Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 6:58 and sunset is 5:20 for 10 hours 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 39.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5:15 PM and there is a Whitewater Forward Community Round Table at 6 PM.
On this day in 1763, the Treaty of Paris, also known as the Treaty of 1763, was signed on 10 February 1763 following Great Britain and Prussia’s victory over France and Spain during the Seven Years’ War. The treaty’s provisions included the ceding of what is now Wisconsin (among many other places) from France to Britain.
Yesterday’s post addressed the over-reliance of one resident on one population projection for Whitewater in 2040. See Over Reliance on a Single Population Projection.
How odd, though, to hear a longtime resident, local landlord, former Community Development Authority member, former Community Development Authority chairman, former school board member, and former school board president warning of Whitewater’s supposed demographic decline.
(Every resident should and must have a right to speak at public comment. That right includes speaking bleakly about Whitewater’s future, speaking bleakly about Whitewater’s future on flimsy grounds, and even speaking bleakly about Whitewater’s future on flimsy grounds while ignoring one’s own below-average record of policymaking in this town.)
Let’s assume this gentleman believes, far too credulously, that a future of decline awaits the city.
If so, then what was he doing all those years on the Community Development Authority and school board? All those meetings, all those plans, and indeed all those controversies, only to lead to decline? Why did he bother?
One possibility is that he and others spent the last decade accomplishing nothing that would last. In this possibility, they were wasting others’ time and futures while live-action role playing at interminable meetings.
I’ll not say that our future is so bleak as that gentleman claims, but I do think he was wasting public opportunity after public opportunity. See from 2018 A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA (‘This new EOZ program allows for private investments to be made, with significant tax benefits, in lower income communities like ours that need a boost to their economy,” said Larry Kachel, Chair of the Whitewater Community Development Authority’). (Emphasis added.)
A lower-income community for many residents over many years, but likely not a lower income for that former chairman of the Community Development Authority. (Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ve been misreading all these years. When I see the title of that public body, it says Community Development not Chairman Development.)
Wasting money, too, it turns out. See from that last decade Meeper Technology Loan Investigation, Memo and Documents (writing off more than $750,000 in loans).
It’s also possible that he simply wants to disparage the work of those now in office who will not bend to his will.1
And so, and so, in this man’s telling, it’s a slope of decline on the way to 2040. Well, if so, in his public roles he played a part in placing us on that supposed path. Of those who told the community time and again in the last decade that they were paramount — can’t they see that if Whitewater will have a bleak future, then they are culpable in that sad fate?
And yet, and yet, as I am a free-market man, and not a self-interested incumbent landlord, I do not share his pessimism (whether real or feigned, whether genuine or spiteful). Although I’m a tragic optimist, optimism is the noun, modified only by an awareness of human loss even in good times.
And look, and look — this is a city of many thousands, interacting freely every day. From those many come myriad possibilities in a spontaneous order. This community is not the possession of one man, whether landlord, city official, or libertarian blogger2. This community’s finest work has happened and will happen apart from any of those roles.
How sad, truly, that this isn’t obvious to everyone.
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- Of this second possibility I have no assessment to make, being neither a psychiatrist nor a priest; this libertarian blogger neither takes patients nor hears confessions. My role is much smaller. ↩︎
- Whitewater belongs to everyone yet no one. ↩︎
What happens when a satellite burns up?: