By Amanda Coers
Not long after I launched Junction City Community News, someone paid me what they probably intended as an insult: They called me a “shit-stirrer.”
I took it as a compliment. After all, I happen to be a professional stirrer of pots, with roots in journalism dating back to 2002. There’s a better term I prefer, though.
Muckraker.
It’s a phrase coined during the Progressive Era (1890–1920). You can think of them as original shit-stirrers. Muckrakers were investigative reporters who dragged systemic corruption, corporate monopolies and urban exploitation into the daylight. It was the work of muckrakers that brought about historic federal reforms and constitutional change.
But whether it’s a shit-stirrer or a muckraker, it really boils down to a nosy reporter who won’t let things slide. The public deserves transparency, and democracy in small towns doesn’t survive without reporters who simply refuse to take “no” for an answer.
I didn’t set out with a grand crusade. Back in early summer, I was just doing what curious citizens and news nerds do: scrolling through city council agendas. Then I saw it on the menu: Flock Safety surveillance cameras.
For an independent journalist, an automated license-plate-reading dragnet potentially being contracted by a small-town council is too tempting a treat to pass up. I started digging into the contracts, the data retention and how the decision was being made. I launched Junction City Community News on Substack in July with that first report, playfully titled “What the Flock?”
Turns out, once you dip the spoon into local governance, you don’t just get one clean scoop. A little stirring brings all kinds of unsavory lumps to the surface. All it took was attending one city council meeting in Junction City to smell something rotten.
The behavior of the council towards its own community members was baffling to me. Combative from the get-go, and with every question posed to them, they danced away from simply listening to the overwhelming pushback from residents who didn’t want their Fourth Amendment rights trampled.
It was their evasive and hostile attitude that prompted me to start digging. And before I knew it, I was reading about a bizarre administrative shuffle involving the former city administrator and his abrupt transition into a newly minted “project manager” role, directly after the city’s union expressed their desire to vote no confidence in him.
Then I came across the high-stakes weirdness surrounding the $1.4 million High Pass Road land purchase, accompanied by the city actively stonewalling public records requests that residents had every legal right to see. The aroma speaks for itself: a rather distinct smell of bullshit.
Meanwhile, residents turn on their taps here in Junction City and get rust-colored water. That makes it even harder to swallow the upcoming utility rate increases.
Junction City’s infrastructure has been quietly choking for decades, burdened by a water and wastewater system that has struggled ever since the 1990s, when local leaders seemed to gamble on the grand promise of a state prison that never materialized as planned. Lines were laid, capacity was skewed, and water was left sitting to stagnate. Yet even as current residents deal with deteriorating utility realities and confusing answers from leadership, officials continue to push forward on aggressive development plans.
If you live in Eugene or Springfield, it’s easy to treat small rural outposts like Junction City as quiet pastoral backdrops. Barely a thought may be given as you pass through on Highway 99 on your way to Corvallis or beyond.
That detachment is a mistake. What happens out here does not stay behind our city limits.
When a rural neighbor attempts to bandage decades of infrastructure mismanagement by greenlighting sprawling developments, it ripples across city limit lines. Look at the current discussions around regional sewer expansion and tying into vital shared services: the financial obligations, environmental risks and utility burdens of small-town mismanagement inevitably land on the doorstep of the broader metro area.
Small-town municipalities are far too often boiling pots for unchecked municipal power. When there is no watchdog in the room, backroom deals become standard operating procedure, public records become treated like proprietary corporate secrets and public infrastructure is treated like an afterthought until the pipes literally back up.
If digging into public documents, demanding straight answers and bringing uncomfortable truths into the daylight makes someone a shit-stirrer, hand me the ladle. And if a news story ruffles your feathers, don’t get mad at the person holding the spoon. Get mad at whoever filled the pot in the first place. I say let’s stir it up, examine what’s inside, get our hands dirty, and ask the questions that matter.
Stir the pot. Rake the muck.
The stinky brew has been simmering undisturbed for far too long, and Junction City residents deserve to know what’s in it.
Amanda Coers is an independent watchdog journalist and the editor of Junction City Community News on Substack.