On Saturday, Elkhorn police were called to a well-known downtown eatery for a squirrel that chased customers as they entered Moy’s Restaurant for early evening meals.
See, “Squirrel disrupts diners at Elkhorn restaurant” by Latest News — GazetteXtra.
It was sadly predictable that only a few days after a story about how the City of Whitewater violated federal law in awarding a contract under a multi-million dollar federal grant, City Manager Kevin Brunner would attempt to distort & minimize the nature of the violation, with a tale that’s simply incredible.
Sure enough, he’s right on schedule, in remarks published on October 9th in a story entitled, “Tech park project continues after EDA violation.”
(I’ve written about federal rules violations at the Whitewater Innovation Center before. See, Whitewater’s Innovation Center: Economic Development Administration Sends ‘Cease and Desist’ Letter Over Alleged Violation of Competition in Construction Requirements, and later at Wisconsin State Journal: Work was stopped on Whitewater technology park due to federal rules violations. For the State Journal story, see Work was stopped on Whitewater technology park due to federal rules violations.)
I’ll address the city manager’s remarks, below.
“A misunderstanding on how to apply the federal law.” Brunner brazenly contends that the violation was simply a “misunderstanding on how to apply the federal law.”
No, and no again. The violation was that Brunner didn’t comply with federal law. Brunner’s remarks make this all seem like a matter of interpretation. That’s nonsense, as the letter from the Economic Development Administration plainly states:
It has come to the Economic Development Administration (EDA) attention that the construction contractor for the Whitewater Technology Park building portion of the Project has not been awarded per EDA Standard Terms and Conditions. The construction contractor is also working as a construction project manager developing specifications, requirements, statements of work, and invitations for bid and/or requests for proposal. This is a clear violation of the Grant Award Terms and Conditions and in particular, CFR 15 sec. 14.43 Competition. This unauthorized action subjects the grant to possible termination for cause.
The City of Whitewater, Community Development Authority and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, as co-grant Recipients, are hereby advised to cease and desist, all construction activities associated with this EDA investment….
A full accounting of this matter by the EDA will be required before it will authorize any additional Project activities….
See, full letter from the Economic Development Administration to the City of Whitewater, among others:
Brunner’s reference to state and local law is risible: it was a federal grant, worth millions; the least that he could expect is that he would need to comply with federal law. Not only is it obvious that a federal grant must comply with federal legal requirements, but as the EDA letter makes plain, these requirements were set out clearly in the Grant Award Terms and Conditions.
Talking about state and local law is irrelevant to the violation. (After all, that’s why the EDA stopped the project and the architect has had to assume oversight duties.)
Overlooking the Obvious. Even assuming a world without any law of any kind, it should be clear to someone that the company that manages a construction project shouldn’t be awarding itself contracts. That this didn’t even occur to Brunner — by his own admission — speaks poorly about his actual understanding of the project, and projects, generally.
About that ‘Scrutiny.’ Brunner’s quick to shift the focus from his own responsibilities to an agency’s scrutiny: “Obviously there’s a whole other level of scrutiny, and once we were made aware of that we wanted to comply.”
No, and no again. Brunner should have been aware of the basic terms and conditions without any agency’s needing to issue a cease-and-desist letter. He, and others, were responsible for this project. They freely applied for the grant; no one forced Brunner into this position.
As for wanting to comply, well, there was no alternative, if Brunner wanted to continue with the project. The best way to demonstrate a desire to comply with the terms of a federal grant is to read thoroughly the terms of the federal grant.
Financial Impact on the Project. The story notes that “Brunner said he doesn’t expect the violation to have any financial impact on the project.”
That’s impossible, of course. The only way a work stoppage could have no financial impact is if there were no value — none at all — to any alternative uses of workers’ time. In the world in which we all live, one of finite resources, and choices between opportunities, there’s a cost to any use (or non-use) of resources. It cannot be otherwise.
It’s almost too funny that Brunner, as a leader in a project that also involves a university, is apparently ignorant of (or disingenuous about) a truth that any undergraduate in economics would easily comprehend.
There are other consequences, too.
Brunner may contend that there’s no financial impact, but there’s also a cost to credibility to parties who cannot comply with plain requirements for millions in federal grants. (A violation like this is so rare that it’s remarkable, and that’s why it became a newspaper and an Associated Press story.)
Brunner may contend that there’s no financial impact, but there’s also a cost to credibility to a city manager who wants to propose a city budget, with possible hardships to others, when he cannot comply adequately with simple requirements.
The Real Timeline. There’s been a striking lack of candor in all this. The cease-and-desist letter was stamped with the date for 9/28/10, but it’s likely some local officials were aware of its contents earlier. That means that in remarks at a Community Development Authority board meeting of September 27th, and at a Common Council meeting on October 5th, Brunner was not candid about the extent the federal rules violations that the project faced.
Worse — for all this, he’s spinning a new, deceptive tale about these violations.
It’s all predictable, if embarrassing and irresponsible.
The Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters’ October 2010 Newsletter is now available, and the latest issue includes a calendar of upcoming LWV events. The most-recent copy of the LWV newsletter is available as a link on my blogroll, and is embedded below, with coding through Google.
