Nobody in “the City” has the responsibility to give us complete and accurate information about anything, including HHS2.
What do we mean by “the City” in this instance?
It’s kind of like the definition of Yankee. A Brit will tell you that a Yankee is an American. An American will tell you it’s somebody from the North. A Northerner will tell you it’s somebody from New England. A New Englander will tell you that a Yankee is somebody from New Hampshire, and in New Hampshire they’ll tell you that a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
Likewise, the City could be the 54,000 people in the 17 square miles of Harrisonburg, or the 40 percent of those people who vote in a presidential year, or the city government housed in a $10 million palace downtown, or the city council, or the city manager’s office. Regardless of what we mean by the City, everyone cited here should have the same basic factual information about city projects.
Three decades ago, the Daily News-Record had more reporters covering just local government than the entire news desk has now. Classified ads paid roughly half their salaries. Those ads are on Craigslist now, the newsroom is gutted, the Citizen is writing mostly news features, even the best television news offers mostly snapshots, and radio offers timeliness but not depth.
It’s nobody’s job right now to give a complete picture of what goes on in city government. The City could respond in one of three ways, one passive, two active.
The first passive response would be to go on as always, based on the idea that Virginia law gives a locality few duties for informing the public. Meeting minutes are required, and jargonish announcements of public hearings, and responses to Freedom of Information requests – requests that it’s still up to the citizen to file.
The first active response for the City could be to take advantage of the situation by misleading the public or hiding information. Most local governments already do this in one way or another, although without admitting and often without knowing it.
The second active response would be to provide a narrative of what the City is doing. An example of the City doing a good job of this would be the information about the new trash cans. Two examples of things done badly are Covid and HHS2.
Covid, I’ve mentioned before. The City has yet to explain why Harrisonburg has had one of the highest Covid infection rates in the state for the past 13 months. As far as I know, the City has never mentioned that fact.
On HHS2, a Facebook exchange last week exemplified the problem. A School Board member posted something about the project from the city manager’s budget presentation. A city council member responded that the information was incomplete, but didn’t offer what was missing until asked. The missing information was from a liaison committee meeting, not from the budget presentation. The meeting was televised, and the council member suggested people interested in HHS2 should have known about it. The council member didn’t say how.
I wrote last week about a couple of apocalyptic charts delivered without explanation in the budget presentation. It turns out the explanation of those charts came not in the budget presentation but in a separate liaison meeting, this one not televised.
I’ve worked with computers since 1982, and often after solving a particularly intractable software problem, I wonder what it’s like for those who haven’t been wired for 40 years.
By that same token, I’m a former mayor. I’m married to a school board member who previously served on planning commission. Democrats running for office give me at least a courtesy call. I’m not exactly out of the loop, yet I have to stitch the HHS2 narrative together myself. What must it be like for the average citizen who doesn’t have the time or information sources to figure out this story?
Long story short – OK, it’s too late for that – the School Board can restart construction of HHS2 with less than a tenth of the purchase price in hand, hoping the city council will, at an unspecified future date, vote to fund the rest of it. There is no commitment from the city council to finish the project. As far as the construction of public facilities, that fragile arrangement is at the edge of the known universe. If you think an abandoned pile of dirt off South Main looks lonely, wait until you see it with a few rusting girders offering afternoon silhouettes for photographers and sheltered corners for bird nests.
The City has no legal obligation to give us information about how that arrangement is going to work. It, the City, can always say that’s the responsibility of the schools, which many local governments tend to view not as a component of the locality, but as a competing entity.
But the City has a moral obligation to give us more complete information about a project that’s been needed for ten years and an issue in every local election for five years. That information should be a clear and complete narrative, in one place, that doesn’t refer us to meetings that may or may not have been televised or to meeting minutes that haven’t been approved yet.