Dante Morelli, Senior Economics major and Biology and Chemistry minor, shares about their second internship with the City of Walla Walla Development Services Department.
“Serving the Public at the City of Walla Walla
My name is Dante Morelli, and I am in my second round of Whitman Internship Grant funding with the City of Walla Walla Development Services department. I am a Senior Economics Major, with minors in Biology and Chemistry. I plan to study Urban Planning and Transportation Engineering after I graduate from Whitman. In this blog post, I would like to talk about some of the things I’ve been doing to serve the community of Walla Walla.
To start, I have had the opportunity to survey businesses in downtown Walla Walla to ascertain if they have their business licenses and are complying with the code. The most interesting aspect of this task has been being able to go inside every building downtown. Seeing inside all of the old downtown buildings that I would normally have never even stepped food in has been a fun experience.
During my first round of this internship, I had been using GIS and google maps to do demography 
mapping of the community so that the planners could figure out the land use for certain properties and zone them appropriately. Specifically, these properties were industrially zoned, when they were residential in use. This caused the homeowners and residents to be unable to obtain insurance and a fair rate, and their houses were artificially lower in value simply by the fact that they were in an industrial land use zone rather than residential. In this second round of WIG funding, I have been able to see how the work I did in the spring is being used going forward. This has been extremely rewarding to see work continue through the planning process.
Some other work that I have been doing this summer has been reviewing plans and applications. This is very practical, hands-on work with a real impact to the efficiency of the office. I am extremely happy to be able to have this opportunity, as this is an experience that I would never have obtained without an internship like this. Some additional experience that I will be getting as my internship closes out is census data enumeration and tabulation. This is to collect data to send to the state department of revenue to determine the need of the city for money from the state. Accurate collection of data is crucial, as large differences in real vs recorded data could result in lower amounts of funding for the city. I’m happy to have this responsibility and look forward to finishing out the summer strong!”