Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset is 4:22 for 9 hours 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1665, the first account of a blood transfusion is published, in the form of a letter from physician Richard Lower to chemist Robert Boyle, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Some of our fellow residents this December opened their property-tax bills and felt an uncomfortable jolt. How did taxes jump like this? That reaction is natural and understandable. A few remarks follow about taxes.
Portions of these increases are from operations (day-to-day functions of the city) and others are from necessary — often delayed from the last decade — capital expenses (renovation or construction projects). A significant part of the operational-level increase came from a referendum for police and emergency services that voters approved this spring in April 2025.
(In fact, Whitewater’s voters have approved two public safety referendums — one for Fire & Emergency Services staffing on November 8, 2022, and one for Police and Fire & Emergency Services staffing on April 1, 2025. I supported both referendums. See In Support of Whitewater’s Fire & EMS Referendum, Fire & Rescue, Whitewater’s Most Important Public Policy Accomplishment of the Last Generation, and Referendums: “The loss of the municipal referendum [on police staffing] would have increased burdens on the workforce (as rejection would have worked an attitudinal burden all its own on existing employees.”)
My remarks concern policies of and within the City of Whitewater, where I am a resident and property owner: residing here in the city, not across the town line; owning a home here in the city, not elsewhere; voting as part of this city’s electorate, not with a different one; loving this small and beautiful community, above any other. Here now forever, happily and thankfully so.
Neither of my votes rested on what city officials, other city employees, police officers, firefighters, or emergency responders might want — my votes rested on my own judgment and discernment. I chose freely — and with confidence — as I felt best1. That’s all anyone can do, and all anyone should do.
Yet, I understand that these operational referendums came at a cost. No decision on public costs is an easy one.
This libertarian2 blogger has been a sometime critic of policing in Whitewater, but that criticism of policing was always grounded in wanting a better force, not a diminished or overburdened one3. Indeed, the traditional — and candidly correct — understanding of government’s chief role is to provide for public safety. A society that cannot or will not establish a government to advance public safety (at home and from abroad) is a society that does not understand government’s paramount justification.
When a community cannot staff emergencies reliably — when it can’t cover multiple calls, when it can’t sustain patrol, when dispatch is stretched, when responders are pulled from one crisis to gamble on another — then the rest of civic life becomes empty theater.
If anything, many of these public safety additions should have come by the end of the last decade.
These safety referendums led to most of the City of Whitewater’s increase in the operational tax levy. From 2021 to 2025, the operational levy increased $2.73 million. Of that, $2.4 million (90%) comes from the two voter-approved public referendums. The remaining 10% comprises ordinary contributors like property value changes and new construction. (Of the April 2025 safety referendum, the City of Whitewater even pared back an initial recommendation for staffing, doing what it could to request fewer personnel through its referendum.)
This matters because it punctures the easiest accusation: that Whitewater’s city council acted recklessly by going to referendum. It did not. On the contrary, this has been a cautious body. The world is full of reckless people; they are not sitting on this council. (For those seeking the reckless, I’d be happy to point readers in the right direction.)
Whitewater is a whole community of fifteen thousand, and to remain a viable community of fifteen thousand she requires stable, secure services. Voters acted sensibly by approving these measures.
Of capital costs, one can say sincerely and straightforwardly, without the slightest sarcasm — one wishes that buildings and capital lasted longer and cost less to repair. That’s not anyone’s situation — not anyone in America. It’s all costly. If some of our hiring should have come sooner (five or ten years sooner), then the same is even more true about capital projects that we might have done earlier, at less expense. The last decade’s mistakes are, however, past mistakes — all people act only from the margin of the present, looking forward.
There are other concerns some have raised about staffing additions that I’ll address in another post.
That part of the December 16 meeting of the Whitewater Council included residents’ tax and budget questions should neither surprise nor startle; we do not live in easy times. It’s not mere platitude to say so, but rather an acknowledgement of society’s collective condition.
Partway into the meeting, our community heard that this council will “see what the world would look like with a no tax increase option going into next year…two budgets, the one with nothing, no increase, and then the one with the net new construction increase, the small amount allowed under levy limits, and that’ll both go through finance committee.”
That commitment is from a local government taking matters seriously and responding prudently.
This is a budget, and these are safety referendums, deserving ongoing support.
See City of Whitewater, Understanding the Impact of the Recent Referendum on Your Property Taxes, December 2025 and Referendum Tax Outcome Explained (Video). See also FREE WHITEWATER, Whitewater Common Council Adopts a Modern Budget.
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- Nothing about my views on public policy over these many years has depended on pleasing a few (obviously); it’s enough to make (what one believes) are the right choices. ↩︎
- Tenets, plainly summarized. ↩︎
- I have never once called for the abolition of any American police force, anywhere. Critical of former leaders sometimes, but of the necessity of police forces, never. ↩︎