Knight Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting
How-to guide:
Finding problems facing small cities
By Donnie Forti
From time to time, big city journalists will take a look at the problems of cities outside the metropolitan area. A reporter may journey to several of them and report on life in small town America by talking to residents.
Donnie Forti, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, decided it was time to use 21st century journalism methods – the Internet and databases – to track the story, in addition to attending and reporting on each meeting. He chose similar cities in seven Midwestern states and counted the number of complaints to their city councils, categorized the subjects of their complaints and entered the information into a searchable database.
Following is Forti's report:
Five members failed to appear for a Feb. 6, 2006, Common Council meeting in Beaver Dam, Wis. Left with no quorum, the mayor canceled the meeting.
More than 200 times in 2006, citizens complained about public officials and their lack of attention to their jobs in the seven representative Midwestern cities chosen for a student survey. Other major concerns were dilapidated buildings, traffic, parking problems and jobs for young people. But in every city surveyed, trash pickup was one of the items on the list of concerns.
The chosen cities have populations between 15,000 and 20,000. Each city has a high school, daily newspaper and radio station and posts its city council minutes online.
The intent of the survey was to document the concerns of citizens by conducting a count of their complaints at city council meetings.
We surveyed Albert Lea, Minn.; Beaver Dam, Wis.; Logansport, Ind.; Mount Vernon, Ill.; Newton, Iowa; Owosso, Mich.; and Sikeston, Mo.
City council operations and services
Problems with meeting agendas and the running of city council meetings appeared in six of the seven cities we surveyed.
In Albert Lea, Mount Vernon and Newton, citizens complained about meeting agendas and meeting notices not being posted in public view. As one citizen commented at a Newton city council meeting, “The notice for the meeting was illegal because it was not posted 24 hours ahead of time.” Another citizen in Newton complained that “The agenda does not tell the public anything.”
Out of the cities we surveyed, Albert Lea and Owosso received the most citizen complaints about city council operations. The majority of complaints in Albert Lea were about miscommunication or a lack of information. For example, a citizen said he is being harassed by the fire chief regarding a fire at his home, and the citizen claims to have had none of his questions answered.
In another example, one citizen complained about the city's bidding process: “I want to know the low bids, all the bids and who is the contractor…” According to the minutes, the City of Albert Lea was served with a lawsuit that claimed its sludge contract violates open bidding laws and bid-rigging prohibitions.
In Owosso, citizen complaints about city council operations focused on council conduct. In fact, sometimes the minutes merely mentioned that a citizen commented on the conduct at public hearings, conduct at the council meeting, or public trust of the council. In a discussion about the condition of a downtown building, one citizen, speaking about the city manager who was restricting open dialogue, called him “rude,” and added that he is tired of the way the city is handling this issue. In a separate incident, a citizen complained that he believed “The City Manager authorized street improvements without council approval.”
While Albert Lea officials followed up on public comments, Owosso's did not always do so. One citizen commented on his desire to have council members answer every question posed during the citizen comment-and-question periods. Another citizen remarked that “Those with dissenting opinions keep the council from being a rubber stamp.”
Many of the discussions about trash collection deal with citizen and council member complaints about private garbage haulers. In Mount Vernon, citizens complained about odor and fly problems at a waste transfer station. One citizen said he had spoken to the operators of this station before and they always promised that they would do something about the problems, but, to date, nothing has been done. According to the same citizen, the garbage is sometimes left sitting at the station for seven days before it is hauled away. And he believes the leakage from the garbage could be contaminating the ground and water.
Citizens in Albert Lea complained about the city’s private refuse hauler. A company truck turned around in one resident's driveway and smashed the end of his culvert. He told a city employee about the damage, but he said nothing was done. He also called the private garbage hauler. But he said he got no reply.
In three of the cities surveyed, council members discussed changing refuse haulers. In Logansport, for instance, the street commissioner and the mayor talked about the possibility of the city taking over trash collection. The mayor commented that $750,000 in tax money does not come back to the community.
Sikeston had only two complaints about city services, and one was about trash collection. In total, Sikeston heard only seven public comments at city council meetings. What we do not know is whether citizens there are reluctant to complain.