Here’s a sampling of upcoming events for the Whitewater-Area League — the newsletter offers much more information —
Date: October 16 (Saturday)
Event: Candidate Forums
Where: City Municipal Building, Council Chambers
11 AM – Noon State Assembly District 43 (Kim Hixson and Evan Wynn)
1 PM – 2 PM State Senate District 15 (Rick Richard and Tim Cullen)
Date: October 21 (Thursday)
Event: Sustainability at UW-Whitewater: The Challenge of Acting Locally. Dr. Eric Campas, Asst. Professor, Geography and Geology Department at UW-Whitewater
Where: Municipal Building, Council Chambers, 7 PM
Fairhaven Lecture Series
The Fall 2010 Fairhaven Lecture Series, sponsored by the UW-W Office of Continuing Education, will look at biography as a literary form, look at the life and times of some of history?s most famous, infamous, and barely famous figures, and even take a biographical look at the life a famous city. All lectures are open to the public at no charge and are held on Mondays at 3 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of the Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 West Starin Road. Guest / street parking is adjacent to the building.
October 11 Bert the Miner: Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive and Humanitarian. Richard Haney, Professor Emeritus, History Department
October 18 Travels with Charlie: A Trip with Charles Darwin. Daryle Waechter-Brulla, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
October 25 Take this Stand: Rod Serling and the Politics of the Twilight Zone. Mark Boulton, Assistant Professor, History Department
November 1 Along the Trail of the Blackhawk. Tony Guiling, Associate Professor, History Department
November 8 A Biography of a City: The History of Tokyo. Roderick Wilson, Lecturer, History Department
November 15 The Least Dangerous Branch: Justices Who Have Gone Out on a Limb. Jolly Emery, Associate Professor, Political Science Department
Good morning,
Whitewater’s Columbus Day forecast calls for a mostly sunny day with a high temperature of seventy-seven degrees.
In the CIty of Whitewater of tonight, there will be a Planning Commission meeting at 6:00 p.m. The meeting agenda is available online. At 6:30 p.m., there will be a meeting of the Library Board. The meeting agenda is available online.
There is a scheduled public listening session with school district administrator Suzanne Zentner at the district’s central office (419 South Elizabeth Street). The English language session is from 5:00-5:45 p.m., and the Spanish session from 5:45 to 6:30 p.m.
There’s a study that points to a possible cause of honey bees’ decline (colony collapse disorder). The cause may be two combined afflictions:
In this new study [published in PLoS One], researchers looked at bee colonies that had died off due to CCD, or were in the process of failing, and compared them to a few that had no history of the problem. They couldn’t pin down a single pathogen as the problem—however, they could pin down two.
According to the paper, “virtually all” of the CCD colonies were infected by two things: the Nosema fungus that researchers had previously suspected, and a DNA-virus called invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV). IIV is fairly prevalent in bee colonies (75 percent of healthy ones also had it) but its combination with Nosema seemed to spell doom for the bees….
Quick notes: Ars Technica reporter Casey Johnston notes that the study’s lead researcher has a link to Bayer Crop Science, a maker of pesticides that might be used to treat CCD under the above explanation.
See, Dying bee colonies linked to a fungus and virus in cahoots.
For the original study (hardly a layman’s paper!), see Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline.
Life imitates art — in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Bruce Wayne discovers that the Joker has devised a lethal assault on Gotham city’s residents, inserting different toxins into ordinary substances in a way that use of only one is harmless, but the combination of several proves fatal.
Well said.
See, Don Spencer: Need open market for raw milk, too.
For the original editorial, see Help Dairy Deliver.
Is there freedom of speech in China? – No! Slate Magazine http://slate.me/bqt7fn
8 Oct
A dictatorship at work: China blanks Nobel Peace prize searches – CNN.com http://bit.ly/cY7Tro
8 Oct
Employers Continue to Discriminate Against Jobless, Think ‘The Best People Are Already Working’ http://huff.to/b7r3Hr
8 Oct
Goodbye, Free Trade? High tariffs & currency wars cost us big in the 1930s. We can avoid making the same mistakes again http://bit.ly/c5DZcR
8 Oct
U.S. Economy Lost 95,000 Jobs in September – WSJ.com http://bit.ly/9vdoiG
8 Oct
Jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize – WSJ.com http://bit.ly/a0UfwG
8 Oct
Wisconsin State Journal: Work was stopped on Whitewater technology park due to federal rules violations http://bit.ly/952yfs
7 Oct
Gallup Finds U.S. Unemployment at 10.1% in September http://bit.ly/bKQTrZ
7 Oct
Whitewater Innovation Center: EDA Sends ‘Cease and Desist’ Letter Over Competition in Construction Reqs FREE WHITEWATER http://bit.ly/blAUTl
3 Oct
Astonishing and disgraceful:
Before he launched a campaign for Congress in northwest Ohio, Republican candidate Rich Iott took part in World War II reenactments dressed in the uniform of Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS.
