possible. “At some point, your budget can get to the point where you simply don’t have the dollars to employ the same number of people,” said City Councilmember Gary Marrs in the article. “It’s going to be a tough year. There are going to be some extremely tough decisions to make, and unfortunately [they are] going to include personnel” (Barkin, 2010). Coverage of other topics did not necessarily include coverage of budget activities but included everything from the construction of a sewage treatment plant to informing the citizens of Roanoke, Va. about environmental issues in their community related to emissions from a sewage treatment plant. Without newspaper coverage of the topic, it is unlikely the citizens would have ever have known there was a potential problem. Roanoke Times reporter Laurence Hammack (2010) wrote, “Water and sewer treatment plants in Bedford and Franklin counties have been cited by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for excessive releases of copper, zinc and nickel. The Western Virginia Water Authority, which operates a water treatment plant in Bedford County, was fined $3,500 for discharging too much copper into Falling Creek. In Franklin County, the Ferrum Water and Sewage Authority was fined $2,200 for too much zinc and nickel in the treated wastewater that it released into Storey Creek.” Maybe Hammack’s work is not the coverage that is going to win a reporter a Pulitzer Prize, but it is exactly the kind of civic journalism the local citizens depend on so they can know what is happening in their community. Coverage of public works in local government presented two challenges: the long-term nature of the projects and the mandatory nature of the work. Many cities included large public works projects in budgets outside the general fund or departmental budgets, including them instead in large, capital projects that spanned over years or decades and that were beyond the scope of this study. Often a governing board obligated the community to years and years of taxes or bond payments that the current administration was obligated to follow. Hence, there was often little discussion of the items and little media coverage of them unless something went wrong. Public works projects also presented a challenge for local
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