Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon and evening thunderstorms with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:55 and sunset is 8:03 for 14 hours 8 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Teaching and Learning Committee meets at 4:30 PM and the full board meets at 6 PM. Whitewater’s Planning and Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1990, the Magellan space probe reaches Venus:
Magellan created the first (and currently the best) near-photographic quality, high resolution radar mapping of the planet’s surface features. Prior Venus missions had created low resolution radar globes of general, continent-sized formations. Magellan, however, finally allowed detailed imaging and analysis of craters, hills, ridges, and other geologic formations, to a degree comparable to the visible-light photographic mapping of other planets.
Over recent months, Whitewater’s Comprehensive Plan Advisory Work Group has met to discuss the comprehensive plan for the city. Communities of all sizes undertake this work, either because their states require comprehensive plans or because it seems prudent to those communities. In Wisconsin, statutes do not require comprehensive local planning in all cases, but instead as a consequence of local land use ordinances. Wis. Stat. § 66.1001(3) (2025–26). In effect, this legal requirement makes a comprehensive plan a practical necessity.
Planning itself is unobjectionable and is often necessary. (Hayek, for example, famously notes that planning has a definite, albeit limited, role: “planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition.”) It’s also impossible to ignore the difference in sheer command between municipal planning and national planning — local planning, even if misguided, has nowhere near the coercive power of national planning. By analogy, a homeowner’s association may sometimes overreach, but HOAs are not state regimes.
Whitewater’s is a work in progress, and I’ve no observations (nor even implications) to make today, except to highlight that the work is ongoing and worthy of consideration when completed. Embedded below is the latest recording of the local work group.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A New Ethics Ordinance and a Whitewater Comparative Analysis.
Now that’s competition — California corgi race brings fierce competition: