We are a city of fourteen thousand, with a public school district, and a college campus, and so have grown used to the idea that almost everything costs a million dollars or more. People in the know say that these large sums are just the cost of doing business, as though government were really in the business of doing business.

We spend several million dollars to fund our small city each year. Millions for a city budget, millions for a water utility, millions more for a stormwater utility, and yet millions more to fund tax incremental districts within town.

At the request of our common council, our tax levy for the new budget is slightly less than the current one. One might think that a levy at the same level as this year, during a deep recession, would be imprudent.

Imprudence, though, is a relative term. Initially, our city manager proposed an increase in the levy, albeit less than the maximum the law allowed. I suppose this was his way of being frugal, by proposing and increase less than it might have been, but I don’t know with certainty.

He seemed surprised, to me, at the council session in which he learned that the council might prefer no increase in the levy at all.

I don’t know if our city manager has his ear to the ground (or even if that really works), but I do know it should be no surprise to favor a smaller levy during business closings and high unemployment.

The details of our 2010 budget are available through a story from a nearby newspaper:

Whitewater council approves property tax levy below 2008’s

One could have expected three contentions to come out of the budget process, and sure enough, they all did.

First, Whitewater faced a shortfall of a few hundred thousand in her budget, and I have heard the effort to close the gap described in near-heroic terms.

If a chef set fire to a kitchen, one would consider it noteworthy that he was able to douse the fire; it might not hurt to ask, afterward, how he set fire to the kitchen in the first place.

Second, it is true that the absolute amount of the levy was reduced, as the headline of the article to which I have linked declares.

Unfortunately, residents do not feel a levy, but rather a net tax rate.

It’s true that the tax levy is slightly less than last year, owing to the insistence of our common council that it not increase over the 2008 level.

It’s also true that the majority of city residents, living in the Walworth County portion of the city, will see an increase in their net tax rate:

“Brunner noted that the estimated net tax rate when combined with other taxing jurisdictions, including the Whitewater Unified School District, county taxes, technical college taxes, and state forestry taxes, will be $18.911 in 2009 (up from $17.72) for the Walworth County part of Whitewater….”

Astonishing, really, that even in difficult times, the combination of tax rates for most of Whitewater will increase.

There’s a third predictable contention, that one cannot imagine how one might cut still more:

“Brunner commented on the budget after the vote.

“We worked very hard to do this,” he said. “The council was very strong about not increasing the levy this year because of the tough economic times our citizens face. We cut over $300,000 in this budget to get the levy down below what it was last year. We have reduced some capital expenses, and we have frozen management salaries for a year and a number of other things, as well. I do not know how long we can do this, but this is the second year in a row that we have been able to hold the line.”

When one commits to capital project after capital project, after a while I’m sure it’s impossible to imagine less spending.

Municipal spending, as with all government spending, sets an ever-higher floor, but contemplates scarcely any ceiling.

If one cannot imagine reductions in a small town, then I cannot imagine where one might find them.

Pointing to a reduction in the levy, as a headline, ignores the increasing burden of taxation (and beyond it, regulation) in small-town America.

It’s not Los Angeles, surely, but then it doesn’t need to be.

Although bureaucrats may take pride – and pad their resumes – with large budgets and impressive-sounding projects, the gap between their ambitions and a small town’s burdens is the gap that truly matters.

Two hundred-thirty six years ago, a group of patriots dumped tea into Boston Harbor as a protest against British taxation, and really, British rule, generally.

America was born as an independent nation, spread across a continent, and built the most prosperous society in the world in the years since.

While we have grown in so many admirable ways in the intervening generations, we have abandoned – or been asked to abandon – much of the independent and forthright character that made us a free and great republic.

Even in a small town, like Whitewater, Wisconsin, there is an expectation that officials will be treated with a certain deference. What they call politeness is more like a servile deference, a fawning and compliant attitude.

When one person feels this way, he collects and selects others who think as he does.

Some months ago, I wrote about the unfortunate situation in which a homeowner’s property was flooded by a sewer backup while he was serving abroad.