Iott was involved with a group called Wiking, which reenacts the exploits of the 5th SS Panzer Division, mainly on the Eastern Front fighting the communist Soviet Union’s Red Army, the Atlantic reported….
See, Republican Candidate in Ohio Took Part in Nazi War Reenactments.
More from The Atlantic, that reported initially on Iott’s perverse membership in the Wiking ‘reenactment’ group, about the SS Division the group celebrates:
The actual Wiking unit has a history as grisly as that of other Nazi divisions. In her book “The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945,” Eleonore Lappin, the noted Austrian historian, writes that soldiers from the Wiking division were involved in the killing of Hungarian Jews in March and April 1945, before surrendering to American forces in Austria.
“What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that’s kind of a dodge,” says Prof. Rob Citino, of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, who examined the Wiking website. “The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of ‘subhumans.’ Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That’s what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.”
No, it certainly doesn’t.
Art Carden, at Forbes‘s Economic Imagination blog, explains the difference:
Is a “free market” agenda the same thing as a “pro-business” agenda? Economists of a libertarian persuasion find this frustrating because our enthusiasm for free markets is often mistaken as enthusiasm for specific businesses or corporate interests. But just because something is good for General Motors does not mean it is necessarily good for America….
In a free market, you are welcome, and indeed encouraged, to enter the mousetrap industry if you think you can build a better mousetrap or find a way to make similar mousetraps more efficiently. The other side of that coin is that you will be encouraged to leave the mousetrap industry if it turns out that your mousetraps are not better, but inferior.
A “free market” agenda is not the same thing as a “pro business” agenda. Businesses should not be protected from competition, losses, and bankruptcy when they fail to deliver for the customer. All three are essential to truly free markets and free enterprise.
See, “Free Market” Doesn’t Mean “Pro-Business” – Art Carden – The Economic Imagination – Forbes.
Here’s the Friday open comments post.
Today’s suggested topic is open — after a hiatus of two weeks, this libertarian website will not confine the topic in any narrow way. Roam at will.
The use of pseudonyms and anonymous postings is, of course, fine.
Although the comments template has a space for a name, email address, and website, those who want to leave a field blank can do so. Comments will be moderated, against profanity or trolls. Otherwise, have at it.
I’ll keep the post open through Sunday afternoon.
Have at it.
There’s a story on Whitewater’s Technology Park and Innovation Center, from the Wisconsin State Journal. See, Work was stopped on Whitewater technology park due to federal rules violations.
Reporter Dee Hall writes that
Work on the Whitewater University Technology Park was temporarily halted last week when the federal government notified officials with the city and UW-Whitewater that they violated federal rules when awarding a construction contract at the park….
The problem revolved around a $2.9 million contract awarded in April to Janesville-based J.P. Cullen & Sons. Cullen was in charge of reviewing the bids and recommended itself for the main construction contract.
As construction manager for the project, Cullen also is charged with overseeing construction and making sure subcontractors meet deadlines and budget. As part of the agreement with the federal government, Brunner said, Cullen’s work is now being overseen by the project architect, Eppstein Uhen Architects of Milwaukee.
In commenting on the temporary stoppage, Brunner remarked that
…. he had no idea until a few weeks ago that the arrangement didn’t comply with federal rules. He said Whitewater officials were able to demonstrate to EDA that it had held “an open and competitive bidding process” that met state and local laws.
Added Brunner: “We really truly believed we were doing the right thing.”
For my original post on the federal violations, see Whitewater’s Innovation Center: Economic Development Administration Sends ‘Cease and Desist’ Letter Over Alleged Violation of Competition in Construction Requirements.
I have written critically about the project before, but a stoppage for a federal rules violation — and a change in required oversight as a result — speaks poorly of this project. (I’ve contended that the project is both over-hyped and a misdirection of resources from Whitewater’s more significant needs.)
There are very few places that commit this sort of federal violation and experience this sort of work stoppage. Grandiose claims and serial groundbreaking ceremonies for the project should be the least of Whitewater’s concerns.
Note: Originally posted 10-7 at 10:30 p.m.
Good morning,
Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of seventy-nine degrees.
It’s Homecoming today in the Whippet City. Many of our schools will be holding Spirit Day events to celebrate. There’s a fine array of Homecoming events today and tonight:
The Whitewater High School Booster Club invites you to their annual Homecoming cookout on Friday, October 8th. The cookout begins at 5 PM and will be held at the Whitewater High School Athletic Complex Concession area. For a $6 donation you can enjoy a great spread by the WHS Booster Club. The meal includes a sandwich, chips, assorted sides, dessert & drink. Sandwich options include chicken breast, brat, burger or hotdog.
Service will continue until game time. The Homecoming football game verses East Troy begins at 7:00 PM.
WHS’s very own Willie Whippet will be in attendance and will be joined by WHS alum Darren Powers who will once again be bringing his real-life Whippets to the game. The WHS Band will be performing at half-time and the 2010 Homecoming court will also be introduced.
Come join the fun and support your Whippets!
The whippets at the game will be particularly impressive, but until then here’s a video of another whippet, who’s almost as sharp as a genuine Whitewater whippet:
