A new local source for H'burg news

Government meetings will be the focus of TSAHarrisonburg

After a month, Deb and I have written 11 stories for TSAHarrisonburg, which is both a Substack site and a Facebook page. Transparent Straightforward Accountability.

It’s somewhere between a hobby and a public service. Hobby because we don’t have to do it but we enjoy it. “Cheaper than golf” as Deb once said of my photography hobby. Public service because somebody has to cover government meetings in some detail, beyond the headlines and the posturing.

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The biggest difference between what’s on TSAHarrisonburg and what I write on Stillnotsleeping will be the expression of opinion. For example, when writing about the Bluestone Town Center here I’d write, “An inexperienced City Council approved the most bone-headed, ill-conceived project presented to it since the golf course.” On TSA, “City Council approved BTC despite hours of objections from Harrisonburg citizens without ever answering any of the objections.”

One opinion I’ll frequently express as fact is that government documents and presentations are over-written, depending too much on jargon and technical information that’s dense on a good day, impenetrable on a bad one. One example was a recent reference to a space being “trauma aware.” I have two dozen hours of literature classes, experience at two newspapers, political and governmental experience, and I’ve been to two Wakefield tractor pulls. I still have no idea what that phrase means. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that maybe the speaker said “drama aware” but I don’t know what that means either.

Still, there is a reason for some of the language. When the planning staff describes a potential rezoning, they’re going to use the language from the relevant statutes and the phrasing that’s used in the office. (An SUP is a special use permit. Isn’t that super?) Using our governmental, political, and journalistic experience to translate some of that can give readers a better idea of what’s going on in their government, and we can provide relevant local history that used to come from traditional journalism.

Besides translation, or paraphrasing into plain language, we’ll also be digging out what a meeting is about. To get to the facts on a rezoning, you can go to the city’s website, click on the link for agendas, download the agenda, then download as many as half a dozen other documents, from government memoranda to slideshows. Or you can read the synopses we provide.

We’ve been writing up some of the meeting information in advance from the information in the agenda and associated documents. Writing in advance might mean beginning a paragraph with “Council will hear a presentation on raising the threshold” and then editing it to say “Council voted to raise the threshold.” So far this year, paraphrasing the documents and then adding in the council action has been most of the work. That may not be the case on more controversial items that draw a lot of public comment.

We hope people will sign up and use our recaps and synopses as a way to keep up or as a starting point for their own reading on various topics. We hope we can also bring some perspective missing because of the shrinking of local journalism from traditional sources.

It’s worth mentioning that our coverage will complement The Citizen without competing. It’s also worth mentioning that we get no benefit out of this project in the traditional sense. No glory, no money, no products to endorse. Except in regard to something I said when I first got involved in politics 25 years ago: All I want out of local government is a decent place to live.

All we want out of TSA is for people to know more about what’s going on.