Mountrail County Promoter - Columnists

Two instances do not a trend make, but two efforts to remove public notices from newspapers this year are concerning.
The first involved the North Dakota Trust Lands department successfully lobbying an interim rules committee to remove notices of oil and gas lease auctions.
This was possible because the requirement to publish notice of these auctions was contained within a rule, not a statute. Statutes require the legislature to act, rules do not.
The North Dakota Newspaper Association argued these notices give private mineral owners information about tracts being offered for bid near them and, after the fact, provide one of the few publicly accessible records about the going rate for lease payments.
Having lived in oil country during the Bakken oil boom, it was an easy issue for me to understand. It was these notices that also alerted me as a journalist that it was an opportunity to learn lease amounts, which companies are active in a region, and how much interest a particular parcel received.
Beyond that, for the mineral owners who were readers of those notices -- and the reporting that followed -- gave insight about the potential value of minerals held privately and whether other companies might be worth approaching if an unsatisfactory lease was offered.
Not to mention, the minerals which are the subject of these state auctions belong to all of us.
Now, as a result of the rules committee’s action, mineral owners -- and the press -- will have to be pretty motivated to track these sales and the results.
The only way to restore these publications is for the North Dakota Newspaper Association to lobby for a bill that writes the publication requirement into statute. That’s a lot of effort to restore something we don’t believe should ever have been taken away, but it’s your right to know.

Now this week (July 31), the comment period on another effort to curtail publication of notices will close, once again bypassing any legislative action. 
In this case, the North Dakota Supreme Court will decide the issue, because it is the Court administration bringing it forward, following a request from northeastern North Dakota judges earlier this year.
The judges maintain the cost to make service by publication in certain actions is too costly and burdensome, and the public would be better served if the court simply published these notices on a court website -- a system that doesn’t actually exist yet, but one administrators assert will be cost effective and easily created.
Service by publication is used in a variety of instances when a person impacted by a court action cannot be located or is unknown. So, in lieu of personal service, certain actions may be publicized in a newspaper. If the new rule takes effect, initial pleadings requiring service by publication not specifically citing newspaper publication can now be satisfied by “publication” on the court’s system.
Though a name change is possibly the most innocuous of the notices impacted, I used it as an example in NDNA’s answer to the court, for one, because they are quite numerous, but also incredibly inexpensive. They’re also a good analogy if you compare a public notice to a tree falling in the proverbial forest. If no one hears it, does it make a sound?
If no one in your local community knows you are now going by a different name, what is the point of having to publish it in the first place? The idea that people are going to start making a habit of regularly visiting this court website to see whose name may have changed lately is ludicrous.
It is precisely the geographic connection to the notice’s action and the serendipity of coming across a piece of information you never knew you were looking for that makes public notice in newspapers so valuable.
Not only that, state law already requires all public notices published in newspapers to appear on NDNA’s statewide public notice system, ndpublicnotices.com and those publications are free for the public to see already and cost nothing for placement.
A quick search there last week turned up 371 name change notices so far this year. They cost between $25 and $80 for the publication, depending on the circulation of the newspaper.
Reference to all court notices “eventually” going on the court website only is already contained in the discussion, so it’s pretty obvious this is just a first salvo in what newspapers -- and the public -- should read as a first step toward shifting all court notices out of newspapers.