Due to a “legal advertising error,” the city of Asheville has postponed all five public hearings scheduled for the Jan. 11 City Council meeting, including a vote on the controversial 51 Biltmore project. Four of the hearings are rescheduled for the Jan. 25 meeting, and one for the Feb. 8 meeting.
“The law only allows public hearings with a certain amount of public notice,” City Clerk Maggie Burleson tells Xpress. “None of the legal ads got published by the Citizen-Times in time, so the hearings didn’t meet the legal requirements.”
Burleson says the city submitted ads for the public hearings on Dec. 15, but “the person who handles the legal ads was out of town that week” and they weren’t published in the Dec. 31 and Jan. 7 editions of the Citizen-Times as scheduled.
“Apologies to everyone who was planning to show up for those hearings, and we hope they’ll come back on the new dates,” Burleson adds.
The public hearing on 51 Biltmore is rescheduled for Jan. 25, as are hearings on rezoning 13 acres on Orchard Street from industrial to low-density residential, a conditional zoning request for the Barnes duplex and a sign package for Mission Hospitals. A hearing on closing unopened right-of-ways and city streets within the area of the Montford Commons development is postponed until Feb. 8.
— David Forbes, senior news reporter
Wow, that is a lot of work to postpone because someone forgot to place ads. The rules on public notice are arcane at best, requiring publishing of ads in only paid circ sources, I believe. In todays digital age, this is extremely outdated, IMO. I have looked into this issue as an Xpress staffer on the advertising/development side of things, BTW, and it seems like it is just one of those rules that has never really been looked at recently.
It is shameful that in these times that our taxes go to this waste. http://legal-notice.org has some interesting stories about local governments saving money by posting their notices on line. Why can’t we? The kind of service of forgetting to run a notice for three weeks only comes when there is a monopoly authorized by the government. The law that requires publication in a newspaper needs to be changed because:
1.) It saves us lots of money.
2.) It is the environmentally responsible thing to do (not more trees used or public notices
3.) The definition of general circulation has changed thanks to search engines and indexing.
4.) A notice doesn’t need to be on paper to verify that it published
5.) The shelf life of an ad on a web site is forever whereas in a newspaper it is in for a few weeks and out.
6.) Affidavits can be provided on line.
7.) The penetration of the internet is far greater than the penetration of any local printed newspaper.
8.) The amount of detail disclosed in an advertisement on line is far greater (given that there is no limit as to how much information you can include) than in the newspaper where you are charged for every inch of content. Disclosure and transparency is far greater on line.