Whitewater is a city of 14,296 in southern Wisconsin.  Wasilla is a town of approximately 9,000 in Alaska.  I am a blogger from Whitewater, Wisconsin, and I am concerned about the relative comparison between Whitewater and Wasilla.
 
Whitewater is approximately 58% larger than Wasilla.  That means that Whitewater’s residents should be 58% smarter, more successful, more efficient, and more attractive . 

We should be better.
 
I don’t think that it’s worked out that way.
 
In Wasilla, the former mayor, a woman, has become a standing governor and candidate for vice president of the United States of America.  In Whitewater, the current city officials are … the current city officials. 
 
Wasilla produced someone to lead a state, and contend on a national stage. 
 
Forget political views – how is it that smaller Wasilla produced a woman who campaigns across a continent, when larger Whitewater is run by a bunch of men who definitely won’t be campaigning across a continent, state, or even county anytime soon?     
 
I called the National Academy of Sciences this morning and asked for a relative assessment of the capability of Governor Palin, former mayor of Wasilla, with the current public officials in Whitewater. 
 
They hung up on me sixteen times before someone would take my call. 
 
When someone finally agreed to talk to me, he explained that comparisons this lopsided require calculations with a supercomputer array – the fractional number representing Whitewater’s male leadership would be too small for consideration without advanced hardware.  I learned that dedication of that sort of processing power requires presidential authorization. 
 
Oh well, I tried. 
 
What happened, Whitewater?  Come on, town fathers – if you’re all so smart and civic-minded, so highly extra special excellent, why can’t you achieve something similar?   
 
You should be better, stronger, faster…anything. 
 
Perhaps we need a local version – of whatever politics – of that former mayor, current governor, and current vice presidential candidate from Wasilla. 

What good does our Whitewater boys’ club do us if the whole gaggle can’t compare favorably with one Wasilla girl? 

Early in Whitewater’s September 2nd Common Council meeting, there was a brief mention of a failed effort to establish a joint municipal-university court, with jurisdiction over certain local offenses in Whitewater. 
 
I have watched this proposal since June, and wondered how long it would be before the effort was abandoned.  It had to be abandoned; there was not the slightest chance that this arrangement was permissible under existing Wisconsin law. 
 
Not the slightest chance. 
 
I cannot have been alone in seeing this; there must have been quite a few people in town who saw the same thing. 
 
When I first heard of it, from an article in the Janesville Gazette in late June, I was candidly stunned; current Wisconsin law does not permit a municipality to establish this kind of joint court.  I thought to myself at the time:  How does anyone expect this proposal to withstand legal scrutiny?  Alternatively, is the city administration’s hope that no one will challenge it?      
 
(I have alluded to this proposal, and two others, in a few posts.  When I remarked that no one pays attention to Wisconsin statutes, and when I mentioned that the administration of justice is a bigger problem than student housing, this is one of the matters that I had in mind.  The other two are not yet ripe; we’ll see how they develop.) 
 
I thought about blogging on the topic at length, with the case against this proposal, but I decided to wait and see what might happen to the effort. 
 
I thought that perhaps within a week or two someone would see that it was impermissible. 

That didn’t happen.  Our city’s administration (with the help of the university) pushed this idea in the press, and clung to it throughout public meetings in the summer.  (A Gazette story, entitled “A Joint Court is Just the Ticket” did a fine job of setting out the city’s proposal and its motivation.  The story is available at http://www.GazetteXtra.com/news/2008/jun/22/joint-court-could-be-just-ticket/ ).  

The original Whitewater proposal, as the Gazette outlines it, was grandiose: the first such joint court system in the state, the city reaping fines that might go to a nearby county (up to $64,000 annually!), plans to increase the salary of our local municipal judge, insisting that all this would be convenient for students, etc. 

As summer wore on, the administration realized that an increase in a municipal judge’s salary could not take place immediately, the range of offenses proposed for the court was problematic, and that all this required further study.  A scaled-back version of the joint system, with a lower set of offenses within its jurisdiction, was to roll out instead. 

Now, after Labor Day, it’s clear that there will be …  nothing . 

On Law – From the beginning, it should have been clear that this arrangement was legally impermissible.  When the story broke, the legal over-reach of the program should have been clear to a wider group. 

(Note, that one of the commenters at the Gazette website saw that it was legally problematic, and he highlights one – but hardly all – of the legal reasons that this proposal was a mess.)        

Does Whitewater’s administration, so quick to tout its managerial competency, have no one who saw the impermissibility of this proposal, or no one who could make that clear?  It might have saved gushing through the summer about how we were onto something ‘exciting,’ etc. 

On Policy —   The Whitewater City manager contends that this would have been ‘good policy.’ 

Nonsense – This was bad policy, twice-over.  First, good policy is more than throwing a judicial proposal at the wall, and seeing if it sticks.  The result is no example of competence or experience. 

Second – and far more importantly – this administration must have no sense or feel for judicial affairs – none.  A change like this should be about more than making money.  Money should be the last thing on anyone’s mind. 

To represent the city is more than making deals, making a budget, standing with the loudest of the stodgy opinions in the room, occasionally hesitating between them as the volume rises and falls. 

Let’s be clear: No sensible, capable person would think that this was a good deal for most defendants.  I’ll enumerate only one reason now.  Proximity eases the city’s practical burden; travel to a county seat makes the city work to defend its case.  It insults sense to tell students and other defendants that the joint court was a convenience to them. 

A joint court scheme was convenient for defendants the way leaning into an oven would be convenient for Hansel and Gretel – it makes the shoving so much faster and easier for the witch. 

There’s a slapdash quality to all of this, implicating both competency and judgment. 

Whitewater has a collection of local merchants organized as Downtown Whitewater, Inc.  Tami Brodnicki is the Executive Director of the group, and she presented last night as part of a quarterly presentation schedule. 
 
The group supports and seeks local merchants for Whitewater, and one example of that support is the upcoming September 12th and 13th Taste of Whitewater celebration at the Cravath Lakefront.  (I posted videos from YouTube that the group prepared earlier this week.)
 
Another effort was on display Tuesday night – television commercials to highlight local business offerings.  Television sends a signal unlike other media, of seriousness, planning, and organization.  Media have shifted in America, especially these last ten years or so, but television remains a premier medium. 
 
Commercials like this send a positive message from, and about, local merchants.  It’s a good idea likely to produce good results. 

More to come

Like many towns, we have local public access cable channel. (We have a second one for our local campus station, too.)  We have a weekly newspaper, and a few websites, but little local news coverage otherwise.  The public access channel is our best bet for unedited coverage of municipal meetings and events. 
 
Although there was legitimate concern about a shift of the cable channel to a digital tier, that immediate problem has disappeared.  Our public access channel will be accessible on both an analog and digital tier, and thus still be available to the widest group of subscribers as an analog offering.  (The channel will move to a different analog station on the cable menu.)   
 
FREE WHITEWATER offers commentary on events in town, by design and intention, and others writing about news in Whitewater do the same by consequence (even if they don’t see it that way).  Summaries of news events take the form of commentary whether intentional or not; Bowdlerized news is commentary by a different name. 
 
All commentary is best when the unedited information on a meeting, from which the commentary derives, is available.  Residents should always be able to see easily the full measure of a meeting, for content, tone, and atmosphere – all together. 
 
Our public access channel ably fulfills that need. 
 
More to come…