Your ELi

East Lansing City Council meets every week, but half of these meetings are called “regular meetings” and half are called “work sessions.” Council “work sessions”—which have, all told, been constituting over half the time Council actually meets—are not videotaped or broadcast to the public, which  “regular meetings” are. This means that, unless you have the time and energy to go to City Hall for "work sessions," you can’t find out for yourself what’s going on at Council over half the time.

During this week’s bloom of Je suis Charlie, in the wake of the murders at France’s satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I got to wondering whether Eli is Charlie. The simplest answer, of course, is “no.” Much to the disappointment of our astronomy reporter who would dearly love to write satire about what goes on in East Lansing city politics, we don’t accept satire. Satire is editorial, and ELi is nonpartisan and non-editorial.

Image: Direct messaging to coordinate restoration efforts last year during the outage

Remember the power outage that began one year ago today? It was a major reason why in the spring of 2014 I decided to found ELi as a 501c3 nonprofit organization that would serve the people of East Lansing through the labor of embedded citizen reporters.

Image of "Community" sculpture in Valley Court Park, courtesy of City of East Lansing

This week, along with a donation, one of our readers sent this note:

I think ELi is playing a very important role in catalyzing a more robust, and more democratic, discourse in town. I am grateful to you and all involved for doing what you do.

Image: Time-lapse photograph of Grand River Avenue by East Lansing photographer Dylan Lees

Do you ever hear people around town say, "In East Lansing, there's no there there," or "No one knows what's going on in this city"? If you've been reading ELi, you know we are working to change both of those perceptions. This new weekly feature, Your ELi, will help by giving you an overview of what's happening this week in your East Lansing.