Sunday in the Park

There were years and years that my job was to cover the goings on at City Hall as a reporter for The Park Record, as the Park City reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, and years later as editor of The Park Record. My doodling improved over that period of time. I think I mastered a form of lucid dreaming. I was able to make grocery lists and house-repair lists and notes on other stories I was trying to cover.

Don’t misunderstand. I was a good reporter. An award-winning reporter, actually. Probably because I stayed through those meetings.

As anyone who participated in government can tell you, if they are honest, much of the making of laws and enforcing them and the business of the running the business of a city is, well, dull. There are budgets so complicated you have to really pick away at things to discover where the staples are buried that you think could be cut. Numbers that have grown beyond the imagination of the folks who set so much in motion in the ’80s when they created parks and bought the old Racquet Club for the community and annexed the land that became Deer Valley.

I was remembering those years of covering the council Thursday night when I attended one of those meetings. These days the council and mayor sit elevated, in a lovely temperature-controlled room with beautiful audio visual equipment and working microphones. Back in the day, they sat behind a long table, where you could see everyone’s feet. Reporters and staff members could pass the time commenting on footwear and exposed toes when the talks about slurry seal were too mind-numbing. There were no cell phones to turn to for distraction then. You could catch up on writing birthday cards or start that novel you dreamed about but there was an unwritten rule of journalism, you stayed to the end.

It was a double-edged sword: You might miss something and, if you left, would something be discussed just because you were no longer in the room? Being accountable was a balance for the reporter and those who were reported upon. There was a trust and conversation and hints “off the record” that allowed you to become the scavenger on the hunt. Good government wants good reporting. It allows those in government to do their job in a fashion they are proud of and let the public know. In a healthy government it is we the people, not us and them.

I had come to council to hear/watch the outcome of an issue I had been following for years. It was the very last item on the agenda. I arrived a bit before six and left around nine. To put it another way, it lasted longer than the cocktail hour and the dinner hour combined. Work session had started hours before that and I had no reason to attend it but I did remember how numbing those sessions could be. Myles Rademan used to say we are governed by those show up. I would amend that to add, “and stay up.”

This night, there were summer ice-cream trucks to be approved and construction projects to get underway in our short growing-of-asphalt season and budgets to be dissected and committees to report. I was intrigued by the Effective Transportation Committee and could only wonder if there had previously been an ineffective transportation committee. The finance guy who talked about the funds needed in the fund and if funds didn’t come in they would need to find funds to cover the fund required clearly lost me altogether.

The report about the dead fish in Thaynes Canyon was factual and not meant to be funny, but the line where I heard “and we have kept one of the fish on ice” gave me a great visual of a sushi bar.

The business of running a city is in no way glamorous it is difficult, often pedestrian work. Without thoughtful people working and watching and trying to put all the moving pieces into something comprehensible, it can appear to be a tangle of spaghetti strings unrelated and saucy and messy.

I was, for the record, disappointed in the council vote for the item I had come to hear. But I was not disappointed in listening to the council members speak their mind and ask thoughtful questions (even more thoughtful questions, I should add, since this been an issue for a very long time). The process was civil, which is good, but it lacked any passion from the audience. No one protested the project or questioned the applicants or wanted an explanation of the renderings. If the outcome was disappointing to me, then so was the absence of the public playing its role.

It is a dance a tango at times, a waltz if we’re lucky, hip hop for excitement but a dance to make good government happen. If we are complaining about outcomes from City Hall, we need to examine Citizen Participation to see when the pas de deux became a solo. It is the process I am reflecting upon this day, which governs how we enjoy all our Sundays in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.