Update: Wichita council delays vote on ‘official city newspaper’; seeks residents’ input

Update, April 2: The City Council delayed a vote on the proposed charter ordinance until June 4 to allow district advisory boards to review the proposal. The June 4 meeting will be held at 6 p.m. inside the council chambers at City Hall.

Original story:

City Hall’s own website, Wichita.gov would be recognized as the “official city newspaper” under a proposed charter ordinance the City Council will vote on Tuesday.

Doing so would allow the city to terminate its contract for publishing copies of new ordinances and notices of other official actions in The Eagle, including notices about imposing taxes, creating benefit districts and amending the zoning code.

The publication of legal notices in a designated newspaper is required by state law.

In supporting documents, the city cites a July 2023 nonbinding legal opinion by Attorney General Kris Kobach declaring that second-class cities — those with between 2,000 and 15,000 residents — can circumvent the third-party publication requirement.

City staff asserts that the same should hold true for any city that invokes home rule on the issue.

“The opinion finds that a city may designate its website as the ‘official newspaper’ for publication of certain documents and notices. The Attorney General’s analysis would be applicable to the City’s ability to charter out from the provisions of K.S.A 64-101,” the agenda report states.

Staff prepared a document listing 13 Kansas cities that have switched to online-only self-publication, ranging in size from Lake Quivira (population 1,008) to Salina (population 46,481). The list includes Augusta twice and one entry — “Pra?” — that appears to refer to Pratt.

Staff documents acknowledge that because of the way certain state statutes are worded, some notices, including public hearings for the annual budget, city land acquisition and eminent domain hearings, must be published in “a newspaper of general circulation” and that “publication on City website [is] not sufficient.”

“The contract with the Wichita Eagle will be utilized for these publications until August of 2024, when the contract will be rebid,” the agenda report states.

Adopting a charter ordinance requires five of seven council members to vote in favor of the proposal. The vote was 5-2 earlier this month when the council directed staff to prepare an option to extract the city from its roughly $150,000 annual contract with McClatchy, The Eagle’s parent company.

“No citizen is reading a legal notice in the newspaper anyway. I’ve never done that. I can guarantee you most citizens aren’t doing that anyway,” council member Dalton Glasscock said at the March 19 meeting.

Mayor Lily Wu questioned whether publishing with The Eagle in print and online is a redundancy, given that the city already posts legal notices on its website.

Council member Becky Tuttle said if the goal is to promote transparency and restore trust in city government, ceasing publication of notices in the newspaper would be a counterproductive step.

“I think redundancy in communication to the community is just fine because everybody gets their message in a little bit different way, so the more we can do, the better,” Tuttle said. Vice Mayor Maggie Ballard was the only other member to vote against reviewing the city’s contract with McClatchy.

Press advocates have raised concerns about government transparency associated with the move away from print publication, including how citizens can know for sure that official language is not altered after the fact.

“The clerk, by affidavit, verifies the ordinances and resolutions published online is verbatim of the notice provided or the action taken by the city council,” city spokesperson Megan Lovely said in an email statement. “The chance of error is diminished under the proposed system, vastly improving on the current protocol of emailing Word doc-formatted notices to a third party for print publication. With the online system, there is no need to retype or reformat a notice/item by a third party which can lead to errors or omissions.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2024 at 5:47 AM.