I would think, and perhaps you would think, too, that an entrepreneur is a man or woman who runs a private business, bearing the risks and demands of his or her enterprise. For this reason, Americans are sympathetic to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial efforts – we admire the creativity and effort of business men and women…
Innovation Center/Tech Park
Corporate Welfare, Gluttony, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation as a Fad
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Innovation is both a genuine development and a fad. In a free society, with unrestricted flows of information, capital, labor, and goods, it’s nearly inevitable that people will improve products and services in powerful, clever ways. Innovation – the word, the idea, etc. – is also a contemporary fad, the jargon of our…
Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government
If someone thinks that the Innovation Center is one of a ‘few good things’…
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
CDA, City, Development, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government
About that iButtonLink Announcement…
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
An aspiring musician tells his friends that he performed to a standing-room-only crowd at Carnegie Hall. Needless to say, they’re impressed. “It’s great that your songs drew such attendance,” they observe. “Why, yes,” the musician replies, “it must have been my music, although I suppose the free tickets and fifty-dollar gift packages might have…
Business, CDA, City, CRT, Development, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Planning
Yet Another Exercise in Standards Beneath Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
It should be a universal truth that Whitewater and Wisconsin deserve a far higher standard of diligence and review than whatever our CDA chairman believes his “gut” tells him would be good for our city and nearby area. In fact, that kind of intestinally-based level of judgment has failed this city time and again, and…
Corporate Welfare, Federal Government, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park
No, That’s Not Why There’s an Innovation Center
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Perhaps, just perhaps, Whitewater’s a laboratory for testing the theory that if one repeats a flimsy explanation long enough, it will become true. Over at the Daily Union, there’s a recent story about a university project that’s developed a smartphone app that allows users “to link organized recreational activities with social media.” One reads that…
CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Law, Official Misconduct, Open Government, State Government, Taxes/Taxation, Wisconsin
The Truth about the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
A person should be able to make simple distinctions, as between the sensible and foolish, or practical and impractical. Sometimes those distinctions should be clear, and as stark as the difference between the contents of a sample cup and a glass of Chardonnay. You’ll hear a lot locally over the next few days about a…
CDA, City, Economy, Gov. Walker, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Technology
The New Whitewater Start Up Grants (in Proper Perspective)
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority has been working on a seed capital fund (working on this fund for some time), and today the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation has announced a $150,000 matching contribution to the CDA, and two grants – each in the amount of $10,000 – for entrepreneurs from that fund. The matching grant from…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Amps, Business, and the Innovation Center
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
There was a story recently about a tenant at the Whitewater Innovation Center that makes a device for controlling a guitar amplifier. The story’s notable for four reasons: (1) it under-reports the actual cost of the Innovation Center and Tech Park by about half, (2) the current uses of the Innovation Center are so different…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation Center Executive Director Admits Building’s ‘Major Accomplishment’ Was Taking $11.5 Million in Public Money
by JOHN ADAMS • • 3 Comments
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…
Innovation Center/Tech Park
Deceptive Headline Can’t Hide Truth of Innovation Center’s Wasted Millions
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Over at the Journal Sentinel, the dodgy headline on Tom Daykin’s story can’t hide the truth of Whitewater’s taxpayer-funded ‘business incubator’ – after a year, the overwhelming majority of space is either for public tenants or is still empty. Not businesses, not private concerns, but public money overwhelmingly for new digs for public employees…or used…
Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, State Government
The Spectrum Brands State-backed Deal: Either Shameful Negligence or Shameful Dishonesty
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Consider how profligate the State of Wisconsin is with public money. Millions spent on a business relocation for a corporation that (1) withheld its identity, (2) was already in Wisconsin, (3) used flimsy worries about protests at the Capitol as way to curry favor with the Walker Administration, (4) where the head of the Wisconsin…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
The Innovation Center, Virtual and Real
by JOHN ADAMS •
Every exercise in puffery about the taxpayer-funded Innovation Center is an opportunity to demonstrate how wasteful the project really is. The gentlemen behind the project would do better to say nothing about it than to hype it yet again, but that they cannot do: insisting on the grandeur of that empty effort is who they…
City, Economy, Innovation Center/Tech Park, University
The Starin Road Extension
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s a story, from yesterday’s Daily Union, about the Starin Road extension. See, Whitewater dedicates Starin Road extension. In the story, Whitewater’s city manager advances a few justifications for the multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-financed extension: first for emergencies, then for connecting the Innovation Center to the campus, then as part of a package including bike trails. There’s…