Dodge Center officials do right by revealing Messenger is not qualified to be legal paper

   Just as the Dodge County Independent maintained in December when it outlined why the Dodge Center Messenger is not a legal newspaper, the city attorney for Dodge Center has come to the same conclusion.
In an editorial in the Dec. 7 edition, the DCI argued that the Messenger does not qualify as a legal newspaper for publishing official notices. The heart of the issue is the frequency of publication. The statute calls for legal newspapers to publish at least twice a month. We have maintained the Messenger comes out only once a month.
By contrast, the DCI is a weekly publication and has served as a legal newspaper for decades.
The issue surfaced in July when the Triton School District decided to make the Messenger its legal newspaper. Besides official notices not being published in a timely manner in any publication, Triton continues to violate state law by allowing the Messenger to be its so-called legal newspaper. It’s not, and now city officials agree.
Dodge Center City Attorney Timothy Woessner has clarified the issue, which Triton officials need to pay special attention to. In a Memorandum from City Administrator Lee Mattson to the City Council, Woessner advised the Messenger “does not satisfy the statutory requirements of a legal newspaper.”
Woessner also mirrored the DCI’s argument that the statute requires that all conditions of being a legal newspaper be satisfied for 12 months prior to being selected as an official newspaper. That has not happened.
It appears the Messenger has been skirmishing around the law by putting out a second edition during some months only to a few select households in Dodge Center, which clearly is not the intent of the law. The papers need to go out to the same audience each time. One edition goes to 1,821 households, while the second edition only hits 409 households. However, Dodge Center’s Mattson found that the Messenger only went out once in July 2023. With the Messenger, it seems to be a “pick and choose to do what we want attitude” without regard to the law.
City Attorney Woessner concluded, “the Messenger should be published and distributed to its full circulation of 1,821 for 12 months to comply” with state law. That is exactly one of the points we argued in our initial editorial.
Apparently not happy with Dodge Center city attorney’s opinion, Terry Campbell, editor of the Messenger, has pushed city leaders to explore the issue even further. Dodge Center is teaming up with Dodge County officials to seek a legal opinion from “an attorney specializing in this area of law.” The cost would be shared by the two agencies.
“It shows our commitment to following the law,” said Mattson in his Memorandum.
It’s unfortunate the government agencies have to spend additional taxpayer dollars to determine something that’s quite obvious and been determined by the city attorney.
We hope this issue will be settled once the second opinion comes back. We’re confident that the same determination will be made.
In the meantime, Triton needs to reverse course for legal publication. The Messenger was not a legal newspaper in July when the appointment was made and still is not to this day.
Only hitting one-fourth of households with a second edition does not constitute a legal newspaper.
We applaud Dodge Center city officials for aggressively tackling this issue and validating exactly what we’ve maintained all along. It’s reassuring to see that city officials are doing their due diligence in getting to the bottom of this issue and calling out the Messenger for what it’s not doing in complying with state law.
The DCI wishes the same could be said for Triton officials, who stubbornly continue to fool the public into thinking they are following the law. This is troublesome, and citizens of the district should demand more accountability from school leaders. We have only just begun to unravel a pattern of bad practices related to data privacy laws involving Triton.
The two entities—Dodge Center City and Triton School—apparently have different definitions of transparency. Dodge Center does it right, while Triton doesn’t even come close in our book.