Unfortunate, but more than that – odd, too. Odd that citizens were asked to assume that a decision the insurance carrier for the city made to deny coverage was – by simple consequence – proof that the city was not liable.

That’s odd, because almost anyone knows that there may be a difference between damage an insurance carrier will cover and what the law may determine about an insured’s liability.

Yet, when an official comes to believe that what he says must receive assent because he has said it, then justification and reasoning are secondary to mere declaration.

One often hears that small towns encourage greater humility, but I simply cannot tell.

I am quite sure that websites, blogs, email, digital cameras, hand-held video cameras, and phones that can take pictures and record video make it easier to spread a message that’s free of official influence.

This year, current-day tea party protesters have taken advantage of all these media to spread a message that politicians, bureaucrats, and their status-quo defenders cannot easily obstruct or edit.

Now, I know very well that some progressives dislike the tea party movement, but those on the left should support the means if not the ends. The clever use of video and websites to promote a message is one from which the left can learn, and one which they will surely emulate.

(I am not on the left, but instead am a libertarian. Still, I find it foolish for progressives, or true conservatives, for that matter, to object to media that help advance individual rights.)

Most interesting to me is the use of video recordings of ordinary citizens asking questions at a public meeting. It takes scarcely any time to upload video of a pompous official to YouTube for an entire community to see.

(Predictably, so-called public servants often ban cameras from town halls. Tea Party activists have learned to take in a few cameras in different parts of a room, so that one camera can record the confiscation – sometimes aggressively – of a second camera.)

A politician who grew to maturity in an era of Time, Newsweek, the CBS Evening News and one compliant local newspaper might find this new era chaotic and somehow wrong.

If every meeting in Whitewater were recorded – with audio or video – what would public meetings in our small town be like? We’d have no possibility of leaving something out of the meeting’s minutes, no matter how unintentional those omissions might be.

A video camera could supplement, and improve, the written record. A camera properly placed, costing not much, really, would be an advance over minutes alone.

There are many fine cameras with excellent features that consumers purchase and use satisfactorily each day.

But how willing would groups be to have a video record of every public meeting? (Here I emphasize that my question concerns only public meetings. No official should feel concern about the recording of a meeting that is, in any event, open to the public.)

One of the best ways to assure public awareness of political developments would be video recording of all public meetings, even with a simple camera on a tripod.

Not merely those that are recorded now, but those that are not – the meetings of the Police and Fire Commission, the Community Development Authority (each committee and subgroup, each and every time), etc.

(Our public access channel does a very fine job – the only truly fine job anyone does – of covering the meetings. We would be far less knowledgeable without a complete video record of Council, Planning, and school board meetings, among others.)

You can be assured that the same people who insist that one should never say a contrary word will suddenly have myriad objections and serious concerns about expanded recording.

Oh my – in those objections, one could not be more hypocritical and self-interested, even if one tried.

Immediately below, in the preceding post, I cite the Wisconsin Historical Society on the Pratt Institute, a center for spiritualism, formerly of Whitewater.

Here I refer to the Morris Pratt Institute, not the noted graduate school in New York.

The Morris Pratt Institute is now located elsewhere in Wisconsin, but occasionally someone will tell me that Whitewater, Wisconsin is an odd place because of the center for spiritualism once located in town. There are also assorted stories about witches having lived in town, and while here having placed various curses on our small city.

I cannot say if anyone once cursed our town, but I am fairly certain that at least a few of our residents might be considered scary.

That’s hardly what makes the town so odd in politics and culture. The answers are far more mundane: that we insist on grandiose claims of our local exceptionalism, that we lack a press that watches politicians closely and unsparingly, that we waste time and money on marquee public works projects, and that many of our politicians and local bureaucrats are excuse-making and self-flattering.

We began as a city of self-reliant individualists. We’ve become a place of fussy and vain bureaucrats. We have lost touch with the true exceptionalism of America, and replaced it with a sad local counterfeit.

It didn’t take witches and kooky seances to make us this way; we did it all on our own.