The best use of a blog in a situation like this would have been to regularly post updates about it when the problems first came to light, as that’s when the public gets interested and rumors start flying.

I think your post in general raises an interesting issue for ‘community leaders’ and their responses to either praise or criticism.
If Supt. Richardson would have commented on the school issues on this blog, would it have been productive or a very long, time consuming ‘argument’ ? … possibly without any satisfactory resolve.

Here’s an example: Also at Monday’s council meeting, a packet item sought approval from the council of the hospital’s settlement on the construction failure of a portion of the surgical area floor. (it had sunk , 8 inches maybe? and it had to be torn up and reconstructed ). The settlement amount was announced in the packet, but not the costs to the hospital for correcting the fault (no pun intended). It got complicated in the reimbursement to the hospital because some of the original construction companies were no longer in business. Also, obviously when there is not an existing construction company to take the responsibility for the repair, a settlement of some sort will have to be reached, and the very word implies negotiation.

After the meeting, when asked what the cost of repair actually were, the Mayor said that those costs were “confidential”; i.e. not public information.

You have raised a very interesting topic …

So … my question is: How would this example have been helped, or not helped, by a more complete report by the director of the hospital, and in what format should that occur?

Rossing’s guest column in yesterday’s paper, Annexation 101 helps us remember our objective, seemed an attempt to address the trust/respect issue, too.