Some people might wonder how a reporter assigned to cover neighborhoods can, at the same time, be a neighborhood activist without crossing an ethical line etched in a code of conduct somewhere.
Brandt said that he avoided crossing that line by keeping distance between himself and City Hall when working on the Greenway project.
"Basically, when it involved politics or conversations with people in public office, I let other people handle that. I felt it was important to keep my distance."
He also, of course, didn't write any articles about the Greenway.
"I made a decision early on, both because I live in the neighborhood and because I had been on the neighborhood board when I started the beat, that I wasn't going to write about Kingfield. When something interesting came up in Kingfield, I'd mention it to [columnist] Doug Grow or somebody else.
"We conceived the Greenway as a community entity and I wasn't getting anything personally out of it," said Brandt, who lives about half a block away from the now-verdant boulevard.
"I figured as long as it was a general community improvement and it was [NRP] money that had been allocated to my neighborhood, so it was a question within the neighborhood of how do we spend it, I was comfortable."
It's interesting that this unpaid and unheralded effort to create a greenspace with bikepath and flora-decorated bump-outs on the street fits so neatly into a description Brandt has of the Strib: "We don't do the stories about the small triumphs of neighborhood life, about how people interact in the city that raises the common good."
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