Notifying the Public

At the June 18 meeting of the Saratoga Town Council, the governing body received a total of nine resolutions from the Wyoming Association of Municipalities (WAM) following their 2024 conference, including one focused on how public notices are published under law.

WAM is a non-profit organization representing various local governments from across the state of Wyoming. The association holds conferences to discuss and inform on municipal leadership. The resolutions from the conference not are not actually law, but instead suggestions for bills to be put into legislation.

WAM Resolution 24-09, regarding legal advertisements, is about the current requirement of memorializations and public notices from local governments to be published in a newspaper of general circulation.

The resolution asks for this requirement to be changed, and “supports giving local governments the choice of how and where to publish the required memorialization and notice under Wyoming law.”

According to the Wyoming Public Notice website, run by the Wyoming Press Association (WPA), public notices are intended to be available to people whom the information would affect. As a result, notices are published in local newspapers.

“A fundamental purpose of public notices is to help ensure that government is held accountable and that requires an independent third-party,” the website reads. “Without such verification, elected officials and the government entities would be accountable only to themselves.”

In 2023, the WPA released a study conducted by CODA research on public notices and local newspapers. According to the study, 87% of Wyoming adults get news from local print or digital newspapers.

“78% of Wyoming adults read public notices in local print or digital newspapers,” the study reports. “68% believe that state and local governments should be required to publish public notices in newspapers on a regular basis as a service to the community.”

The 2023 Local Newspaper Study, published by the America’s Newspapers organization, provides similar statistics.

“66% of Americans believe that publishing public notices in newspapers should be required,” the study reads. “57% of Americans report that newspapers and newspaper websites are ‘more reliable’ than city, county or state websites for accessing public notices.”

Joshua Wood, Chairman of the WPA Legislative Committee, provided comment on the importance of providing public notice in newspapers.

"When it comes to providing the most notice to the public, publishing in newspapers is still the best venue for local government to keep the public informed,” Wood said. “The Wyoming Press Association believes so much in this goal that not only did our organization establish wyopublicnotices.com to provide a statewide repository for public notices, but we introduced legislation in 2023 which would have required Wyoming newspapers to publish their public notices on the statewide repository and on their websites. This legislation, which would have codified what newspapers are already doing, failed on a 31-31 vote in the General Session last year”