Covering the County

By Alison St John / Reporter, Off Mic

Published April 9, 2008 at 8:38 PM PDT

This story was published more than 16 years ago.

Of course a reporter can always catch a supervisor in the hall afterwards and get the party line. & But the fun of covering government is the cut and thrust of public testimony -- and the tussle when decision makers disagree with each other!

For example, a recent vote on whether to pay workers compensation for local volunteer firefighters passed without a word of comment. No one came to tell the supervisors that such a gesture is insignificant in the face of the enormous lack of resources devoted to fire fighting in this county.

(San Diego spends $8.5 million a year on firefighting resources. Orange County , with a similar population and a lot less land, spends $250 million. The way fire protection is organized in the two counties is different. San Diego supervisors, who slipped out of the fire protection business in the 1970s, take less responsibility than any other large populated county in California.)

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If no one shows up to comment at supervisors' meetings, there is little to report from the meetings! Not like the city of San Diego, where the council business is sometimes held up for more than an hour with non-agenda public comment. Some of it is out in left field, but much of it points to significant issues that wouldn't be raised in public anywhere else.

Of course there is more to covering the county than just going to their board meetings. But as someone who covers several different government agencies, it is remarkable to me how little public dialogue ends up happening in the county chambers. Is it really because everyone is happy with the job they are doing?

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.