Lower Allen Web Log

First, please know that I understand the difficulties of covering municipal meetings.

From hours spent covering township meetings in Berks County for the Boyertown Times while stringing during college, to the year spent in the audience at LAT meetings, to my interaction with The Patriot-News' fine editorial staff, I believe I fully fathom the challenges. Meetings can run long, the topics are not always earth shattering, and there are too many municipalities, period.

So, when the largest news gathering team in the midstate misses a development involving one of its favorite topics - intergovernmental cooperation - you need to lend our well intentioned friends in the Fourth Estate folks a hand.

In an editorial in this morning's paper, the Patriot's editorial board opines:

Swatara Twp. is considering charging nonresidents a fee to drop off brush and leaves at a township recycling facility that turns the debris into compost and mulch.

The township wants to make the operation self-sustaining, and asking nonresidents to pay a small charge to get rid of yard and landscaping waste doesn't seem unreasonable.

Actually, Swatara is unique among municipalities with this sort of facility in even accepting loads from nonresidents....

Wrong. Swatara Township is not unique.

Earlier this year, Lower Allen Township entered into an intergovernmental cooperation agreement to allow Shiremanstown residents to drop off their yard waste at LAT's facility at no cost to the residents. In return, Shiremanstown will pay LAT $250 a year to offset the costs of processing the waste. Also, LAT staff will drop finished compost in Shiremanstown for its residents to use.

I posted a note about this development earlier, and you can read the recently passed ordinance on LAT's web site.

All by way of saying, I'd love to see a Patriot-News reporter back in the audience at public meetings again. While we aren't as large as Lower Paxton (44,400 population, 2000 census) and Swatara Townships (22,600 pop.), we do dwarf Camp Hill Borough (7,600 pop.), a municipality which receives a grossly inordinate amount of coverage when you consider the number of folks who live inside its borders.

With a presence in Gorgas Hall at 7:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Mondays each month, the Patriot might not have missed this little nugget, and definitely wouldn't have made the mistake it did in this morning's editorial, a mistake worthy of at least a page two correction if not a follow-up piece on its Op/Ed page.