Article originally published June 25, 2025 on law.com 

Link to Original Article by Charles Toutant 

With a temporary solution to New Jersey’s public notice predicament about to run out, state law lawmakers are weighing whether to eliminate most municipal government advertising in local news publications.

A measure pending in the state Senate, S-4654, would allow municipalities to put public notices on their own websites, putting an end to the longstanding reliance on paid notice in newspapers. But a competing Senate bill, S-4484, would extend a law that allows municipalities to continue placing public notices in online news publications.

Last year, New Jersey lawmakers enacted a stopgap measure allowing public bodies to publish public notices in news outlets in a digital-only format. That measure was necessitated when several major newspapers around the state eliminated their print editions in favor of online publication. But that bill expires on Monday.

The New Jersey Press Association, a trade group for newspapers, opposes S-4654 and endorses S-4484. The NJPA says in a statement that S-4654 gives “short shrift” to legal ads, and suggested extending the current law while the public notice issue gets more study.

The bill allowing municipalities to use their own websites, S-4654, is sponsored by Senate President Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, and Sen. Anthony Bucco, R-Morris. The bill allowing municipalities to continue placing notices in online news publications, S-4484, is sponsored by Sen. Andrew Zwicker, D-Mercer. Neither bill has a companion in the General Assembly.

“Publication by the third party newspaper promotes transparency, trust, and accountability in government. Transparency, trust and accountability are lost when the publisher is the government itself, as S-4654 proposes for public entities,” the NJPA said in a statement about the proposal.

Meanwhile, the NJPA says in a statement that S-4484 “provides an immediate path to bolster the historical principle of public notices which is to provide transparency for government action, as well as private actions, that affect the public interest. Importantly S4484 provides an avenue for new online only New Jersey media outlets to also publish these vital notices in addition to legacy newspapers.”

“Maintaining the public notice function exclusively with independent, third-party news media ensures that proper notice was given by both governmental and private parties. Allowing public notices, even if only partially, to be fulfilled by government on government websites erodes trust of government,” the NJPA said.

The New Jersey Law Journal is a member of the New Jersey Press Association.

Municipal attorneys around the state have been eagerly awaiting the solution that was created when legislators enacted a temporary fix for the public notice issue, said Steven Goodell, who is president of the New Jersey Institute of Local Government Attorneys.

“My sense is that this bill that has been introduced by the Senate leadership is a reasonable solution to the problem. It creates a system that would bring us into the 21st century and put notices on line where people would expect to see them,” said Goodell, who is with Parker McCay in Hamilton. “I think in this day and age, if people want to know what’s going on in the municipality, they are likely to go to the municipality’s website. So, if you’re a consumer or a citizen looking for information that’s of public interest, that’s where you’re likely to go-you’re not likely to search for that information in a in a newspaper or on in any particular online publication.”

Steven W. Kleinman, a municipal attorney in Hackensack and Chatham Borough, seems ready to give up the reliance on local newspapers for announcing public notices.

“They’re expensive, and there’s some real question, given the unfortunate state of the newspaper industry, whether they’re even effective in providing people with the information that they need in terms of government matters. I think this is probably just bowing to reality. It seems to make sense, and I would tell you, from a municipal clerk perspective, anything that makes the process quicker and easier is something that the clerks I work with are certainly positive about,” said Kleinman, who is with Cleary, Giacobbe, Alfieri & Jacobs in Oakland.

When municipalities were publishing notices in local newspapers, sometimes there was uncertainty about when they would be published, and some newspapers have stopped publishing daily anymore, Kleinman said.

“Being able to have a system in place that will allow this to be done in a manner that’s easy and predictable is, I think, something of value to the municipalities,” Kleinman said.