Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will see intervals of clouds and sun with a brief shower or two and a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:41 and sunset is 8:02 for 14 hours 19 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Ethics Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1992, Michigan ratifies a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the Constitution making the 27th Amendment law. This amendment bars the Congress from giving itself a mid-term pay raise.
Over three months ago, a longtime resident1 contended during public comment at the 1.20.26 session of the Whitewater Common Council that a demographic projection showed that Whitewater would lose 3,000 people in population by 2040. See Whitewater Common Council, January 20, 2026 Video @ 46:54.
On 2.9.26, this libertarian blogger wrote an assessment of that claim, concluding that the resident confused the authorship of the demographic projection and misunderstood or ignored the limitations of that projection’s conclusions. See Over Reliance on a Single Population Projection (outlining the reasons that “solid, rational planning for 2040 beats picking — cherry-picking, really — one estimate in remarks to the Whitewater Common Council.”)
Later, Later, that same over reliance on a single projection spread through others onto social media.
Honestly, to have the the hubris of some of these gentlemen in believing they can take a single demographic projection (and ignore other projections and different methodologies) is nearly satirical — something like an economic model that relies on one positive quarter from 2023.
One should be clear that this reliance on one projection was a transparent effort to undermine a proposed development project by throwing anything and everything at the wall.
Well, as one should have seen months ago, any considered analysis of several demographic projections (not simply a single projection that satisfies one’s argument!) concludes that
After consideration of both high and low forecasts, the [Whitewater Forward] plan uses a forecast based on an annual average resident growth rate of 0.4%, with some growth in local student population through 2030 based on the University’s strategic goals.
See RDG Planning & Design, Population Forecasts for Whitewater (2026).
Indeed, of the four major population projections for Whitewater that RDG Planning reviews, only one of them shows a decline. The one projection that estimates a decline relies, as I noted at the time, on a “method [that] 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.”
RDG notes what’s unique about Whitewater that a model projecting decline would miss:
decline of the student population after 2020 [i.e., a temporary distortion from the pandemic] is likely influencing the projection for Whitewater, along with the unique population age cohorts from university students that factor into the birth and death model.
No one need be a demographer (as I am not) to grasp that serious argumentation requires looking at several studies, considering whether one of them might have (as in this matter) a different methodology, and then fairly and accurately representing those various demographic projections and their approaches.
Regrettably, that’s not what one of Whitewater’s longtime residents did this winter. It’s what RDG Planning & Design’s Population Forecasts for Whitewater (2026) does this spring.
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- Local landlord, former Community Development Authority member, former Community Development Authority chairman, former school board member, former school board president. ↩︎
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Particular Species of Democrat, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Inside The Old Skydiving Plane Hunting Drones in Ukraine: