As a homeowner trying to update an old house in Bradenton’s Village of the Arts, I know all too well (from personal experience) that the Bradenton Department of Planning and Community Development is a mess. But now it looks like the department’s grant-making agency is even worse off than the parts of it that harass people like me. And it seems that if the people who work there complain, they get fired. Or maybe their jobs are just being outsourced to save money. Or something.

I’ve seen two somewhat confusing, incomplete articles — 3 Bradenton workers who complained are fired and City seeks to be ‘leaner, meaner’ — in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about the shakeup in this murky city department, and nothing at all about it in Bradenton’s most local paper, The Herald.

Besides the Department of Planning and Community Development problems, our police department is in the middle of contract negotiations with the rank and file, which is reasonably important to us citizens, especially given the Bradenton Police Department’s high turnover rate and chronic shorthandedness.

And when State Rep. Peterman, whose district is mostly in St. Petersburg, with a little gerrymandered tail of it sticking into Bradenton, showed up at a Bradenton Planning Commission meeting last month to stick up for a developer who wants to build high-rise towers along our waterfront, he drew no attention from the Herald reporter who was there, nor did the resulting Herald story mention that every single person — including Peterman — who spoke in favor of shoreline uglification was paid to do so, while none of the people who spoke against it got a dime.

Maybe I don’t have a properly modern journalistic mindset, but it seems to me that an elected representative whoring himself to a developer as a “community consultant” is news worth reporting.

The list goes on… and on… and on. Bradenton (pop. 60,000) has at least a dozen interesting, important stories every month that don’t get into local newspapers.

Someone needs to start doing serious local news coverage in this part of the world. I don’t mean just going to public meetings and writing down some of what’s said by people holding microphones, but looking behind the scenes to see what’s being done wrong and — just as important — who’s doing things right and isn’t getting credit for it.

Will that “someone” be our existing newspapers or someone new? Got me. I’m just a newspaper reader who spends less time reading the things every year, and more time reading blogs and other informal Internet information sources, because every year my local newspapers seem to get a little duller and a little less informative.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Bradenton/local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.