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Vulnerability of a Restaurant Culture

View image | gettyimages.com Whitewater’s publicly-driven marketing may not have amounted to much, these last ten years, but there are few better advertisements for Whitewater than thriving restaurants and taverns. Good restaurants, doing well, are a sign of a successful community. Some of Whitewater’s newest restaurants also reflect a sensibility that’s significantly more contemporary than…

First Vendor Presentation of 1.21.14 to Whitewater’s Common Council

Post 8 in a series. First Vendor Presentation of 1.21.14 to Whitewater Common Council from John Adams on Vimeo. In this post, I’ll look at the first vendor presentation on the digester proposal to Whitewater’s Common Council. (Every question in this series has a unique number, assigned chronologically based on when it was asked.  All…

WEDC Slowly Crumbles

WEDC ‘CEO’ Reed Hall Looks Downcast.  You Would, Too, If You’d Disgraced All Wisconsin Yet Again.  AP Photo. On a Friday afternoon, there’s breaking news across Wisconsin. Having rejected free markets in capital, labor, and goods for cronyism and ineffectual manipulation of the economy, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation now slowly crumbles: Scott Walker calls…

Wisconsin on Pace for Most Layoff Notifications Since WEDC Created

WKOW 27: Madison, WI Breaking News, Weather and Sports Now I thought, as it’s what I have heard again, again, and again, that the WEDC was the Laser-Focused Semi-Private Job Creator of Wisconsin™.  How odd, then, to read that since the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s inception, Wisconsin is on pace for more job layoffs than…

Kidney-Selling as a Threat to the City’s Future

In a city where some have had an unfortunate tendency to favor marketing over actual accomplishments, and where ‘Whitewater Advocacy’ often amounts to the laughable exaggerations of a few insiders, loss of funding poses a double risk. First, communities across the state have to make do with less, and Whitewater (with a public campus) will…

The Cold Fusion Problem

In the late 1980s, scientists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons told the world that they had a device that demonstrated the energy-producing consequences of a nuclear reaction, but at room temperatures.  Since humanity had produced energy from nuclear reactions only at very high temperatures, this sort of fusion would have been cold (and more easily-produced)…

WEDC’s Development Gurus Fail Again

All Whitewater has heard Chancellor Telfer, City Manager Clapper, and CDA Chairman Knight tout money from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation as though it were manna from Heaven.  We were supposed to see this money as they meant us to see it, as blessing and providence.  Meanwhile,  each time those officials flacked these public funds,…

Roger Goodell could swing a gig in Wisconsin

Over at Esquire, Ben Collins writes (accurately) about Roger Goodell as “a visual representation of everything wrong with corporate America squeezed into one empty suit made of blood and money.”   See, Roger Goodell, World Class Client of Crisis Communications Experts, Still Needs to Resign.” Collins can be confident because he saw Goodell’s 9.19.14 news conference. …

In a City of Sixty-Thousand, Fifteen People Aren’t a Sign of Community Enthusiasm

Nearby Janesville is considering a downtown revitalization, and at the most-recent meeting for the large & expensive proposal, only fifteen-people attended.  The Gazette wrote about the plan with this headline: Last meeting for Janesville’s downtown plan doesn’t reflect ‘widespread championship’ (subscription req’d).  Well, no, it doesn’t.  (The online version of the Gazette had a more…

The Bad Bet Placed on an Eternal 2004

Some local proposals, in Whitewater or nearby places, look like they were designed by someone from 2004.  Some in that year assumed that local residents would support public funding for any designated purpose, that claims of job-creation would be swallowed whole, that the press would support those claims relentlessly, that press support would make a…