A few weeks back I wrote about how newspapers used to believe it was their obligation to watch paint dry—to keep a close eye on the process of local government. Danny Westneat, a columnist for The Seattle Times, has written a piece that perfectly illustrates why such coverage is important. Last fall, at the end of a long, dry city council agenda in the Seattle suburb of Kent, he wrote, there was “a mysterious bit marked only as ‘Property Negotiations, as per RCW 42.30.110(1)(c).'” When that item came up, the mayor announced that the council was going into a closed executive session and he asked everyone in the audience to leave. The few people in attendance accordingly left, and when the council returned from its secret session it quickly voted to sell a 10-acre public park to a developer, who planned to put a housing subdivision there. No one learned of this until four months later, when the “lone newspaper left in the area, a weekly with only two reporters covering a city of 125,000, broke the news.” Continue Reading →
