a weekly parcel-transfer column, the marine forecast in full rather than abbreviated. Nine items by midnight. None of them pay $11.40 an inch.
She left the list up. It is still there.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s culture desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com