What Elkins paper?

LITTLE ROCK — How can city officials not acknowledge that their town has its own weekly newspaper, even passing an ordinance saying it doesn’t exist?

That’s apparently one of the things that Arkansas Municipal League attorney Michael Mosley will argue while defending the city of Elkins in an ongoing civil lawsuit, according to a story published in this supposedly nonexistent newspaper.

In December, the Lowrey family of Elkins filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that most of the town’s ordinances are invalid. They acted after reading a series of enterprise stories published in the weekly White River Valley News claiming that that for years the local government had failed to follow a state law requiring municipalities to publish new ordinances, either by placing them in a local newspaper or posting them in five of the “most public places.”

The flap already has prompted the city attorney for nearby West Fork to discover seven invalid ordinances there, invalid because they were neverpublished publicly.

Numerous Elkins ordinances apparently were enacted without being published in the local weekly. If it’s determined that the law wasn’t followed, any unpublished ordinances enacting fines, penalties, annexations or utility rates could be held invalid. That could mean big refunds to Elkins’ citizens.

To me, either the town’s ordinances were properly approved or they weren’t. And there are precedents.The state Supreme Court nullified unpublished ordinances in Fort Smith in 1983. It doesn’t strengthen Elkins’ case that former Mayor Jack Ladyman concedes that the city wasn’t posting some ordinances in five public places until 2005. He said that, to his knowledge, most ordinances were not published. Oddly enough, during his tenure the City Council approved an ordinance which proclaimed that the town didn’t have a newspaper.

Citing court filings in the lawsuit, a recent story in that very paper said that Mosley will argue that the newspaper, founded by the Dingledine family of Elkins in 1999, and with its office, now located beside the local Dollar Store, isn’t published in Elkins.

While it is true the paper has been printed on a daily newspaper press in nearby Springdale, that part of publishing is normal for small weeklies that can’t spring for their own megaexpensive printing press.

Stranger to me, the city claims it did attempt to publish its ordinances, but City Attorney Danny Wright says he was told by the Elkins paper that he couldn’t do that. The weekly’s current owner, Madison County Record Inc., says it doesn’t refuse any legal ads. Pat Harris, was the editor of theElkins paper from 2007-10, says she never refused any legal ads and always referred potential advertisers to the company’s business office at the Northwest Arkansas Times, which was then a sister publication that handled ads for the Elkins paper.

Someone also will have to explain to the court’s satisfaction why, if not published in a local newspaper, the new ordinances weren’t then posted in the city’s five most public places, as state law requires.

So what gives here? The city contends that it did publish some ordinances in the daily paper and is searching for receipts to prove it.

From what I’ve witnessed, those who manage Elkins have made the common mistake of underestimating just about everything about this matter, including the town’s supposedly nonexistent weekly, which exposed the matter.

I’d gently suggest that the city fathers might consider making a more convincing argument than that their own local paper, which has perhaps the lowest possible ad rates, wouldn’t publish their ordinances, or that they couldn’t find five “most public places” in which to post them.

Maybe other cities oughta take a tip from West Fork and Fort Smith and examine the validity of their ordinances.

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Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.