The public reconnects

by Mark Matassa
Seattle Times staff reporter

There's the Bellevue woman who's stuck in traffic most of the time. She fears the only word her five kids hear from her anymore is, "Hurry."

In Tacoma, an equally busy man longs for a time, although he's not sure he can really remember one, when "hurry" wasn't the way of things. When people knew their neighbors and felt safe.

A family had the same feeling in White Center before moving six months ago into a new home, part of a planned development, between Federal Way and Milton. They know their ready-made community is, in a way, artificial; but they feel better.

A Seattle job counselor, having simplified life by reducing his commute to a short walk, looks vainly for the government to solve community problems like homelessness.

A Renton man finds his "community" in his church.

A Puyallup woman finds hers in her four young sons.

Their stories aren't the same, these neighbors we don't know, yet they all sound familiar. They're talking about things easily substantiated by the statistics-wielding experts who normally populate newspaper pages - crime rates and test scores, joblessness and voter dissatisfaction - but in ways that, frankly, rarely appear in the newspaper.

They're not neat sound bites, they're not nifty summations of what politicians call "policy issues." They're just people's stories.

Somewhere along the way, maybe about the time "hurry" became a way of life or homeowners associations began replacing neighborhoods, people's stories disappeared from American discourse. In their place we now have anecdotes, talking points and media strategies and - maybe not coincidentally - more crime and traffic and cynicism and less morality and independence and patriotism.

For many of us, at least, it sure feels that way.

In an attempt to help staunch that feeling, The Seattle Times today begins a new reporting project with two local National Public Radio stations - KUOW-FM and KPLU-FM - and a Florida-based journalism think tank, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

The idea of the project, which we're calling "Front Porch Forum" (after a remark by David Foxley, a State Patrol officer we met from Auburn), is to print your stories, questions and ideas, and to relate them to how our communities, governments, political campaigns and news outlets are running.

We're not sure where this will lead. In other parts of the country, where similar reporting ventures are under way, people have taken to the idea.

In Charlotte, N.C., for example, printing people's stories in the newspaper two years ago led to a "Citizens Agenda," a compilation of residents' concerns that ultimately became a powerful force in the state's 1992 elections. Candidates felt compelled to respond to the people's agenda, rather than the other way around.

The Charlotte Observer newspaper radically changed the way it covered politics, forsaking insider banter and forcing politicians to answer people's questions. A funny thing happened: Voter turnout increased and North Carolinians reported feeling better about their communities and their government.

To get the idea off the ground here, The Times and the two NPR radio stations convened four discussion groups earlier this month. The groups of 10 or so people, selected randomly within specific geographic areas, met in Tacoma, Seattle, Burien and Kirkland.

Our plan is to synthesize some of the ideas generated in the discussions into a statewide poll, to be conducted next month. It will deal with what people like and dislike about living here, about their hopes for the future and what can be done now to make those dreams more likely. And we'll try to make connections between this people's agenda and this year's campaigns for ballot initiatives and political offices.

In general, people said in our initial discussions, they like living in Western Washington. They love the weather, they love the quick access to the mountains and the water. They see it as a region of opportunity.

But they're troubled too. Partly because there is so much to like about this place, it is growing too fast for most longtime residents and even for many newcomers. Traffic is a hassle; the economy is a gamble. Crime is creeping into formerly safe areas, even threatening people who "keep their noses clean," as several people put it in our discussions.

Increasingly, a dream is to leave the Sound for Idaho or Montana or the Oregon Coast, somewhere with some room to stretch out and fewer worries.

We'll report the results of the poll next month and ask for your help in deciding how to use the information to address your concerns.

We're also inviting you to begin telling us about yourself right away, today, either by contacting The Times or calling KPLU or KUOW at the numbers listed with this article.

If this month's discussion groups are a barometer, the results of this project will include much "conventional wisdom" - but told in unexpected ways. Or at least in ways that politicians and editors and other purveyors of conventional wisdom aren't used to hearing it.

It was no surprise to find that crime was on many people's minds, for example.

Every politician, from Republican U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton to his most liberal challenger, Democratic state Rep. Jesse Wineberry, has identified crime as a top election issue.

Yet we found in our initial Front Porch Forum discussions that most people have a keener understanding of crime's causes and effects than a typical politician or newspaper editor ever demonstrates.

Patty Stone, the Bellevue mother of five who's always on the go, seldom reads the paper anymore but hears about neighborhood crime from her kids, who repeat what they've heard at school.

It's no mystery, said participants in all four discussion groups, that schooling suffers when students and teachers are worried about violence. And that chronically bad schools hurt the economy, which means more parents have to work and more families have to live farther away from where they work, which means there's less time for family, which sometimes leads to more crime or to problems with drugs or alcohol, which somehow spawns more government programs, which mean higher taxes, which breeds distrust of government, which turns people inward.

Politicians and the media usually don't address such problems cohesively. At a newspaper, each is a discrete "beat," often reported upon as if in a vacuum, by specialist reporters. Politicians, whose pollsters carefully measure public attitudes about each "issue," have likewise learned to ignore the whole.

It's no wonder citizens don't feel connected to their governments or their communities.

Said Al Poindexter, the Seattle job counselor: "The government responds to the hot spots first. They're always putting out fires and you can be talking beforehand and ask them to respond beforehand, but until it gets hot, until it becomes a real issue for the government, they don't respond."

In fact, for many of those in our discussion groups, the problem isn't feeling DIS-connected from government; the connection was never there in the first place. The political system is worse than broken. It's seen as irrelevant or, worse, as an obstacle to improving things.

But that doesn't mean people have stopped caring. On the contrary, many people are looking for ways to connect with each other.

Don Fleming, the Renton man who is minister of Glen Acres Church in Burien, says his sense of community is not geographical, but spiritual. "Community is where people care about each other," he said.

Althea Janke, a Puyallup woman who runs her own housekeeping business, wants strong communities too, but she echoed a lot of those we met when she said caring about each other starts at home, with her four sons, ages 7 to 11.

"I think the responsibility starts with me and my boys and raising my boys right. If I raise my boys right they'll raise their boys right and there will be a mushroom effect."

Richard Molzahn, a Boeing aircraft designer, not only was willing to take an interest in his neighbor's lives, he's paying homeowners-association dues to do it. His family moved late last year to a new planned development outside Federal Way.

"The sense of community has come back for me," he said. "We have a homeowners' association. We have monthly meetings where we discuss our community and what we're going to do about this and what we're going to do about that. Now that is community."

Foxley, the Auburn-based patrol officer, he doesn't envision anything quite so structured. And he doesn't particularly care if everybody agrees with one another. He would like people to begin talking, the way he imagines neighbors used to do when time was more plentiful and conversations spilled naturally over the back fence or onto the front porch.

"Maybe something the papers could do, and this is something that's been knocking in the back of my mind for a while," he said, "they could on a regular basis have, for lack of a better word, a front-porch forum. . . . It would be an open forum, where people would go and talk, and people would listen."

It's an idea worth trying.