WALSENBURG- At the Walsenburg finance committee meeting on Monday evening, it was decided that the Huerfano World newspaper was not over-charging the City on its legal notices. It was charging the maximum allowable rate, but not over that, as the publishers of the Signature newspaper, David and Renee Rhinehart, had stated in the City Council meeting two weeks ago.
It was also noted that Walsenburg has never put its legal notices up for bid, like the County has done. The City is paying 44 cents per line for the publication of its legals, and the County is paying 11 cents per line.
With this discrepancy in mind, the finance committee will propose to the general council at the next meeting that the City put its legal notices up for bid, initially every four months, so that the three eligible newspapers in the county will have an equal chance to bid on them. (The Journal newspaper is as of yet, not a legal newspaper, as we have not been been publishing for 52 consecutive weeks. We will reach legal status on Thanksgiving, 2008.) The City will generate a standard set of ‘specs’ for all the papers to bid on, so that they are comparing ‘apples to apples’.
The legal notices should be up for bid by June of this year. With three newspapers vying to publish them, the City should see significant savings in its publishing expenses.
