Small town politics
First, I want to take a quick second to apologize for my two-week hiatus. Only the perfect storm of family gatherings that I just sailed through could have kept me away for so long. But anyway, on to the subject matter at hand.
One of the pieces of advice that I have repeatedly heard from professional political journalists is to get experience covering politics on a local level. According to them, local politics gives you a chance to see more of the process with less red tape. And as I respect the people I heard that from, I immediately sought out a way to do that when I got home. As a result, I got my position with The Sanilac County News as the Marlette City Council reporter.
I still believe that advice to be true, however, I think that their idea of local was a bit… less rural than where I am at.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great experience to be able to cover the Marlette City Council meetings. I do get to see the inner workings of the council, the council members know me by name and are more than willing to cooperate when I have questions.
But there really isn’t a lot of variety in subject matter. Granted, the topic that has dominated the meetings over the last month and a half is important and affects a lot of people. The council seriously considered closing the Marlette community pool–one of the last remaining public pools in the area–due to leakage caused by old age. A lot of people came together to find a way to make sure the pool opens, and, as of last night, the council believes it will open next Monday.
That one topic, however, has been the only real topic to come before the board. There was no real debate over the city’s budget (at least not while I’ve been covering the meetings) which was passed at the second meeting I covered, and the only citizen’s comment beyond concerns about the pool has been about the number of loud dogs in several Marlette neighborhoods.
Perhaps I’m a bit jaded because I just got off of a semester covering DC politics, and I didn’t have a real beat so I went from covering defense hearings one day to finance hearings the next and then on to food safety. I knew going into this job that it wasn’t going to be nearly as varied. But I guess I still expected there to be two or three issues before the board.
Now, having said that, I am not trying to marginalize the work that the board does. The past month and a half has shown me that local politicians put a LOT more effort and heart into what they do. Being on council is, for most of the board, essentially an extracurricular activity beyond their day-to-day careers, and yet the dedicate a remarkable amount of time to what they do for the city.
I suppose that I am seeing exactly what the more experienced journalists had expected me to… it just hasn’t come in the form that I expected to see it. But then again, that’s probably what they expected. 
June 24th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I was just browsing a few college web sites since I have a daughter that is trying to determine where she wants to go to college in a couple of years. Your blog topic caught my attention since I work for City government and I was curious when I saw “small town politics.” In regards to the small town politics, keep in tune with what is happening. You will often see more direct government impact on peoples day to day lives in city government than with federal government.
However, my question to you is since I notice that you covered food safety hearings while in DC, what did you observe? Have you heard of the recent e-coli outbreaks in Ohio and Michigan that they “think” is tied to ground beef, but have not released the name or source? Sort of leaves the public at risk in my opinion. In fact, the information regarding this topic has been pretty low key.
Just interested in what you may have learned while in DC in relation to this sort of topic.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Hey Annette!
I actually have been following the news about the e-coli outbreaks linked to Kroger ground beef, as well as other outbreaks linked to agricultural products. I come from a really small farming community, so I see how the increased incidents with these health risks affects people both on the supply and consumer side.
In my opinion, we really need to establish a way to track agricultural products from the farm to the consumer. Right now, if I’m remembering this right, products get shuffled through approximately five different stages before it hits the store shelves, and at each stage, the distributor needs only know where they got the product and where they shipped it. As products are combined and repacked and reshipped at almost every stage it’s impossible to trace where exactly the food you’re eating came from (unless of course, you buy it locally or grow it yourself).
There has been talk of a barcode system on produce, where each individual piece of fruit and vegetable would have a barcoded sticker on it with the information on where it’s been and who’s handled it. I really support that idea, but it could take some time to implement and would be costly. With food prices already rising, implementing a costly system definitely bears careful consideration–but in the end I really think that the public’s safety is worth the extra money up front.