City Leaders’ Residency

Whitewater’s 2.21.13 Common Council meeting included a discussion – and change – to the city’s standing requirement that key leaders of the city live within the city limits. After consideration, Common Council voted to establish the area of the Whitewater Unified School District as the area in which principal municipal leaders must live.

Quick thoughts:

1. Ambivalence. Although I’ve previously advocated a residency requirement for leaders, I understand and respect the counter-argument that no one should be told where to live. In fact, some of the sternest emails I’ve ever received have been from libertarians who think it’s wrong to argue in favor of a residency requirement.

I’ve previously advocated in favor of a requirement – to bind leaders closely to the city residents that pay them — but it’s an ill-fitting advocacy for a libertarian.

If the requirement goes away, I’ll not shed any tears. (I’m not lachrymose by nature, anyway.)

2. Culture. The unwillingness of leaders to reside within the city limits belies the ceaseless claims that Whitewater has had a successful, full-time managerial culture this last decade. ‘Coaching this’ and ‘vision that,’ but no one has been able to persuade all other leaders to live within the city limits.

For every time someone’s flacked how well our full-time administration has functioned, here’s a rebuttal: not well enough these last years to entice – rather than compel – leaders to live in town.

But in the end, if living here is so terribly hard for leaders that they have to be compelled to live in the city, Whitewater might as well junk the requirement altogether.

One will know when Whitewater is living up to even half the claims of its political boosters when leaders voluntarily pick homes and apartments within the city proper.

3. Partiality. Whitewater’s problem isn’t consistency, really, but partiality. Her difficulty isn’t simply doing things the same way (although that has been a definite problem), but rather doing things different ways for biased reasons.

It’s partiality that’s a problem in a small town that favors personality over principle. Feeling entitled to special treatment is not a principle – it’s (lamentable) pride.

Select access to favors and deals, the narcissism that undergirds an overweening sense of entitlement, topped with lies to prop up one’s false claims: it’s low and crude and embarrassing.

If there’s no requirement – or at least if there will be a more generous one — there’ll be one less restriction someone will try to circumvent, on the theory that he or she is entitled to do so.

This lessening of restrictions will, in this case, also free Whitewater’s police chief from her contractual obligation to live within the city limits. There’s a certain practicality there: it’s quicker to lift a requirement than wait forever while it remains unfulfilled.

4. Wisconsin. Gov. Walker proposes, and the legislature is almost certain to approve, an end to local government residency requirements in Wisconsin. As the GOP has a majority in both chambers, an adopted budget containing a ban on residency requirements is likely to come in June. Lifting of residency requirements will come quickly thereafter, if not immediately upon the new budget going into effect.

Best guess: they’ll be no local-government residency requirements in this state, soon enough.

After requirements, this municipal administration’s need to persuade leaders to live within the city whose residents employ them will still remain.