The federal government gave millions in tax dollars to Whitewater, the Whitewater Community Development Authority, and UW-Whitewater for a reason. Here’s that reason:
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.
See, Whitewater’s Innovation Center: Grants and Bonds.
Here’s how Whitewater’s city manager, in his Weekly Report from 2.18.11, touts use of the building:
One of the benefits of our new Whitewater Innovation Center is the ability to periodically host important business and scientific conferences and meetings. The Walworth County Economic Development Alliance (WCEDA) held its monthly Business Briefs breakfast there as well as held its annual meeting at the Center earlier today.
That’s WCEDA, an organization so small and broke that it had to let go a newly-hired (and much heralded!) executive director, and replace him with someone already on staff.
American spent millions on a building for a meeting that WCEDA — WCEDA, of all groups — holds monthly anyway? There’s no incremental gain whatever in a meeting like that for those who lost their jobs as flood victims or from auto plant closings. If WCEDA met at the building all day and night for a year, and the attendees stuffed themselves silly on pancakes and waffles, there would still be no gain for those who lost their jobs as flood victims or from auto plant closings.
There will be other small, dog-crap organizations with fancy names that will use the ‘Innovation’ Center for meetings.
That’s not, however, why Whitewater received the money. It was supposed to help actual working people, not self-promoting bureaucrats and breakfasting community planners.
Even to suggest this meeting as worthy of the building’s cost in federal dollars and municipal public debt is yet further evidence that the city manager’s simply ridiculous. (Whitewater town squires: there’s your negotiator when budget cuts and labor negotiations take place.)
But if Whitewater’s city manager insists on a new career as an event planner, he might as well book a big, lively event, something commensurate with quality of this project.
Something, perhaps, like this —
