The work described in this editorial and the series of articles to come took months. It took records requests, follow-up requests, and requests after that. It took a lot of phone calls to a lot of people. It took spreadsheets and timesheets and ledgers and a great deal of patience with silence.
All of it because one person asked me one question back in January. That question led to more questions the more I looked at the information. Then I realized it all went together with what the editor was looking into, and with a conversation that happened on public record four years ago. And those led to me saying to myself, more times than I can count, 'This must be wrong. There must be a justification.'
Sometimes it was wrong. Sometimes there was a justification. I have learned a lot, and I have been disheartened by a lot too. Not just by local government, but by those higher up as well.
But when you are simply asking questions to try to understand, and you keep getting half responses and incomplete information from public records requests, or one person says one thing and another says something different, and the numbers are not adding up, it makes you look closer, not further away. You would reason that the people in a position to answer those questions would recognize this and take the time to provide complete and correct information, if everything were on the up and up.
Zora Neale Hurston once wrote: 'Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.'
That is exactly what this is. We were asked. When no answers made sense, we became more curious. Then the documents, and in many cases, the lack of them, gave us reason to keep being curious. And when we felt informed enough to ask sharper questions, well, you can imagine how that went over.
A word to anyone who chooses to work in public service: more often than not, if you take the time to answer a citizen, which we are, first and foremost, so they can better understand, the red flags stop flying.
After my last conversation with the editor, when I was complaining about how aggravating it is for people to not just answer my questions or to just do their job the way the law tells them to, he said something that made me realize how important it is for citizens to pay attention to their town, county, school, and other local government. Even more so now, when a lot of those in elected positions race to social media to 'justify' their actions before the facts drop.
He said, 'All politics is local.'
The phrase was popularized by Tip O'Neill, and it is basically the whole reason local newspapers matter. A federal law, a state law or policy, a bond election, a hospital district decision, a school board vote, a tax rate, or a water issue becomes real when people can see how it hits their family, their property, their school, their paycheck, or their town. And when those same agencies do everything they can to try to keep you silent, talk louder.
The purpose, informing the people about how their public institutions are operating, never wavered.
We believe you are owed what we found.
Some might not see why this matters yet. Others will, the moment it touches their own lives.
The archives will be here when they do. If you have questions of your own, our door is always open.
If we cannot provide you with an answer, we will keep searching until we can. We still have a lot of questions that we might never get answered ourselves, but that will not stop me from trying to do right by our readers and keep asking. Respectfully, of course.