Township bonds won’t be certified

By Geoffrey Woehlk | July 10, 2025 |

Melinda Patton Nodaway County Clerk

MARYVILLE, Mo. — Three township bond issues in Nodaway County are among several statewide that will not be certified by the state auditor’s office because of failing to meet public notice requirements.

Nodaway County Clerk Melinda Patton told The Forum on Wednesday that the three road bond issues overwhelmingly approved by voters on the April 8 ballot in Atchison, Jackson and Monroe townships will not be certified by State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s office due to the issue that has swept up multiple political subdivisions across the state.

In late June, the Missouri Independent reported that Gilmore & Bell, a widely used bond counsel, had discovered that some of its clients had not run election notices in local newspapers in the required window before an election.

Missouri law requires that election authorities — usually the county clerk’s office — place an election notice in local newspapers twice before each election: once in the “second week prior to the election” and again “within one week prior to the election.”

According to The Independent, Gilmore & Bell falsely claimed in an affidavit submitted to the auditor’s office in February that Randolph County had run notices in a newspaper for an election that included a $1.6 million bond issue for the Higbee Fire Protection District. When the firm was unable to prove that the notice ran within the required time frame, it reportedly discovered that up to 10 more of its clients had not met the strict public notice requirements and notified the auditor’s office.

Weekly newspapers play role

In Nodaway County, sample ballots for the April 8 election ran in The Forum on March 20 and March 27 — 19 and 12 days prior to the election, respectively. Patton told The Forum that has been her typical practice since The Forum switched from daily publication to weekly in December 2017, and that she believed she was not only in compliance with the law, but was doing what was most practical for voters.

She is not alone. More than a handful of other clerks across the state, including Worth County Clerk Roberta Owens, handle election notices the same way — Patton said more than a dozen — mainly due to the decline of local daily newspapers.

In an attempt to ensure voters have adequate notice of upcoming elections, clerks like Patton have opted to instead run the notices earlier so that they are relevant for the entirety of a newspaper’s weeklong run and give voters more chances to see the sample ballot.

The Forum, for example, comes out on Thursdays — five days before a Tuesday election. With a daily newspaper, each day’s paper can be assumed to be current. The news in a weekly newspaper, however, is “good” for the whole week, complicating timing: The newspaper that comes out on a Thursday is still the most recent edition available on the Wednesday after Election Day — too late for notice — and a newspaper that comes out on the Thursday 19 days prior to Election Day is still the most recent edition available 14 and 13 days before Election Day, which would be within the two-week time frame.

With a daily newspaper, there are also multiple opportunities within the required window to run corrections if a notice runs incorrectly. That’s not the case with a weekly newspaper.

That happened as recently as the city of Maryville’s special election in February. For that Feb. 4 election, the Nodaway County Clerk’s office placed the first public notice of the election in the Jan. 16 edition of The Forum, but the notice had an incorrect heading, calling it a “Nodaway Township Question” instead of a “City of Maryville Question.” To make up for the error, the clerk’s office ran the correct notice in the next two editions of The Forum on Jan. 23 and 30. Without the error and subsequent third notice within a week of the election, the time-sensitive water plant bond would have been out of compliance.

But under the typical circumstances, clerks who have opted to give notices that week of cushion have ended up outside the two-week and one-week mandate that was written into law at a time when it was common for multiple daily newspapers to operate in any given county. And under those circumstances, Auditor Fitzpatrick told The Independent that his office will not certify the bond issues, leaving school districts, townships and other local leaders without the money for construction projects they had planned on due to an issue outside of their control.

Next steps

Patton told The Forum that the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities is pushing for lawmakers to change the statute to allow more leeway in following the spirit of the law, rather than the letter — which in this case, worked against what voters approved.

Although Patton said she has followed the same protocol since she took office in 2017, April’s was the first to run afoul of the auditor’s office. And even for that election, the results themselves were certified by the secretary of state’s office.

The outcome is that only the bond issues on the April 2025 ballot are affected by the public notice complication. And across the state, it has resulted in the auditor’s office certifying some bond issues, while rejecting others depending on whether the discrepancy was noticed.

To proceed with the general obligation road bonds initially approved by voters in April, the townships will need to put the issues back on the ballot, Patton said. The soonest opportunity would be in November. But November elections in odd-numbered years, like 2025, feature different rules for bonds. Because of that, general obligation bonds that go on November’s ballot this year would require a two-thirds majority instead of four-sevenths, though each township bond issue easily passed the two-thirds threshold in April’s election.

FORUM EDITION JAN. 13, 2025
Public notices like this one, which appeared in the Jan. 13 edition of The Forum, are required to run in local newspapers twice, with one notice coming within two weeks and a second within one week of an election. The notice above appeared three weeks before the Feb. 4 special election in Maryville, but because there was a mistake in the notice, the Nodaway County Clerk’s Office ran the notice again within the mandated time frame.