Prince George City Council has decided against reinstating public notice advertising in the Prince George Citizen.
Council discussed the matter for roughly 90 minutes at tonight’s (Monday) meeting.
The previous City Council voted to do away with putting public notices in the paper, with the change taking effect in November 2022.
Currently, the City posts public notices on its website, as well as on the City’s Facebook page.
In August 2023, Mayor Simon Yu had put forward a motion to amend the City’s Public Notice Bylaw to require local newspapers as a required means of publication for public notices, a motion that was defeated.
The item came back to the Council table tonight as a notice of motion from Councillor Trudy Klassen.
“I was inspired by a motion that I actually hadn’t voted for, but the idea of bringing more of our budget items, more of our procurement options to locally owned businesses, and I thought ‘hey, we have a fully, completely, couldn’t be more locally owned paper of record in our city,” she said.
“I really believe that the Community Charter gets it right on this one, and the change the Community Charter had, back, I think it was in 2020? 21, allowing municipalities to avoid having to advertise in local paper of record where there was none, and I think that Council got it wrong when they voted to not use the local paper of record.”
Klassen said she’s concerned about things being missed, providing an example of a landfill being under the site of the new Fire Hall when it was being built.
“That sort of points to the need to have a really robust local media, and when you’re putting public notices in your newspaper, you’re getting the demographic that has the most collective knowledge, and that is our elders,” she continued.
“We can say what we want about the younger generation getting all their information online, but I think there is value in that paper record, and having that in the Citizen, which is printed.”
The motion Klassen put forward included a budget of $100,000.
“I know it’s expensive, but I think it pays for itself in the value that it gives to citizens,” she said.
Councillor Kyle Sampson said the motion “felt like a subsidy.”
“If my colleague wants to subsidize a local media business with $100,000, I think it just needs to be said, let’s just give them $100,000,” he said.
“But doing it under the guise of we’re not being transparent because public notices are on our website in perpetuity forever, and always able to be found, on our website, forever, our public notices are on our social media, forever, if that’s not transparent, I don’t know what is.”
Sampson touched on several other points, such as public notices typically informing the public on specific, small developments that do not have wide impacts across the city, and that public notices that are wider reaching are more advertised.
He also said “spending $100,000 on print was outdated.”
“The legislation, made by the province, who guides us, wouldn’t change the legislation to allow for modern options, if people weren’t changing consumer habits,” he said.
“People are changing how they consume information, that doesn’t mean, and I want to be clear because they’re going to report on this, that doesn’t mean that the Citizen is obsolete, but it means that people’s consumer habits of how they take in information is changing.”
It was also noted that while Klassen’s motion states the $100,000 advertising budget would come from the Communications Department’s budget, public notices are actually funded by the Legislative Services budget.
Councillor Ron Polillo, who spent 27 years in local media in Prince George, said he saw the motion as “very flawed.”
“The reason why, well I’ll give you three reasons. One is, it singles out one media, it’s not equitable, it’s not fair. Two, it’s not effective, it doesn’t reach the entire audience you want to reach. Three, it’s not an efficient way to spend taxpayer’s dollars, as I mentioned this a year and a half, two years ago, when we had this discussion,” he said.
Polillo also presented information given to Council from City Staff, highlighting how much the City spent with each of the local media outlets.
According to Polillo, in 2024, the Pattison Media received $29,559, the Citizen received $25,033, and Vista Radio received $59,344.
The City’s Communications Manager Claire Thwaites said the larger amount going to Vista Radio was due to radio campaigns for big events at the CN Centre.
After about an hour of debate, Council voted against Klassen’s first motion to reinstate public notice advertising in the Citizen was ultimately defeated, with Mayor Yu, and Councillors Klassen and Skakun voting in favour.
Also included in Klassen’s notice of motion was a resolution to reduce advertising on American platforms such as Meta (Facebook), another motion that was defeated.
According to Polillo, the City only spent $6,618 on advertising on Facebook in 2024.
Polillo also provided an example of paying to boost a post for CityFest that happened last month.
“The analytics on that, just so we all know, 415,000 views, almost 14,000 in reach, 1,185 clicks, 82 shares,” he said.
One motion that was passed from Klassen’s Notice of Motion was to publish a transparency report by the third quarter of next year, detailing advertising expenditures by platform.
