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…
Local Government
Local Government, Politics
Stakeholder’s Just Another Word for Special Interest
by JOHN ADAMS •
In a small town like Whitewater, there’s much emphasis on finding and listening to stakeholders. In fact, local policymaking is mostly stakeholder policymaking. As stakeholders aren’t merely and exclusively residents, but are more often influential residents and local special interests (business groups, business people, etc.) there’s a double-counting of connected residents, as though one gets…
Local Government, Newspapers, Politics, Press
Fake News Was a Local Problem Before It Was a National One
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s post-election consternation about the amount of bogus news sites on social media. This concern pairs with the worry that fact-checking from major news organizations doesn’t work well when candidates simply lie and refuse either correction or apology. This may be a recent national development – at least on this scale – but local news for…
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…
America, City, Federal Government, Local Government, Politics
The National-Local Mix
by JOHN ADAMS •
City, Culture, Local Government, Politics
Twenty-Five Years On: School Board & City
by JOHN ADAMS •
Alternative title: Culture Advances While Beyond Politics Far Lags Behind. Over at the Banner, there’s a new feature entitled, “A mini-look at local history – a new Banner Monday project!” The 10.10.16 entry is about two public actions from twenty-five years ago. I’m all for history (local or otherwise), but the entry is telling coming from a…
Local Government, Politics, Press
‘He Said, She Said’
by JOHN ADAMS •
Alternative title — False Balance While Dealing with Liars, Exaggerators, and Other Political Miscreants. There’s considerable consternation in the national press that traditional ‘he said, she said’ political coverage, where each side of a question gets an equal, unchallenged say, doesn’t work when one candidate is an inveterate liar: A certain etiquette has long governed…
City, Government Spending, Local Government
Local Government’s Not a Profession of Faith
by JOHN ADAMS •
Local government, in its existence, is not a profession of faith, the way a credal religion is. It’s a limited delegation of popular sovereignty to produce definite, specific results. Words alone are insufficient. (Needless to say, that’s true of religious belief, too: the Church rightly expects that faith leads to care for the poor and…
City, Environment, Local Government, Negligence, Water
Pavement Project Causes Lake Contamination in Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS •
WKOW 27: Madison, WI Breaking News, Weather and Sports WKOW-TV of Madison reports on what everyone in Whitewater can see: that oil from a paving project has spread from that project. See, Pavement project causes lake contamination in Whitewater @ WKOW-TV. Three key points: 1. Unobservant: city officials took two days to discover this. WKOW’s…
City, Culture, Local Government, Politics
Do you remember when Gen. MacArthur called for dedication to ‘Duty, Honor, Country, and Local Government’?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Do you remember when Gen. MacArthur called for dedication to ‘Duty, Honor, Country, and Local Government’? Neither do I. He called, of course, for dedication to Duty, Honor, Country. It wouldn’t have occured to him to exhort a commitment to municipal government. America speaks – when she speaks most movingly – in the language of…
Business, City, Environment, Hip & Prosperous, Lifestyle, Local Government
Places Trying to Cope
by JOHN ADAMS •
City, Culture, Local Government, Newspapers, School District, University
Whitewater’s Mentoring Gap
by JOHN ADAMS •
Looking back ten years (or nine in the case of UW-Whitewater), one finds at the helm of Whitewater’s public institutions leaders who so very much embodied Old Whitewater: Steinhaus, Brunner, Coan, Telfer (beginning in ’07). They were the perfect representatives of Old Whitewater, where Old Whitewater is an attitude, not an age: narrow, grandiose, mediocre, producing…
City, Local Government, Politics
The Importance of Why
by JOHN ADAMS •
In our state, local candidates have an early-January deadline by which to declare their candidacies for the 2016 election. In a small town, there’s bound to be some curiosity about who’s running. That curiosity, however, is merely a superficial – and often personality-driven – concern. It’s not who, but why someone seeks office that matters. Why…
City, Culture, Local Government, Politics
Commentary & Chronicle
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
I’ve been writing, happily, from Whitewater for years. Writing like this has, to my mind, two aspects: as commentary and as chronicle. Blogging as commentary is obvious, of course. Blogging as chronicle, however is just as important, if not more so. One writes sometimes to advocate, but always to describe. Longtime readers know that I have…