SECAUCUS – Assembly Speaker Vincent Preto said recently that his sponsorship of a bill to cut down legal notices in newspapers in December may have been a mistake.
Some scratched their heads when the Democrat backed an effort by Gov. Chris Christie to change state law so that numerous types of government and other legal notices — such as those before a public hearing — did not have to appear in newspapers. While some of those ads are actually funded by developers and attorneys who have to alert the public of various actions, Republicans floated numbers claiming governments were paying $80 million annually to newspapers.
Because many newspapers receive a considerable amount of revenue from legal ads, and many outlets had critical coverage of Gov. Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal last year, some observers referred to the matter as Christie’s “Newspaper Revenge Bill.”
It was up for a vote at one of the last legislative sessions of last year, along with a measure that would have allowed Christie to sell his memoir while in office.
The measure failed at the last minute after residents and newspapers contacted legislators asking them to hold off.
Lat month, the New Jersey Press Association contradicted the Republican numbers, saying they provided the state legislature with information that state’s more than 550 municipalities spent $32 million in printing public notices last year — but taxpayers only funded $7.3 million of that, an average of less than $15,000 per town. When asked individually, the town of Secaucus, which Prieto represents, said it spent about $100,000 to publish the notices last year.
Speaking at a fundraiser for the Team Guttenberg slate in West New York last month, Preto said of his support for the bill in December, “Since then, the Press Association has gotten engaged, and has actually come back to us. They gave us some numbers now that are not what we were being told. So I guess we’re looking at it, and I am working with the Press Association to see what we should be doing, and working collaboratively together.”
So, if such a bill were to return to the legislature, it “would be something of a different bill than what you would’ve seen in December,” he said. “I haven’t seen all the numbers yet. We’re not trying to hurt that industry; we just wanted to find cost-savings. So we will work together to get it right.”
In January, the state Republicans fired off a Tweet saying, “Legislature should be offended they were lied to by newspaper publishers. Time to end the mandated printing of taxpayer-funded legal notices .”
When the Reporter Tweeted back to ask for a breakdown of funds and asking whether the GOP was including government ads reimbursed by private developers and attorneys, the GOP failed to respond.
