Among the many hazing rituals journalism students must endure is a field trip to a meeting of a local governing body.
This is an excellent way to scare off the unserious ones whose idea of being a journalist is to wear an ugly necktie while telling a national television audience why LeBron James rises or does not rise to the occasion in pressure situations.
For the dedicated and demented ones who will scratch and claw their way into one of the few remaining jobs in the news biz, covering a school board, town council or planning commission meeting is a preview of the glamorous world of daily journalism they are likely to encounter as reporters for the Dinkyville Gazette.
Last Monday night, accordingly, I took the 17 students in my news writing class to look in on the doings of the State College Borough Council. The agenda looked kind of light. The good news was that it promised to be a short meeting. The bad news was that it promised to be a dull meeting.
Local government meetings are not generally known to be rip-roaring affairs. Most reporters hate them. Their editors, on the other hand, love ’em – they’re a sure-fire source of news, even if the news is that council rezoned a piece of property from single-family residential to multi-family residential.
Occasionally, I told my class, you do get lucky. Once, in California, I covered a hearing to determine whether a gold mine operator’s permit should be renewed.
The mine hired local people, spent money at local businesses and paid taxes into local coffers, so it had its defenders.
It also made noise, kicked up dust and once, launched a chunk of rock through the roof and into the bathtub of a nearby house. If an occupant had been communing with his rubber ducky at the time, it surely would have been the last bath he ever took. So the mine also had its detractors.
The hearing put defenders and detractors in the same room. Whee! The highlight of the proceedings occurred when two women, one an employee of the mine and the other a neighbor of the house damaged in the fly-rock-in-the-bathtub incident, came to blows. A reporter couldn’t ask for better.
I didn’t expect anything as juicy as that to happen in the State College Municipal Building on Monday night.
My class arranged itself in the back row of council chambers and looked increasingly slack-jawed as ‘the public hour,’ when citizens are granted four minutes to hold forth on any topic not on the evening’s agenda, brought to the podium a succession of opponents of mandatory fire sprinklers in new residential construction.
This was followed by a gripping tale of riparian buffers, invasive plants and bio-retention facilities in the form of a hearing to consider CVS’s plans to open a new pharmacy on the site of the Ponderosa Steakhouse on South Atherton Street.
Those matters took up most of the first hour. The second hour dealt largely with the borough’s Capital Improvements Plan, which is kind of like a municipal letter to Santa Claus: Borough staff can list the things they want, but that doesn’t mean they’re gonna get ’em.
By 9:15, sensing that on a scale of 1-to-7, my Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness was free-falling into negative number territory, and satisfied that my cub reporters could write a nice little story on council agreeing to donate money to Discovery Space for one year but not for three, I sent them home.
When I got home, though, I sent them a note. Yes, it was as dull as I feared it would be, but I urged them to appreciate the thankless job that elected officials do.
Take the discussion of the new CVS store. The site is next to Slab Cabin Run. Left to its own devices, would the new occupant be conscientious about not fouling this little watercourse? Maybe yes and maybe no. It’s the council’s job to see to it that the new business is designed in such a way that no pollution occurs. (Hence the talk of riparian buffers and bio-retention facilities.)
A new business also has the potential to affect traffic patterns in ways that could lead to congestion or worse, automotive mayhem. Would the developers take care to design the parking lot entrances and exits to minimize the risk of tie-ups and fender benders? Probably. But ultimately it’s the council that has to make sure.
Then there’s the press’ role. Just as local government keeps an eye on local businesses, the local reporters are there to keep an eye on local government.
Boring these meetings may be, but imagine a world where businesses operate without any government oversight. Or where government operates without any press oversight.
Now give me 8 inches on that Capital Improvements Plan by 6 p.m. tomorrow. And make it sing!
