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Zoning changes, tax increases, budget hearings, school board meetings, and land sales—these may not be flashy topics, but make no mistake: this information is essential to maintaining a well-informed community. If you haven’t been paying attention to public notices, we encourage you to start. They are your opportunity to engage with your local government and have a voice in decisions that affect your everyday life.

Public notices are official announcements that inform citizens about government actions, legal proceedings, and decisions that may impact their rights, property, or quality of life. They are a cornerstone of government transparency, and every citizen in our community should have easy access to them.

When a city plans to rezone land for commercial use or schedules a hearing on tax rates, the public deserves a chance to weigh in. But that chance depends entirely on whether people are aware it’s happening. That’s where local newspapers like the Suffolk News-Herald come in.

Currently, you’ll find most public notices affecting the local public in Suffolk published in the Suffolk News-Herald. However, as Suffolk’s most locally focused newspaper, we believe all public notices impacting our community should appear in our pages. This isn’t to say they can’t also run in larger regional papers—but our readers turn to us for hometown news, and public notices are as local as it gets. If residents don’t see them here, there’s a good chance they may not see them at all. 

We want to be transparent: publishing public notices is a source of revenue for newspapers, including ours. But this is more than a financial issue—it’s a civic one. When notices are placed in outlets with limited local reach, fewer people are informed. We do not believe that serves the best interests of Suffolk’s citizens.

Public notices belong where they are easy to find—in the local newspaper, accessible to all.