It's good to be in Belleville

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry LaVaute:

My wife Jan and I moved to this area from central New York over 33 years ago.
Partly as a result, I don’t have the lifelong native’s passion for the Detroit Tigers, the University of Michigan or the Detroit Red Wings.

I get lost easily lost in Detroit, or in the northeastern suburbs, and in many other areas in southeastern Michigan.

I’ve been up north a few times, and have always enjoyed it, but I lack, as I say, the Michigan native’s familiarity with and love of the region.

We moved to Belleville many years ago because Lemontree apartments, now called Harbour Club, accepted dogs, and we had a dog.

That’s why we came to the area. We stayed because we grew comfortable with and fond of many of Belleville’s people and places.

Since I became a staff reporter more than a year ago, I’ve learned other reasons to like the area.
I’ve been particularly surprised by the turnout at the last several community events, including the Taste of Belleville, the Harvest Fest, Trick or Treat on Main Street, and most recently Winter Fest.

The crowds have been quite amazing to me. There were pedestrian traffic jams and slowdowns on the Main Street sidewalks for Trick or Treat. I heard that there were over 500 who enjoyed this year’s Harvest Fest.

On Saturday evening, I stood elbow-to-elbow in near-freezing temperatures with parade watchers who lined up three or four deep along Main Street.

Before I became a reporter, I developed many reasons to like this area. I’ve not changed my mind about most of those things.

Some bemoan the limited degree of change in Belleville. While I understand this, I value the stability of the area more highly.

Let other communities develop retail-shopping opportunities, and learn to live with the congestion and the concrete.

Me, I’d rather be driving south on Sumpter Road from the city, farm land on my left and right, and a limited amount of traffic as I wend my way home.

But when I want collegiality, when I want a community, I know where to find it – right here in my hometown.

Last night, Jan and I attended the Angel of Hope candlelight ceremony, an evening of remembrance for those who had lost young people, perhaps sons or daughters or grandchildren, much too early.

Jan and I discussed, before we went to the event, how or even whether to cover it for the newspaper, wishing to be respectful toward the attendees.

In the end, we brought a camera and took a few photos from a polite distance. But we felt better being among the group, as part of a community, and less as a witness.

The snowflakes swirled in a chilling breeze as the names of the children were read, one by one. We stood in silence, alone with our thoughts, yet by our neighbor, as part of a community whose ability to celebrate, to reflect and even to mourn, heartens and lifts me.

Fun with spreadsheets (wait, read on!)

The following was posted by The View Staff Reporter Jerry LaVaute:

Fun with Spreadsheets

I’m currently working on three different Excel spreadsheets, and a fourth one was published today, a summary of the qualifications for the four remaining candidates for Public Safety Director in Van Buren Township.

They’re tricky, getting the look just right in the news, either online or in the newspaper. I haven’t seen the newspaper yet today, but I looked at it online and was reasonably happy.

Data properly arrayed on a spreadsheet is like a kaleidoscope – every time you look, you see something different, and it sometimes is fascinating.

And to get the data, you need help. So I get to mine for data using the subject matter experts in the communities in which I work.

This week and last, I worked with the Finance Director in Sumpter Township, its police chief, fire chiefs in the city of Belleville and Van Buren and Sumpter Township, the treasurer and deputy treasurer in Van Buren Township, the Van Buren Township Supervisor and the Deputy Clerk, and a few other officials in these communities.

As the Professional Golfers Association blurb goes, “These guys are good.”

It’s great fun to gather the data with their help, to try to make sense of it initially, to return to them to validate the data and so validate my conclusions, and to publish the results to a reading audience hungry for facts, expressed in a simple, helpful manner.

Past spreadsheets of mine have compared police compensation in four communities, and another was a detailed explanation of the “blended rate” used to pay police officers who double as firefighters in Van Buren Township.

For the former spreadsheet and the story that accompanied it, I won an investigative journalism award. Very cool.

Next up is a comparison of firefighting staffing in Belleville and Sumpter and Van Buren Townships, and a look at water and sewer rates in what we call the tri-community.