Having covered towns and cities all over the country as a newspaper reporter, I’m always fascinated by what gets people riled up enough to attend public meetings and open houses.
In one tiny Pennsylvania town, it was a proposal to make the historic cannons in the town’s center operable. (Yes, fact is stranger than fiction.) On the central Oregon coast it was a fight over spraying pesticides on beach-adjacent lawns. In Sherwood, Oregon, it was the unexpected firing of a popular police chief just back from war in Iraq.