Over at Downtown Whitewater, Inc., there was a recent awards ceremony. The Stone Stable restoration project won, if I understand the award correctly, for the best public-private partnership. I am pleased that the Stable Stable won an award, but a worthier designation would be to stay that the restoration was the best Whitewater project of 2007.
I have praised the effort before, in a few posts, the first of which, from August, was entitled, Beautiful Whitewater: The Stone Stable. Here’s part of what I wrote then:
If someone told you that an old stone stable had been torn down, and some of your fellow residents had organized to rebuild, stone by stone, the stable on a new location, what would you think? I heard of this project months ago, and when I first heard of it, I was surprised; it’s a bold idea toward a traditional end.
Those who founded this town of wood and stone did so with horses and mules, lanterns and candles, steam and sweat. They had harder lives than we do, and despite the difficulty of their circumstances, they bequeathed to us the public thing – the municipality – which now defines much of our connection to each other. It is also, however regrettably, the thing over which we sometimes contend, as we differ in how we have managed our common inheritance.
Here’s information on the stable, from a local website:
Who built the stone stable and for what purpose? Little is known for sure. The first settlers came to Whitewater in 1837 and by 1850 a small village existed in a triangle formed by Church, Whitewater and Main Streets. The stable stood within this triangle. According to research by historian Carol Cartwright, Nelson Combs, a wagon-maker and immigrant to Whitewater from New York State, paid taxes and built houses on adjacent properties in 1845 and 1847, about the time the stable was believed to have been built.
The designation public-private partnership would not have been my favorite. The award was deserved in any event, but it was mainly a private effort, as it should have been.
The public contribution was, in any event, no inhibition to the market. The municipal contribution to this project denied nothing to a private, rival competitor, nor established any unfair preferences, as their were no rival competitors, so to speak.
In how many other recent projects of business support can the city say the same — that it did not boost one to the preference of other, rival private efforts? Whitewater should be out of the business of picking winners — that’s the market’s function, and a function that it does far better.
The Stone Stable was a worthy project in itself.
Congratulations.