Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 50. Sunrise is 5:26 and sunset is 8:17, for 14 hours, 51 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1881, the American Red Cross is established by Clara Barton in Dansville, New York.
At its regular session last night, the Whitewater Common Council approved a counterproposal to the Whitewater Unified School District for a school resource officer. The council sensibly declined to submit a request-for-proposal of the type the district has crafted. The video segment of the council discussion appears above, and a few remarks on the discussion appear below.
Action of the Common Council: The council approved unanimously a motion (1) to decline a formal proposal to the district’s RFP request and to re-offer the April 15th council-approved a 120-day contract extension, (2) to include in reply to the district an outline of other steps the parties could take and contractual provisions they could make to reach an agreement. See Video @ 16:31.
This is a reasonable response of the kind that takes place in negotiations between either public or private organizations across the state. In fact, it’s an agreeable, cooperative counter-proposal. No one familiar with negotiations could reasonably see this otherwise.
Discussion. This discussion took place in open session, but might have also taken place in open session and a closed session with a return to open session afterwards. Either way (open only or open-closed-back-to-open), all of this was a matter-of-fact discussion toward a legal agreement between two local public institutions. Even if there had been a closed session, one could always return to open session and announce that no action would be taken.
There are some clear-cut issues (more on that next), but the discussion among these council members does not justify the concern that the temperature needed to be lowered. This entire discussion was conducted, as it should have been, dispassionately and at a low temperature, so to speak.
The RFP from the district. There’s a key portion of this matter that I’ve yet to discuss, but that officials from the city, police department, and the city’s counsel spotted (and were sure to spot, as it’s so plain). Video @ 1:23 and Video @ 2:45.
It’s right there in view: the district’s RFP is not, in fact, anything like a conventional request-for-proposal — it’s an adhesion contract masquerading as a request-for-proposal. (Adhesion contracts are boilerplate agreements used between parties of unequal bargaining power where the stronger party expects acceptance on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.) These are equal parties; anyone wanting to keep the temperature low would avoid sending the other party a hurry-up-sign-on-the-dotted-line deal.
Give and take negotiations between equal parties don’t involve adhesion contracts.
The right community solution may take time, but is plain to see. It’s the same one advocated at FREE WHITEWATER throughout: discussions between the parties should strive to achieve an agreement between Whitewater’s schools and the city’s police department as promptly as possible.
At least Whitewater doesn’t (yet) have this problem — Colorado police chase a loose pet kangaroo: