Public notice requirements, as known by those in the municipal and land use world, could be changing.
Recently, Advance Local, which owns NJ Advance Media and NJ.com, announced the termination of daily print publications for The Star Ledger, The Times of Trenton, and South Jersey Times, effective February 2, 2025, and the Hunterdon County Democrat’s weekly print edition on January 30, 2025. With these changes and the elimination of these print publications, there is a likely impact to how and where certain municipalities and applicants for development alike will be able to publish certain statutorily required public notices. In effect, without these papers in print, it will become much more difficult for all parties to comply with these notice requirements, including the advising of meeting schedules, ordinance adoptions, development application hearings and zoning changes.
The elimination of these daily papers has fueled discussion about whether the relevant notice statutes should be amended to allow electronic publication of legal notices on a newspaper’s website or through digital publication. This allowance would provide counties, municipalities, and other agencies with the opportunity to comply with the notice requirements and related laws in a timely, cost effective, and efficient manner. However, whether this change will happen is yet to be seen – and whether it will extend to include applicants before local planning and zoning boards, which must provide public notice of certain development applications – is also a key question that must be addressed.
Indeed, amending the relevant statutory provisions to permit electronic public notice would be a significant shift in the longstanding requirement for print media publication. Further, making this change would be a recognition of the difficulty that municipalities and applicants have more recently come to face in providing print publication, due to a greater number of online papers and the increasing costs and time to publish.
