By GRIFFIN LIMERICK
The word “transparency” was used a lot during budget presentations at the April 2 city council meeting, by city staff and residents alike. At the start of the meeting, when emphasizing that the newly proposed fiscal year 2026 budget is merely a draft that will be subject to updates and modifications, City Administrator Tracey Douglas told attendees, “We will be completely transparent with the public as, and if, we make any adjustments.” City Treasurer Ronald Brooks, who has recently been under fire for the city’s audits being years behind schedule, expressed his support for the new city Audit Committee, stating that the committee will “provide more transparency [emphasis Brooks’], if you will, to our financial report.”
The buzzword might have been a response to citizen and council complaints about city finances in recent months, both on the online HOPE listserv and at the equally online city council meetings. It is budget season, after all; cuts are in the air. The people are out for ink, and ink, it would seem, is thicker than blood.
I will be transparent with you. The morning of that April 2 council meeting, the City of Hyattsville informed the Life & Times that our contract with them will be cut by nearly a third, from $44,388 to $30,000, for FY 2026.
This was not a belated April Fool’s joke. The change was already in the budget proposal, released the afternoon of April 1. What may seem like a small amount to the city, which is proposing to spend $80,000 on a new police drone, or even to you, the reader, who — along with your neighbors — pays the city more than $20 million in taxes each year, is a significant hit for us. As a nonprofit, our money comes from a few sources: your donations, two or three grants, meager advertising, and the city contract. Such a cut to our funding might mean the end of a newspaper for us, and an emptier mailbox for you.
In exchange for their $44,000 each year (roughly 18 cents a month for Hyattsville taxpayers), the city receives four pages in the center of the newspaper for their insert, The Hyattsville Reporter, which contains city announcements and an event calendar. We’ve always been happy to run it. Yet this is not the only edition of the Reporter. The city mails very similar content independently each month on glossy paper to every mailbox in Hyattsville, same as the Life & Times, at a significantly higher cost — a seemingly redundant act.
These cuts are not in stone, however. The future never is. Toward the end of the four-hour-long council meeting (thank you to those who stuck around: council, staff and residents), councilmembers Joanne Waszczak (Ward 1), Emily Strab (Ward 2) and Danny Schaible (Ward 2) spoke out against the cut. Waszczak, the first to do so, advocated for the paper’s ability to make sense of local happenings in an otherwise unstable political environment. “I think that residents are really counting on trustworthy news sources, and are seeking out news sources that they feel good about,” Waszczak said. Strab asked the city to view the paper as something more than advertising and part of the communications budget, and look at it instead “as patronage for journalism.”
“Cutting the paper’s contract by a third puts them in a position where Hyattsville might not have a paper,” Strab said, “and I don’t think that’s something we want to do, or force into being.”
Earlier, during the public comment period at the start of the meeting, resident Lina Parikh (faceless on Zoom, as all constituents have remained before their council for five years now, with only councilmembers prompted to use their cameras) suggested the city look for other avenues to reduce the media budget, perhaps even altering how the Reporter is distributed. “We don’t necessarily need glossy print anything being sent to the city,” Parikh observed. (She also advocated for budget “transparency,” perhaps setting the trend for the evening.)
And, already, so many of you readers and donors who were notified by our executive director, Kit Slack, have reached out to your councilmembers to express your support for our paper. Thank you. We hope you continue to do so. Douglas said at the meeting that the budget won’t be adopted until May or June, so your feedback in the near future will help shape the more distant one.
I don’t mean to imply that we are the only institution facing cuts, or that we have been wronged more than others. Residents and councilmembers at the meeting voiced concern over a stipend freeze for the city’s committee members, as well as a cut to the cost-of-living allowance given to employees. Solidarity to all those facing the paper-bladed guillotine. We are not unique, but we may be nothing at all if you don’t speak out.
At the meeting, on one of her slides, Douglas symbolically placed “Hyattsville Residents” at the top of her organizational chart — included in each department’s budget presentation to show chain of command — above her own job as city administrator and that of the mayor, implying that citizens, not staff, hold the power. For us, this is not a symbolic gesture. From your donations, to your emails of story ideas and concerns, to your “From Where I Stand” opinion pieces, to the volunteer writers, columnists, and photographers who create our content each month — the Life & Times is a paper for and by the residents of Hyattsville, which is to say “you.” We prefer it that way.
At the local level, you are not mute. Speak up. If the City of Hyattsville wants to be transparent, it should support the only published entity that can objectively report on its inner dealings to the community.
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The version of this article that circulated in print said that the city had spent $80,000 on a new police drone, without questioning the expense. The police drone is part of the budget proposed April 1. City Councilmembers asked questions about the drone expenditure in a meeting the same week.
