GRAND JUNCTION — The printing of foreclosure notices has a newspaper publisher and a public trustee in a testy and costly disagreement that is reverberating all the way from this Western Slope city to the governor’s office.
Public Trustee Paul Brown, whose political-appointee job involves acting as an intermediary in foreclosures, rocked the finances at The Daily Sentinel newspaper recently when he opted to publish legal notices in two small weekly papers rather than in the Sentinel, where they had been published for decades.
The change cost the Sentinel about $450,000 in annual advertising revenues and resulted in a handful of layoffs at the paper.
It also set up a very public dispute between Brown and Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton. Brown points to mistakes at the Sentinel as his reason for leaving. Seaton argues that Brown is shirking his duty by publishing legal notices where they won’t reach enough readers.
“Jay can blame me until (expletive) freezes over. But Jay is lying and that’s a fact,” Brown said.
It is Brown who is bending the facts, Seaton said.
“We’ve done this work for decades and decades and it was never a problem until Paul Brown took office,” Seaton said.
Brown took office, like other public trustees in Colorado, through a political appointment. Colorado is the only state where public trustees are appointed to serve as intermediaries between borrowers and lenders. In some Colorado counties elected treasurers serve double duty as public trustees.
Seaton admits the Sentinel made a mistake earlier this year in a legal notice. The Sentinel purchased special software to read the legal notices, but Brown wanted the Sentinel to begin scanning the legal notices and running them as-is in a display-ad format rather than in columns as had been done for years.
In Brown’s account, he went to the Sentinel six times trying to get a problem with mistakes fixed. When that didn’t happen, he said he opted to print the notices in the weekly Palisade Tribune and Fruita Times where the circulation is about 2,500 compared to around 30,000 for the Sentinel.
Seaton saw that move as a vendetta on Brown’s part and took his complaint to the governor’s office. Brown was appointed to the position by former Gov. Bill Ritter and reappointed when Hickenlooper took office.
For his part, Brown said he sought reassurance from the governor that he had his backing.
Gov. John Hickenlooper’s spokesman Eric Brown said the only involvement from the governor’s office has been “to ensure a public process is followed with regards to legal notices.”
That hands-off approach didn’t quell the dispute.
Brown pointed to 11 Sentinel articles in 9 days about the dispute as proof that, in his view, “Jay Seaton has declared war on me.”
Seaton countered that he has offered to do whatever it would take to publish the notices to Brown’s satisfaction, but that has fallen on deaf ears. He is not ruling out future legal action.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
