Daily Bread for 2.2.26: Ill-Informed Speculation About City Hiring

Good morning.

Groundhog Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 27. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset is 5:09 for 10 hours 1 minute of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Earlier today, America’s finest meteorologist predicted six more weeks of winter.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 4:30 PM. Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1653, New Amsterdam (later renamed New York) is incorporated.

---

One aspect of a libertarian position is that government should be limited. Limited here means both in size (how many people, how much in costs) and reach (how those people conduct themselves). This is not, however, the most important libertarian claim — the most important claim is, and will always be, that each person possesses individual rights.¹ See Tenets for my own description of libertarian positions.

CLAIM:

On December 2 and December 16 of last year, during public comment for Whitewater Common Council meetings, longtime and established residents asked about the number of employees that the city has recently hired, implying through their questions that the city government has embarked on profligate hiring.

CITY REPLY:

Clarification of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Changes Since 2022

Since 2022, the City’s total Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) count has increased by 17.5 FTEs. However, nearly all of these additions are the result of major organizational changes—not discretionary hiring.

A breakdown is as follows:

• 9.0 FTEs – Fire/EMS Department

These positions were created because the Fire/EMS Department became a full-time, fully staffed municipal department in 2023. Prior to this transition, the City relied heavily on a volunteer/paid-on-call model that was no longer sustainable for service demand and emergency response requirements.

• 7.5 FTEs – Police Department

These positions reflect staffing needed to meet operational requirements, ensure officer safety, improve response times, and address increasing service calls. Public safety staffing levels are routinely reevaluated to ensure the City meets industry standards and community expectations.

• 1.0 FTE – All Other Departments Combined

Outside of Fire/EMS and Police, the entire City organization has added only one net FTE in the past two years. This demonstrates that the City has not engaged in broad, organization-wide hiring, but instead has focused on staffing increases where they were operationally essential.

(Emphasis added.) See Clarification on City’s Increase in Hired Staff, City of Whitewater, January 20, 2025.

ASSESSMENT:

Anyone who has organizational knowledge — anyone who positions himself as an established man worth listening to — would look at the number of employees in an organization and ask if they are full or part-time and why they’ve been hired. Those two questions are so fundamental that even those without organizational familiarity would likely hit upon that line of inquiry.

In this case, those who have been here for years should know that this city has had voter-approved referendums that mandated additional hiring. Some of these gentlemen can tell you when, in 1975, a squirrel on Prince Street developed indigestion but somehow they can’t figure out in this small city that most of the municipal hiring has come from these recent referendums.

I’ve always — unlike others — supported people speaking and discussing. See Yesteryear’s Familiar Tune. That’s because in most cases people have interesting and valuable insights.

Sometimes, however, it becomes clear that a few entitled men are simply talking out of their hats.² This is one of those times.

See also A Baseless Speculation About the City of Whitewater’s Salary Scale.

_____

1. If libertarianism were about no more than small government, then we would all be inherited student-rental landlords complaining incessantly about our own taxes. ↩︎
2. Where hat is a euphemism. ↩︎

---

What’s Up for February 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA: