Editorial: Local leaders should be better than Congress

Vandergrift Council’s recent Zoom meeting might be the perfect example of the relationship between some government officials amid the coronavirus pandemic response.

It had everything. Important things that needed to be done. Action to be taken to stay in compliance with a higher authority. A dictate that was really pointless as it just mirrored an already existing directive.

There was dissent. There was confusion. There was poor communication. There were elected officials who hadn’t read the material.

In short, it was practically Congress.

The whole thing might have been summed up in one quote from Councilwoman Karen McClarnon as a vote to modify an emergency declaration suffered from most council members having not read it.

“Why are we having a meeting if no one’s prepared?” she asked.

Good question.

The new modifications change the restrictions of the declaration to stay in keeping with Gov. Tom Wolf’s yellow-level pandemic allowances and keeps the municipality in eligibility for emergency funding.

So why did the meeting devolve into the remote version of a fistfight? Maybe more importantly, why did so few know what was going on?

“I thought it was ridiculous that council members were not prepared,” resident Jim Dunmiresaid. “Why were there only two that knew what was in the amendment?”

Another good question.

Whenever the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives has a big bill on the table, there is speculation about how much the individual legislators know about what they are passing into law, even if they were part of writing it.

That’s inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable with something like the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that had a whopping 274,559 words. The 2009 Affordable Care Act tops 300,000 words.

A modification to a declaration for a borough of less than 5,000 people? Seems unlikely that is long enough to be a tough read — and apparently it wasn’t, as the amendment passed unanimously once everyone did read it.

Local government is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where every official can see the immediate impact of their decisions on the people to whom they are responsible. The best way to live up to that trust is not to follow the example of higher levels of government but to be the example Congress and others should follow.