The curse of the Tuesdays

The Tucson City Council’s summer break just crushed our dreams.

At least for the next month or so.

Since the start of May, the two most powerful governmental bodies in the Tucson area haven’t been meeting on the same day, thanks to Pima County supervisors, who took the admirable step of switching their meeting schedule so it wouldn’t coincide with city council meetings.

That meant reporters didn’t have to cram all the important local government news into a day or two of coverage. More importantly, the public didn’t have to digest a glut of news about two separate, but confusingly similar, government bodies at the same time.

It was glorious, in a nerdy sort of way.

But the city council members decided in November that they wanted to take this week off so they could attend graduations or take long-planned vacations.

Fair enough. But it looks like a hiccup at the county meant nobody checked the council’s meeting schedule, so we’re back where we started. No meetings this week. Two meetings next Tuesday.

Ugh.

At this point, you might be wondering why we’re harping on such a nerdy topic.

The way we see it, this “cram and glut” schedule isn’t a little bureaucratic quirk. It’s a fundamental flaw in the local news ecosystem that makes it much harder for the public to understand what elected officials are doing.

Since as far back as we can remember, both the council and the supervisors have held their meetings on the first and third Tuesdays of every month (with a few exceptions here and there). The supervisors met in the mornings, the council in the evenings.

Every reporter in town was strapped to the same awkward schedule: Pore through both meeting agendas when they come out on Thursday, scramble to get a bead on the important items and turn those preview stories around on Monday. Then pick the most interesting body to cover on Tuesday. Then do it all over again two weeks later.

For the past month, we didn’t have to choose which meeting we wanted to attend in person, or try to go to both (which makes for a brutally long day). Under the new schedule, we could go to both meetings, no problem.

We were also thrilled that we could plan out our coverage of the council one week, and then do the same for the supervisors the next week. We didn’t have to squeeze everything together or discard newsy items we thought were important — or at least interesting — but that wouldn’t fit in a single newsletter.

It was fun. We got to experiment with our reporting choices.

Could we “set the table” for readers with a collection of nice briefs about what was coming up on the meeting agenda? How about fine-tuning our news quizzes to be subtly informative? Or writing up the most newsworthy item on the meeting agenda and still fit the other, smaller stuff in the newsletter?

What about highlighting an interesting moment at call to the public to give readers a feel for how supervisors meetings play out?

It’s all part of our goal to make it as easy as possible for everyone to understand local government and politics.

Nothing fancy. Just the simple, clear reporting you don’t see much of these days.

We love covering local government. Watching the machinery of government slowly grind through issues. Following the personalities of officials as they make decisions, sometimes based on their own experiences — other times to please their political base, just to get along with their colleagues, or to sock away a favor for later.

Your elected officials make all kinds of decisions that you should know about.

But if any particular item doesn’t reach the very top of that week’s “most interesting story” category, then you’ll probably never hear about it.

For example, you could be forgiven for thinking the only things the supervisors did last year were to sign off on Project Blue and get into fights with the sheriff.

But they do a lot more than that. Decisions that involve millions of dollars, but are considered routine (like how much the county spends on office supplies), end up buried and forgotten if they’re not the hot-button topic of the day.

The supervisors deserve a lot of credit for deciding to switch up their schedule. They also should get some kudos for moving their meetings from the morning to the evening so more working people could attend.

It was one of the many simple, inexpensive moves local officials can make to boost transparency (writing meeting agendas in plain language would be another, along with elected officials writing memos to explain their thinking).

We’re hoping that when the council gets back on their regular schedule, they stay on it. Our best guess is that’ll happen in early July.

Everybody would be better off for it.