Arizonans who like to rent out their homes to visitors and don’t want local officials to stop them will benefit from a new law that took effect Sunday.

Businesses in the state's two largest counties could soon find themselves escaping a cost -- at the expense of local newspapers.

On a 13-16 margin the state Senate on Monday defeated legislation which would have eliminated the requirement for new businesses in the state’s two largest counties to publish their articles of incorporation and other legal notices in newspapers.

Action from yesterday’s legislative session included passage of bills disallowing cities to dictate to developers what kind of plants they have to install; restricting marijuana cultivation facilities from neighborhoods and allowing businesses to publish public notices on a a website.

Newspapers are not going to lose a government-mandated source of revenue, at least not this year.

What's become a yearly effort at the Arizona Legislature to end a requirement for governments to publish notices in newspapers has hit a major snag in the Senate.

The battle over who gets to print public notices continued in the House on Monday, as a bill that had been killed was revived and passed, and another bill went down in flames.

A bill to remove the requirement that cities and counties publish public notices in a newspaper – and instead allow them to publish the notice only on the municipality’s website – was voted down in the House on Wednesday. But the battle over is far from over.

Thwarted in his attempt to allow statutory public notices to appear on websites rather than in newspapers, a lawmaker now wants to create a state-run database of public notices that have been published in newspapers.

A state House committee is balking at a proposal to allowing Arizona governments and businesses to publish notices online as an alternative to having them printed in a newspaper.