Designating your town’s official newspaper
It is one line in a January resolution, it takes about nine seconds to adopt, and it shapes where every legal notice the town publishes goes for the next year. Here is what the statute allows, what happens when no designation is made, and what the designation commits a town to.
An orientation for officials, not legal advice. Your town attorney is the authority for your town.
What the statute says
The authority sits in the Town Law, under the heading “Official newspaper.” The operative words are that a town board “may designate as the official paper of the town any newspaper regularly published in the town.”
Two things are easy to miss in that sentence.
First, “may.” Designating an official newspaper is discretionary. A town board is not required to name one.
Second, “regularly published in the town.” The default condition is a paper published in the town itself — not merely circulated there. This is the part boards most often get wrong, because the obvious local paper is frequently published a few towns over.
When no paper is published in your town
Plenty of towns have no newspaper published within their borders, and the statute anticipates that. Where none is published in the town, the board may designate a newspaper published in the county, provided that paper has general circulation in the town.
The section also allows more than one paper to be designated, and it carries a separate rule for a town of the second class above a certain population. If your town is near that line, that is a question for your attorney rather than a summary.
A designated paper must also qualify as a newspaper for legal-publication purposes under the general law governing that question.
What happens if the board never designates one
This is the useful part, and it is widely misunderstood.
Not designating a newspaper does not mean the town stops publishing notices. Individual statutes still require particular notices to be published, and those duties are untouched by whether a designation exists. The Office of the State Comptroller puts the practical rule plainly in Information for Town Officials: if the town does not have an official newspaper, the notice should be published in a newspaper having general circulation in the town.
That same provision of the Town Law also covers exactly this case. Where no official paper has been designated, the board may authorize publication of a particular notice, resolution or ordinance in a newspaper — and that authorization is deemed a designation of that paper as the official paper of the town for the purpose of that publication.
A caution on this point, because it circulates in the wrong form: the deemed-designation rule that applies to towns generally is the one in the Town Law’s official-newspaper provision. There is a similar-sounding provision in the Suburban Town Law, but it is written for the Town of Greenburgh in Westchester County specifically and is not a statewide rule. Citing it for any other town would be citing the wrong statute.
The January meeting, and what it is actually for
Boards usually handle the designation at the January meeting commonly called the organizational meeting. That name is custom rather than statute.
The Town Law requires the board of every town to meet on or before January 20 each year — but the purpose the statute names for that meeting is the annual accounting by town officers and employees under a separate accounting provision. The words “organizational meeting” do not appear in that section at all. The Comptroller’s guidance refers to budget and organizational meetings as shorthand across several sections of the Town Law.
In practice the January meeting is where a board sets its own housekeeping for the year: the official newspaper, the bank depositories, the regular meeting schedule, mileage rates, appointments. None of that is wrong. It is just worth not assuming a single statute commands the whole agenda.
What the designation does and does not cover
The designation names where the town’s legal notices go. It does not, by itself, decide:
- Which notices must be published at all. That comes from whichever statute creates the particular notice, and those requirements vary a great deal — different lead times, different content, some requiring newspaper publication and some not.
- Meeting notice under the Open Meetings Law. That is a separate scheme with its own rules, and it expressly does not require publication as a paid legal notice. The two operate independently of one another.
- What it costs. The statute says nothing about rates.
What the designation commits a town to
A designation sets where the town’s legal notices are published for the year, and the cost of that publication falls on the town. Those costs appear in the abstract of claims as notices are published.
Readership is the other half of the arithmetic and is generally not measured. Newspaper circulation figures describe a publication, not how many residents of a particular town read a particular legal notice.
We have an interest in how towns answer that, and we will state it plainly rather than bury it: Towncrier is a product for publishing notices where residents can find them, so we are not a neutral party on the question of newspapers.
A note for villages
This page describes towns, and the provision above is a town statute. Villages operate under the Village Law, and the provisions are not identical — a town rule and a village rule are different rules.
The primary sources
- The Town Law’s official-newspaper provision, which is the authority for the designation. The text is published by the New York State Senate.
- Information for Town Officials, from the Office of the State Comptroller’s Division of Local Government and School Accountability. It is reissued annually — check the edition year, because a bare citation goes stale.
- A town’s own attorney, which is where questions about a particular town’s obligations are answered — including which specific notices it must publish, and the second-class town population rule.
This page is a general description of the statutory scheme. It is not legal advice and does not recommend a course of action for any municipality.
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