Newspapers play an important role in democracy. This is true not just on a national scale, which most Americans focus on and have a wide range of media to choose from.

It’s also true locally where coverage is often nonexistent or lacking as media that is already spread too thin dips into small-town stories without context. Municipal government, the least scrutinized, is also the one government that is closest to the people and often has the greatest impact on their lives.

The Enterprise is committed to covering the Helderberg Hilltowns, which we’ve done for 140 years. No other media regularly covers these towns and we understand why. It’s not lucrative.

The rural towns don’t have many businesses to pay big advertising dollars and the population is small. But those people matter, every single one. We carry news of the schools and the libraries, the arts and the plays in the Hilltowns. When a Hilltown resident dies, we publish his or her obituary for free.

We also cover the governments, and this is where the importance of a newspaper in serving democracy comes in.

Take, for example, the town of Berne. Our Hilltown reporter, Noah Zweifel, has assiduously covered Berne since October 2019.

For elections, he interviewed every willing candidate running for office and conducted online interviews with questions culled from residents so voters could understand the views candidates held on issues important to the town.

He has followed the process used to build the town budget each year and written perceptively about what is funded, what is not, and how it will affect taxpayers.

The issues he’s led on are too numerous to detail here. Some, like the fate of the Switzkill Farm, have come to garner attention from larger media while others would have languished unknown if not for Zweifel’s work.

One recent example is a proposal Zweifel covered, raised favorably at a town board meeting and endorsed by a sheriff’s deputy, to make a trail system throughout the town for all-terrain vehicles. A firestorm of letters appeared on our opinion pages because of Zweifel’s coverage.

We greatly value local opinion and spend much of our time and resources to be sure the facts in letters are correct while the opinions are allowed to flow freely. Our letters must be signed. These two tenets — fact-checking and accountability — distinguish our opinion pages from the sea of posts on social media.

As a result of Zweifel’s coverage, the school auditorium was packed on Feb. 20, 2023 for a public hearing on the ATV trail proposal. Zweifel was there with other media when the first speaker, Kevin Crosier, was improperly expelled from the meeting, escorted out by sheriff’s deputies, at the behest of Berne Supervisor Dennis Palow.

Regular readers of our newspaper, thanks to Zeifel’s coverage and that of his predecessors, are well acquainted with the acrimony between Palow, a Republican, and Crosier, a Democrat.

Before Crosier was voted out of office in a red wave that swept the Hilltowns when Donald Trump first ran for president, Crosier himself was sometimes disgruntled with Enterprise coverage.

In our news stories, The Enterprise does not serve as a mouthpiece for either Republicans or Democrats, listening to just the claims of one side with a veneer of he said-she said.

Rather we dig deep to find the truth and serve the public.

Recently, Zweifel has written about unpaid town bills in Berne. And, yes, as readers of our paper know from the back-and-forth on our opinion pages that continues this week, Crosier initially alerted Zweifel to the town’s unpaid bills with National Grid and later Tyler Tech.

Republican-backed Anita Clayton, former town clerk and deputy supervisor of Berne, wrote that Crosier has improperly sent emails of unpaid accounts to Zweifel while Peggy Christman, who chairs the town’s Democratic committee and ran unsuccessfully against Palow for supervisor, wrote that Clayton was lax in her duties of keeping Berne’s town accounts secure.

We check the facts in these letters and let the opinions roll. While the political squabbles play out on our opinion pages, our mission remains covering the news: We believe it is important for taxpayers to know how their money is managed.

We did not publish stories on Berne’s unpaid bills based on the tips we received. We waited until we had confirmation from the aggrieved parties: both from National Grid and from Tyler Tech.

We also supplied context in a series of stories delineating the town board’s fiscal mismanagement in handling Berne’s finances.

In that first story on the town not paying its electric bills, Zweifel wrote, “No indication of a funding problem was ever made to the public, with The Enterprise learning of unpaid bills from former Supervisor Kevin Crosier, a Democrat, who was receiving calls from National Grid about the bills because the town apparently failed to update its contact sheet for the company.”

Of course, for each of these stories, Zweifel attempted to get responses and explanations from town officials. Few, if any, were forthcoming. He did get responses from Freedom of Information Law requests, which allowed us to carry forward with our work of informing the public.

We published the copies of the unpaid bills on our website along with Zweifel’s stories. Bills from National Grid for the town hall, the senior center, the library, the pump station, the highway department, Switzkill Farm facilities, the town park, the transfer station, and the wastewater treatment facility were all left unpaid at different times.

When bills were paid, frequently the town paid less than what was owed. In one case, National Grid sent disconnection notices for service. Supervisor Palow and the town board members contacted by Zweifel did not respond to answer his questions on why the bills weren’t paid.

Informing the public took on added urgency since their elected representatives were not doing so. Using Zweifel’s story as a springboard, we editorialized on the importance of handling public funds properly to be sure basic services, like electricity at the highway department or library or senior center, are provided and the public is informed on how their money is being spent.

This past fall, a town tax hike of over 700 percent wasn’t a shock to our regular readers as Zweifel had written about that possibility when taxes were first cut and the fund balance, built up over previous decades, was drained.

Zweifel wrote again in October 2022, “Berne’s financial dealings and stability have long been in question by certain residents, who fear that grudge politics and a strong desire to appeal to residents by virtually eliminating property tax in the town have led board members to make irresponsible decisions — to say nothing of other state-recognized areas of mismanagement, such as safety protocol at the town highway department, where a worker died in 2020; compliance with Open Meetings Law; and repeatedly hiring building department employees who did not have proper licensing.”

The larger context The Enterprise provided for the recent unpaid bills went back to a 2020 audit by the state comptroller that detailed various record-keeping failures, and said that disorganization led to mispayment of credit card bills, resulting in late fees and interest charges. 

The audit also revealed that Palow, who was then deputy supervisor and had controversially received a $1,500 raise for that position, which primarily centers around reviewing and signing documents in lieu of the supervisor, was not adequately reviewing financial material before signing off on it.

Most troubling of all was board members had not followed most of the comptroller’s recommendations and even seemed unaware of the need.

Context matters, too, in Clayton and Palow’s current complaints about Enterprise coverage of unpaid bills. They were among the town board members that declined to apologize for having Crosier expelled from the public hearing. He had threatened to sue if no apology was forthcoming and is carrying through with that threat.

Zweifel will be on the job to cover the outcome of that suit.

Zweifel’s job is not an easy one. He does it with care and insight, and manages to write with grace. The Enterprise will continue to cover the Hilltowns because we believe the people who live there matter. We want to inform them so that democracy functions as it should.