By Steve Levy
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman created quite a stir by choosing the conservative-leaning New York Post over the more liberal Newsday as the recipient of county cash in return for the newspaper’s publishing of legal notices. https://nypost.com/2024/12/16/us-news/new-york-post-to-expand-long-island-coverage-in-2025
While you’re debating whether the county should be paying the Post or Newsday to publish legal notices, a better debate should be why any taxpayer dollars are going to any newspaper to publish legal notices. This is a relic of the past that is now a clear waste of money.
The idea of publishing legal notices in newspapers made sense prior to the Internet. If a resident wanted to know of an upcoming county auction or other public notices, they needed to know that there was a singular place to retrieve an accurate announcement of these events.
Consequently, the state legislature established a process by which local governing bodies would designate official newspapers to publish the legal ads and receive a fee for doing so. However, the process became blatantly political. The party controlling the legislative majority would determine which newspaper received this lucrative cachet. And while there might not have been official quid pro quos between the newspapers and the elected officials funneling money their way, there certainly in many cases was a wink and a nod that, if you get our money for the legals, you’re going to return the favor with positive coverage for our party.
So much for a free press.
As a county legislator, I was often a lone protest abstention on these legal notice votes.
Today, there seems to be no logical reason why legislatures should be designating any particular newspaper as the official newspaper of that town or county.
The much more sensible and economical solution is for the government to establish on its website a focal point to place all of the legals where they can be easily examined by a curious resident at no cost to the resident or the taxpayers.
So let’s end this silly debate over whether the county should be giving Nassau tax dollars to local liberal Newsday or the city-based conservative New York Post. It would be far better for Blakeman to take a stand that he should keep the tax dollars in the county budget and simply create a website where residents can find the information without expanding a dime.
Steve Levy is Executive Director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.”