EDITOR'S COLUMN: Clarion call to community councils around the Valley

Since arriving here, I’ve tried to devote whatever time I can and to meet people involved in the community.

Usually that means attending the meetings of service organizations and chambers of commerce.

So far, my work schedule has been far too unpredictable for me to actually join any of these organizations, but I make it to as many as I can, and on a few occasions have even had the honor of speaking to groups.

I was invited to speak to the Palmer Lions Club on Tuesday at the Moose Lodge and made my usual points about the importance of partnerships between newspapers and benevolent community groups. I told them that whenever we’re looking at story angles, my response is always the same: “Put a face on it.” Service groups can help facilitate that, because their members are privy not only to the needed work going on in the community, but the individuals and their stories behind it.

I told them I’d like The Frontiersman, by the start of the new year, to have a regular page devoted to service groups and the work they do in the community.

So the first part of this column is a clarion call to all of the Rotarians, Kiwaniians, Elks, Moose, Oddfellows, Shriners, Stonecutters and any others I might have left out, to e-mail us lists of what they’ve got coming up at meetings and in the community.

Beyond that, any photos you all could share, we’d be happy to run to them.

During Q&A on Tuesday, Lion Dennis (Sayer) commented that he’d like to see the paper do more coverage of community councils.

That was something I hadn’t really thought of, but in the instant he said it, I knew he was right.

The problem is there’s just so many of them in the Mat-Su Borough, there’s no way we could cover them all. Whenever there’s an issue on these community councils, we usually don’t get to it until it reaches the borough level, and by that time, the issue has come to a rolling boil and there’s no context for what it’s really all about.

But at the same time, there’s no way we could staff each, or even a respectable percentage, of all these meetings.

So I asked Lion Dennis, also a board member at large for the South Knik River Road Community Council, whether he could start sending me agendas ahead of time for his council’s meetings, and try to spread the word around those involved with other councils to do the same.

When I got back to the office, I asked our reporter Chris Ford, who, like me, is new to Alaska, to blast out e-mails to 18 community councils based on the contact information provided on the borough’s website.

Come to find, five of those councils are not active, several of the contacts were not updated and six e-mails came back undeliverable.

So part two of this column is a clarion call for all members of community councils around the Valley to please send us an e-mail with your updated contact information. Just say ‘hi’ and from there we can work toward getting your agendas, election information and ideas of what the big news items are in your area.

Sayer had the idea of a monthly committed page to updating what’s going on in the community councils, and that sounds like a good place to start.

So if you’re part of a community council — or your area is one of the five inactive, but you’d like to see it get back up and running — shoot an e-mail to news@frontiersman.com.

I’ll reply and we’ll go from there.

Thanks in advance.