One must wonder, as perhaps you do, what would inspire this website. Our beautiful city deserves better than it has received from its government, civic organizations, and long-time residents. We are over fourteen thousand in number, but a few hundred short-sighted, self-interested citizens have led others astray, and by doing so leave Whitewater crippled.
Our municipal government is narrow-minded, with a poor grasp of economics, and clings to burdensome regulations that make Whitewater unattractive to businesses. We gain housing, but lose industry: a recipe for perpetual second-class status. Our economic development is less about a free market economy than about any number of empty municipal gestures. We could hang birdhouses, or painted chairs and wooden fish, from our lampposts forever and still businesses would close and go elsewhere.
The recent completion of a roadway Bypass (could it have been any more aptly but ominously named than ‘bypass?’) around Whitewater diverts customers from our merchants. (A special note to every resident who looked forward to the competition of the Bypass to reduce traffic along Main Street: you got what you wanted, but lost traffic doesn’t put food on anyone’s table.)
Our police force is arrogant, of limited skill and intellect, but of limitless self-congratulatory rhetoric.
Our police chief, who never leaves but to return again, is an apologist for nearly all police actions, however embarrassing, and will invariably defend the force he heads rather than acknowledge and correct their deficiencies.
We are in the grip of a small, obstinate, and poorly educated local elite, that often would rather see the city sink under their control rather than for it to prosper free from their influence.
It is a local, town-bred elite that dislikes its own university campus, and resents the student population (a population than contributes mightily to keeping this city afloat).
It is a local, town-bred elite that dislikes, and fears, the many Mexican Americans in our community, and ignores, or distorts, the many positive contribution Mexican American workers make in our community.
We are burdened with a local newspaper, the Whitewater Register, that is hardly a true local paper, reports little news, and investigates almost nothing.
We have a municipal judge who is a vulgar laughingstock (and what Whitewater High School student does not have a repertoire of jokes about him?). He was re-elected because some short-sighted local residents would rather defend someone they perceive as one of their own than admit that his reputation is one of embarrassment and disgrace to our community.
Our public school administrator many be the worst leader the Whitewater district has ever had: bland, mediocre, but autocratic. Of all the many combinations that one might have (smart or dull, empowering or controlling), she has the worst combination: dull and controlling.
And yet…and yet…this will someday be a FREE WHITEWATER, more prosperous, fair, and pleasant. Even these several challenges will be overcome, to the benefit of our community.