At Whitewater’s Planning Commission, a smart, educated resident (to whom I have no personal connection) mentioned how very much Whitewater could use a reliable publication, so that residents might be properly informed of community developments. The unexpected in this was not lost on me, as only a few feet away from the resident, at the commissioner’s…
City
City, Government Spending, Local Government
At Whitewater’s Planning Commission: Millions But Still a Politician’s Unsatisfied
by JOHN ADAMS •
Last night, Whitewater’s local government conducted its (mostly) monthly Planning Commission meeting. It’s mostly because there aren’t always enough new projects each month to justify holding a meeting. At Item 4 on the agenda, the commission held a public hearing “for consideration of a conditional use permit for an automotive shop at 113 E. Main…
City, Culture, Local Government, School District, University
On Lake, McHenry, and Walworth Counties
by JOHN ADAMS •
In August, I wrote that dorm-construction wasn’t the big story at UW-Whitewater, but rather it was the federal lawsuit against former Chancellor Telfer and [then-current] Athletic Director Amy Edmonds. Even in her mundane story of residence-construction, the Journal Sentinel‘s Karen Herzog got it wrong: the bigger story was an increasing number of out-of-state students (now about…
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, December 13th, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Love the Coopers
by JOHN ADAMS •
This Tuesday, December 13th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Love the Coopers @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building. Love the Coopers is a comedy account of how “four generations of the Cooper clan come together for their annual Christmas Eve celebration, [when] a series of unexpected visitors and unlikely…
City, Culture, Hip & Prosperous, Local Government, Marketing, New Whitewater, School District
How Big Averts Bad
by JOHN ADAMS •
If it should be true that small-town Whitewater faces a choice between difficult times now or an extended decline before an out-of-town-led gentrification, that her decline will otherwise be slow but no less signficant as a result, that stakeholder (special interest) politics grips the city, and that this stakeholder politics is really an identity politics…
City, Culture, Ethnicity, Liberty, Politics, Race
Philosophy or Identity?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Imagine a choice between living in a universally free society where one was of the racial or ethnic minority, or living as a member of the racial or ethnic majority in a universally oppressive society. Which society should one choose? A man or woman, committed first to liberty, would choose to live in a free…
City, Local Government, Politics
The Simplest Explanation for Whitewater, Wisconsin’s Politics
by JOHN ADAMS •
In my last post, I mentioned Noah Rothman’s perceptive post on the failings – and they are many – of a non-ideological politics, a politics without principle. Whitewater’s politics, unlike that which Rothman describes, certainly isn’t a politics of radical populism; there’s no radicalism in Whitewater whatever. (Those who see radicalism here likely see unicorns…
City, Indolence, Local Government
Indolence Over Something as Simple as a Parking Lot Repair
by JOHN ADAMS •
Embed from Getty Images Here’s a simple observation: if full-time department managers in a small town’s government can’t develop and execute repairs to the city’s parking lots without repeated prodding from the town’s part-time council members, then there’s not much that city government can do. Full-time, publicly-paid leaders should have enough pride in their town…
City, Culture, Economics, Politics, School District, University
Plain-Spoken in a Small Town? Not Most Leaders
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s a quaint – but false – notion that people in small towns are uncommonly plain-spoken, even blunt. One sometimes sees examples of this in films or books, where residents are depicted as folksy straight-talkers (“shucks, I don’t cotton to no one abusing nobody,” etc.). I’ve never heard anyone in Whitewater speak so colorfully, and I’ve…
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, In the Heart of the Sea
by JOHN ADAMS •
City, Development, Economy, Free Markets, Government Spending, Local Government
The Local Economic Context of It All
by JOHN ADAMS •
Over a generation, Whitewater’s big-ticket public spending (where big ticket means a million or more per project in a city of about fifteen-thousand) has come with two, often-contradictory justifications: (1) that residents needed to spend so much because Whitewater was the very center of things, or (2) that residents needed to spend so much to assure that…
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, The Free State of Jones
by JOHN ADAMS •
This Tuesday, November 22nd at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Free State of Jones @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building. In The Free State of Jones, from 2016, a “disillusioned Confederate army deserter returns to Mississippi and leads a militia of fellow deserters, runaway slaves, and women…