Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 7:46 PM for 13h 48m 01s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 49.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1985, Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.
Earlier posts this week have presented topics in open government.
On Monday: The Opportunistic Use of Open-Government Principles (‘In the Llano, Texas case, the book-banners are ideologically-motivated populists. There are, however, other groups that also use open-government principles selfishly and particularly. The most obvious situation would be traditional special interest groups (business or trade) seeking regulatory capture’).
On Tuesday: Four Reasons People Oppose Open Government (ignorance, arrogance, indolence, or malfeasance).
On Wednesday: A Suspicious Local Dialect of Opportunistic Demands for Open Government (‘It rouses skepticism that landlords, bankers, and PR men insist on open government now but were less vocal about openness when they played a more prominent role on public boards’).
Consider two situations in which the City of Whitewater has failed to meet open government standards. In the first example, of omission, the municipal government presented a lakes drawdown update that mentioned only dredging of soil but not the proposed pouring of artificial herbicide into the lakes that was, by the city’s plan at the time, a prelude to any drawdown:
When the city presented its lakes drawdown update on 8.17.21, neither any member of the city administration nor any member of the Whitewater Common Council asked a single question about the possible use of herbicides. In fact, as early as June 2021, in an unrecorded Parks & Recreation meeting, officials broached their plan to dump herbicide into the lakes. See Minutes of the 6.9.21 City of Whitewater Parks & Recreation Meeting (highlighting mine).
But in the more prominent August 17th public meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, there was no mention of this obviously controversial part of the project. It would be easy — too easy — to say that city staff was solely responsible for the omission. There were also seven elected representatives of the public in the council chambers that evening. Public awareness came not from the government but from inquisitive residents, a local news site, and this libertarian blogger. The herbicide use was sensibly abandoned.
In the second example, from November 2021 of expressed withholding, the City of Whitewater acknowledged that it received on 11.11.21 public bids for a dredging project but intentionally omitted those documents about the received bids from the 11.16.21 council agenda packet:
So, um, the lack of material but for a memo in your packet was deliberate…
When the City of Whitewater received public bids about a multi-million-dollar project on 11.11.21, the proper open-government practice would have been to place those documents in the agenda packet. When the city manager admitted his deliberate withholding of those documents during the meeting, the proper council practice would have been to direct him to display on the chamber’s projection screen each and every page of those documents (however long it might take).
Instead, the Whitewater’s city manager intentionally withheld those documents and the Whitewater Common Council took no action during the meeting to remedy this transgression against sound open-government principles.
(Whitewater has seen two years of common council errors and omissions. If the new council president avoids this fecklessness the city will be better for it.)
Mars solar eclipse captured by NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover: