OPINION | By The Watertown Post
Let’s be honest: reporting on Watertown city government has become the journalistic equivalent of babysitting a bunch of over-caffeinated toddlers armed with Face-Book accounts and fragile egos.
Every meeting turns into a petty squabble, every email thread ends with someone feeling “disrespected,” and the policy debates—if you can even call them that—are usually just a thinly veiled excuse to throw shade at one another. At this point, it’s less government and more middle school drama club with a municipal budget.
Once upon a time, covering City Hall felt like a public service. Now? It’s like chronicling a never-ending reality show where nobody wins and the viewers stopped watching two seasons ago.
Let’s run through the checklist:
- Passive-aggressive email chains? ✅
- Eye-rolls on the record? ✅
- Councilmembers openly mocking each other? ✅
- Actual progress on city issues? ❌
We’ve got front doors locked tighter than the front gate at Drum, code enforcement officers playing Where’s Waldo with garbage complaints, and a city council field that looks more like the cast of a low-budget reboot of Survivor: Jefferson County. And through it all, everyone thinks they’re the only adult in the room.
The dysfunction is so baked in, you can practically hear the eye rolls in the audio recordings. One side says the other’s corrupt. The other side says they’re being persecuted. Meanwhile, the streets still have potholes big enough to qualify for their own ZIP code.
It’s not just tiresome. It’s boring. And that’s the real crime here. The stakes are real—your tax dollars, your city services, your quality of life—and yet the people at the helm are more focused on who “liked” what on Facebook than solving actual problems.
So no, we’re not going to cover every city council tantrum like it’s Watergate. We’re not interested in playing stenographer to a group that doesn’t know the difference between a leadership crisis and a group chat meltdown.
Watertown deserves better. But until then? We’ll be over here covering stories that actually matter.
Like raccoons paying rent.
— The Watertown Post
Less City Hall. More Reality.
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