There’s no better summary of the millions wasted on Whitewater’s Innovation Center than that from the building’s own Executive Director, Robert Young:

The major accomplishment was raising $11.5 million to make this community-university project possible…

It’s not a perfect summary, of course: Young cleverly uses the term ‘raising,’ as though the money for the building came from private investment, charitable contributions, or bake sales. It didn’t: this building used federal taxpayer dollars and local municipal debt.

Otherwise, it’s a candid admission of what a sham this center is – this is a public boondoggle masquerading as a private initiative.

This was the true purpose of the nearly five-million dollar federal grant for this building, as the federal government intended it:

September 7-September 11, 2009

….$4,740,809 to the Whitewater Community Development Authority, the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, and the City of Whitewater, Wisconsin, to fund construction of the new Innovation Center and infrastructure to serve the technology industrial park, including a road linking the project with the University of Wisconsin’s Whitewater campus. The goal of the project is to create jobs to replace those lost in the floods of 2008 and those lost from recent automotive plant closures. The Innovation Center will serve as both a training center and technology business incubator and will be constructed to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification standards. A portion of the project’s cost will be funded through EDA’s Global Climate Change Mitigation Incentive Fund.

This investment is part of an $11,051,728 project which grantees estimate will help create 1,000 jobs and generate $60 million in private investment.

The goal: One-thousand (new!) jobs, and sixty-million in (genuine!) private investment to replace lost jobs.

That’s not what this is.

Most of the workers in the building are public employees commuting from a prior location, and employees of a supposed capital-management firm who are really just publicly-paid faculty getting a leg up at state expense over genuine, private entrepreneurs. It’s cushy, state-supported capitalism.

Even the short list of tenants belies how tiny some of them truly are: some are renting space about that of a farm shed.

Meanwhile, the nearby business park has tens of thousands of square feet of empty building space (in two buildings alone, about 76,000 and 19,000 square feet, respectively).

That’s twice as much nearby vacant space as all possible space in the Innovation Center.

To the Tech Park Board: Nothing you do or say can make this sow’s ear a silk purse. You should not have taken this money — it should have gone to a community that would have used it properly for those in genuine need. Your selfishness denied another American town a chance to do something right and good.

Here’s a quick recap of your work:

(1) You took millions from a federal grant,

(2) issued millions more in public debt,

(3) issued those millions in municipal public debt even when you knew the city’s existing developments were troubled (that tax-incremental-district four was a candidate for distressed status)

(4) spent meeting after meeting worrying about trivial topics like signs, etc.,

(5) ignored the obvious principle that a project manager should not award itself a contractor’s job,

(6) madly scrambled when the Economic Development Administration had to remind you of that obvious requirement through a Cease and Desist order,

(7) avoided candidly telling the public about the EDA notice of federal violations at a Community Development Authority meeting shortly after that order was issued,

(8) only admitted the regulatory violations you committed after I published the EDA’s Cease and Desist order at FREE WHITEWATER,

(9) made every excuse under the sun why you didn’t follow written federal requirements that most communities manage easily and properly,

(10) poured hours into serial celebrations and grand-openings of the building,

(11) built something new when there was plentiful, vacant office space nearby,

(12) laughably talked about this ordinary building as though it were a cathedral,

(13) gave a presentation in Iowa about the success of the project even before it was completed (!) – and before the EDA rebuked your deficient understanding of conflict-of-interest requirements,

(14) spent time applying for awards (including supposedly international ones!) from obscure organizations that choose ‘winners’ only from among submissions of paid members,

(15) for an anchor tenant that’s actually a public employer relocating from an old building to this new one,

(16) insisted that the public anchor tenant was ‘paying the bills’ when, in fact, taxpayers are paying the bills both of the anchor tenant and for the public money and public debt of this project,

(17) called this a green project when, in fact, it’s a mediocre-looking building that’s brown both literally and figuratively,

(18) destroyed true greenspace for something that looks like a bottom-shelf middle school,

(19) and committed countless hours on this vanity project instead of care for thousands of struggling residents, including hundreds of impoverished children.

There’s no surprise that Old Whitewater will do and say anything to promote itself.

And yet, and yet — there’s no going back for this city, as a New Whitewater, of true priorities and so a better politics, draws nearer.

For a list of prior posts on this topic, see Innovation Center/Tech Park.