Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:00 and sunset is 5:18 for 10 hours 18 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 49.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board holds a Legislative Breakfast at 8:30 AM. Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1775, the British Parliament declares Massachusetts in rebellion.
On January 20, during public comment at a Whitewater Common Council session, a resident1 spoke about a population projection that he saw for Whitewater in 2040. His claim and an assessment of that claim appear below.
CLAIM:
Your report that you did for fire departments and EMS in Walworth County, which I believe came out in October of 2025, had some DOA numbers in them, from the Department of Administration, and they are projecting that Whitewater will lose 3,000 people in its population between now and 2040. They originally did it in 2020 and then updated it in 24, and that’s in the report that was done for the Walworth County Fire and EMS, breaking it down by individual communities.
See Whitewater Common Council, January 20, 2026 Video @ 46:54.
ASSESSMENT:
To begin, this wasn’t a City of Whitewater study. The study was from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. See Rob Henken & Ashley Fisher, One Step Ahead: Preparing for the Future of Fire and Emergency Medical Services in Walworth County (Wisconsin Policy Forum Oct. 2025).
The population projection that the study cites comes from Wisconsin’s Department of Administration (DOA), through the Demographic Services Center (DSC), as part of Wisconsin’s latest municipal projection series. See Wis. Dep’t of Admin., Demographic Servs. Ctr., Population Projections. Anyone who is serious about public policy should mark the difference between a projection and an inevitable outcome.
Any figures like these are hard for anyone not in the field to assess. There’s a huge risk of misunderstanding. There are a few things one can say confidently, however. DOA’s projections are statewide and standardized. That’s to be expected: the DOA does not have the resources to build a specific, boutique model for every municipality. It uses a method that can be applied across the map, so to speak, in a way that places local communities in larger totals.
DOA’s own methodology explains its approach: it uses recent annualized change (including a comparison that runs from 2010 to 2020 and another that incorporates 2020 to a recent estimate period), projects forward, and then adjusts smaller-area projections so they align with the totals implied by county projections.
That approach does produce a baseline across Wisconsin. But every method has a flaw: the method also produces a projection that can be highly sensitive to short-run disruption — especially in places that are unusual in ways for which the model does not account.
Whitewater is one of those places.
The City of Whitewater’s own housing report flags the reality that the pandemic era and enrollment shifts create unusual conditions for interpreting population patterns, and it explains why it preferred a different approach for its own local projection work. See City of Whitewater, City of Whitewater Housing Report (Feb. 2022), prepared with assistance from Vandewalle & Assocs.
If the years one uses for a trendline are abnormal years, then the projection isn’t destiny but rather short-run disturbances extrapolated to 2040. A more recent report that doesn’t account for local fluctuations is less useful than one prepared a bit earlier that does account for those fluctuations.
There are other local-specific reports that show much higher projections. Whitewater’s Comprehensive Plan materials include a projection series reaching 19,250 by 2040. See City of Whitewater, City of Whitewater Comprehensive Plan: Chapter Two—Vision and Opportunities (adopted July 18, 2017). Whitewater’s Housing Report (cited above) projects 16,016 in 2040 using a linear growth methodology.
If one wants the most reliable way to think about Whitewater in 2040, one wouldn’t choose any single projection:
- 13,091 is a state scenario produced by a standardized statewide method (DOA).
- 16,016 is a local moderate-growth scenario offered in a housing planning context. (Housing Report).
- 19,250 is an older plan-era high-growth assumption used for long-range planning (Comprehensive Plan).
Anyone who tells you that one of these numbers for 2040 is a ‘fact’ is simply wrong. The only fact is that there are several published projections.
Solid, rational planning for 2040 beats picking — cherry-picking, really — one estimate in remarks to the Whitewater Common Council.
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- Longtime resident, local landlord, former Community Development Authority member, former Community Development Authority chairman, former school board member, former school board president. ↩︎
When neutron stars merge, things get messy: