Everybody who works in news has a fundamental trait in common: curiosity. When something happens, we have to find the truth behind how and why it happened.
Earlier this year, we got very curious when Athens Mayor Steve Patterson abruptly quit his role as chair of the Outdoor Recreation Council of Appalachia board, taking the city’s membership with him. The mayor had been all in on ORCA and development of the Baileys Trail System for almost a decade. What happened?
When pending legislation was altered at the last minute to revoke the second year of previously allocated state funding for ORCA, we became even more interested in figuring out what was going on.
For four months, the Independent’s Dani Kington painstakingly reviewed hours of ORCA board meeting recordings as well as hundreds of pages of public records, including texts and emails and two years’ worth of meeting minutes. She also interviewed about a dozen sources, some of them multiple times.
The results of that investigation are the focus of a series that begins today. In today’s stories, Dani shows how conflict over strategic planning and a proposal to build cabins near the Baileys led Patterson to sour on ORCA — and how that shift shaped legislators’ attempt to revoke ORCA funding. Upcoming articles will explore a power struggle between Patterson, the rest of the board, and the ORCA staff — particularly Executive Director Jessie Powers — as well as disputes over ORCA’s contract with Sunday Creek Horizons, a local lobbying firm.
I thought Dani’s work was going to be the blockbuster of the summer … until the whole data center thing dropped. That story definitely has everyone’s attention.
While not as immediate as a possible data center, though, what happened at ORCA is equall important. Like the data center, this is a story about who wields political power, and how — with millions of tax dollars at stake. It’s a peek at how the mayor of Athens County’s largest city, an influential regional lobbying firm, and our state legislators shape what’s possible (or not) for local people and organizations. Definitely something to be curious about.
