House committee advances bill to move many legal notices online after heated public testimony

The House State Affairs Committee voted 8–7 to send House Bill 166 to the floor with a “do pass” recommendation after a nearly two-hour debate and more than a half-dozen public testimonies about the future of legal notices in Idaho.

Sponsor Representative Jeff Ehlers (District 21, Meridian) told the committee the bill would allow state agencies to publish required legal notices on a state-controlled website first and phase in other entities over a two-year staggered period, while giving local governments the option to publish abbreviated notices in print with a link to the full notice online. “What wasn't mentioned was the state savings,” Ehlers said; he told the committee it would cost roughly $500,000 to build the proposed site and about $300,000 annually in ongoing costs but could generate “a million dollars of savings a year” from shifting state-agency legal notices to a state-hosted platform.

The bill drew unified opposition from newspaper publishers, publishers’ associations and some county officials who testified that moving notices off newspapers would reduce public awareness and shift private-party publication costs to taxpayers. Jeremy Pyszka, who provided a packet of county budget figures, said the change would not save taxpayers and would reduce public reach: “This bill does not save taxpayers money, in fact, it costs them money with a $570,000 technological infrastructure improvement that needs to be made to the State's website,” he said, and argued Ada County legal…