Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:27, for 15 hours, 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.
Whitewater has been in the midst of a contractual impasse between the Whitewater Unified School District and the City of Whitewater over the district’s objections to a long-standing arrangement for a school resource officer. See from FREE WHITEWATER Discussion of Whitewater’s School Resource Officer Merits a 120-Day Contract Extension, More on a Whitewater School Resource Officer, Update on School Resource Officer Discussions Between the Whitewater School District and the City of Whitewater, Status of a School Resource Officer for Whitewater’s Schools, and City of Whitewater Renews Proposal and Encourages School District to Negotiate.
A longtime resident speaks on the SRO issue at the 5.6.25 meeting of the Whitewater Common Council:
I’m not going to get into the details of the negotiations between the two boards, but help me understand how negotiation by press release is a good idea. When the city manager put out a press release laying things out, made it very public. I don’t know why they left, but I believe that [unclear] was here to deal with this issue. I know WTMJ ran a story on it. We don’t need this. They’ll get to it. They’ll get to it.
I have some questions in your packet [concerning particulars of an SRO proposal from the city]
….
But let the boards work with each other. Let’s not make this an issue of individual personalities. We don’t need any more bad press in the community.
A few remarks:
A request. A lifelong resident, who served on the old Community Development Authority, was president of the old Community Development Authority, served on the Whitewater School Board, and was president of the Whitewater School Board, asks “help me understand“ a matter of public importance.
Easily fulfilled. These are public issues involving child safety, about public officials, at public expense. The particulars of the dispute should be known to residents in the city (pop. approx. 15,000) and the whole district (pop. approx. 22,000). These details are not about mere negotiations, but about fundamental claims that should be, and in a well-ordered community must be, public knowledge.
That’s not an issue of personality, that’s an issue of policymaking.
Bad Press. The best way to avoid bad press is to do good work, and the best way to do good work is to expand the discussion to the whole community.
The particulars of the SRO proposal mentioned on 5.6.25. As it turns out, the resident’s assessment (available in the video above) on the city’s proposed SRO contract (including ill-grasped concerns1 that expenses for an SRO were ‘like double-dipping’ ) was wrong. One meeting later, on 5.20.25, the City of Whitewater answered (refuted, truly) the resident’s concerns in a memo. See City of Whitewater, Public Comment Response from May 6, 2025 Common Council Meeting, May 9, 2025.
Familiarity. Old Whitewater — a state of mind rather than a person — has always felt that a few people in this small American town should decide without informing others of vital public issues.
It’s yesteryear’s familiar tune2, as astonishingly predictable as it is predictably astonishing3.
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- These concerns were evidently erroneous when made on 5.6.25. Anyone with a causal knowledge of prior contractual arrangements would have seen as much. Still, a full memo refuting these concerns was helpful to the public. One can admire a good refutation. ↩︎
- Increasingly rare these days, because to call for closed discussions isn’t as common in town as it once was, but then a remnant still has a lack of reflection before speaking. ↩︎
- Hearing this never upsets me (although I am intellectually opposed to it): my reaction is perhaps similar to that of an ornithologist who hears once again the call of a fading species. There were years ago more people of this closed-government view in town, flocking here and there. ↩︎
Italy’s Mount Etna sends huge ash plume into air during eruption: