Compare and Contrast

By Katherine Watt, Blog Editor

So, we’ve moved to PA – State College, where Penn State University is located. I’m not going to write a whole lot about it, but we’ve been here a month, and already a few things have been surprisingly refreshing.

It’s not Utopia by any means. But a lot of things really are better, and I wanted to pass them along to readers to give people a better idea of the positive alternative to the swill you’ve got to cope with for now in North Plainfield. Better local government is not a pipe-dream or an illusion, as the silence/contempt of the current leadership might suggest. 

The main reason why it’s so hard for this blog’s contributors to be less negative/critical and more positive/affirming is because there really are so few things that work well in North Plainfield. On the rare occasions we’ve found something to commend, we have, but those occasions have been rare indeed.

Things really can get better in North Plainfield too, although residents will have to work at it quite hard, given how far behind the starting block the Borough is at the moment.

State College has got a Shade Tree Commission, and it’s apparently a serious force to be reckoned with. My husband saw them leaving the municipal building a few weeks ago as a big group on their way to their official shade tree protectors-mobile. The shade tree canopy, or “urban forest,” as they call it, is in really good shape. It’s not that there are no problems – pests and tree diseases strike everywhere. But there’s a priority on dealing with those problems in proactive ways that protect and enhance the tree canopy, and it shows. They even have a tree-specific Master Plan.

The Borough website is very well-organized and user-friendly. The Borough Council meetings are televised on CNET, Channel 7 on the local cable package.

Bid postings and job openings are on-line.

Here’s a link to the most recent State College Borough Council meeting agenda, including a link to the full agenda packet (38 pages), so that, from home, interested residents can read what the Council members read to prepare for Council meetings.

I heard a story from a resident that a couple months ago, the Borough Council was considering a plan to prohibit parking on one side of a downtown street to create a bicycle lane. At the televised public hearing, members of a church that would be affected by the loss of parking showed up to urge the Council not to adopt the plan.

They were joined by a group representing bicyclists, who also opposed the measure, arguing that parked cars act as a traffic calming presence, improving bicyclists’ safety more than dedicated bike lanes, which widen the road and encourage drivers to speed up.

One of the Council members apparently asked the room at large if anyone in the audience supported the proposal, and when no one stepped up to advocate for it, the Council simply scrapped the proposal.

How’s that for responsiveness?

The Finance Department pages include links to the last three years’ audits; a 17-page summary of the 2008 municipal budget ($17 million as compared to North Plainfield’s $18.4 million); and the 2008-2012 and 2009-2013 capital improvement plans (I guess it’s updated annually).

There are more reasons than just “open government” principles for offering public access to information like this. It’s a truism of all teaching that the act of preparing information to share with someone else increases the preparers’ own understanding of the material.

In other words, if North Plainfield’s elected, appointed and salaried officials knew from the very start of each task (all-important budgeting, for example) that they would have to promptly put their data, reasoning and future plans into a straightforward, understandable format for public consumption, they’d have a little incentive to dig into it and understand it themselves first.

And very likely, they’d be the first people to give all the information the old smell-test and uncover errors and misjudgments earlier, so those problems could be corrected before damaging the Borough’s financial and political health, rather than long after the damage has been done and compounded with interest.

There’s no such incentive now.

By the way, Emory Layne has talked about the ease of making pdf files with Adobe and a scanner – which is true. It is easy, and that’s how most of the info in the Document Library got in there. 

But in many cases, providing public information would be even easier for the Borough employees than print, scan, upload. Cheap document-hosting sites allow users to quickly and directly upload and store Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe and many other formats, without requiring scanning at all.

Two weeks ago, I registered my son for elementary school. Within a week, the mailman delivered a packet of information from the school, including a welcome letter from his teacher outlining the curriculum for the year and a list of his classmates (so we can ask better questions to better find out what’s going in school), an invitation to an ice-cream social at the school before the academic year begins, and an invitation to Back to School Night a week after school starts. At the website, we were able to find out that conferences will be in late October (North Plainfield’s are in late November).

This past Sunday, an insert in the local newspaper announced adult continuing ed programs like pottery and computer use, plus a free Public Issues Forum series, inviting the public to:

nonpartisan discussions based on the tradition of the early American town meetings.

Citizens work through an issue in a deliberative manner: they inform themselves and each other, consider a range of policy choices, examine the likely consequences of each opinion, identify the values underlying each opinion, and seek common ground among the different choices toward resolution of this issue.

A booklet containing background information is prepared for each forum and is free to registrants. Results of the forums are reported to government officials at the federal, state and county levels, and to leaders of business and industry, education, churches, and human resource agencies.

Upcoming forums include “Paying for Health Care in America,” “The $9 Trillion Debt: Breaking the Habit of Deficit Spending,” and “Preparing Today’s Kids for Tomorrow’s Jobs: What Should Our Community Do?”

Far different than NPCCR volunteers’ extraordinarily frustrating experience attempting to foster this type of community outreach, information and input, which has been met only by negating behavior by the local government, school district and media – the State College events are sponsored by the State College Area School District Community Education program, the Centre Daily Times (main local newspaper), and the Schlow Centre Region Library, and also supported by CNET (the government/education cable channel.)

The same newspaper insert also includes a list of about eight different kinds of afterschool activities for kids that will be held at each elementary school.

In North Plainfield, we got the class list around Valentine’s Day (so as to label Valentines properly). We were lucky to find out about events by 24 hours before they happened, usually by recorded phone message, and often heard about them after they happened. Same for afterschool programs – we’d only hear about them if another child happened to be enrolled, and usually by that time, the program had already been running for several weeks.

Those are just a few relatively small ways that North Plainfield government and schools could better serve the residents, children and parents who live in the Borough.

And it’s not a question of State College being “rich” and North Plainfield being “poor,” as the relative sizes of the two municipal budgets can attest.

It’s a question of clear, open, accountable, public decision-making by informed public officials in front of informed residents.