Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 6:18 and sunset is 7:30 for 13 hours 12 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany mounts a false flag attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, creating an excuse to attack Poland the following day, thus starting the Second World War in Europe. (The Gleiwitz assailants were not Polish but were German SS officers wearing Polish uniforms.)
Tonight, the Whitewater Common Council will meet in special session to consider an ethics complaint.
There are, this morning, four remarks to be made on this matter.
First, the council should consider the complaint, filed on February 3, diligently and dispassionately.
Second, the council now considers this matter because of an inability of Whitewater’s Ethics Board to reach a dispositive determination when this same complaint was before that body earlier this year.
Third, the inability of Whitewater’s Ethics Board to reach a dispositive determination lies fundamentally in deficiencies in our municipal code’s provisions for adjudicating ethics complaints. See Whitewater, Wis., Code of Ordinances ch. 7.04 (2026). I’ll demonstrate this third claim in a future post; it’s not hard — it’s an obvious conclusion for any reasonable person who reviews the relevant portions of our current code. These deficiencies do not lie in some dark mystery or conspiracy — those who drafted the code (enacted in 1991) made mistakes of draftsmanship that can be corrected. Correcting these deficiencies should be — and, given the council’s prior discussions along these lines, no doubt will be — a future task of the Whitewater Common Council.
Fourth, a diligent and dispassionate review necessarily requires an adjudication setting aside feelings, favorable or unfavorable, toward any of the named parties in the complaint. It is natural to have feelings toward others, and sometimes those feelings will be strong toward or away from one person or another. It is possible, and necessary, to set those feelings aside when considering an ethics complaint. Reason should govern feeling, and in this and other cases, it can. Although this has too seldom been Whitewater’s practice in recent decades, it should always have been — and can yet become — our standard.
The agenda and an accompanying staff memo appear immediately below:
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Forthcoming topics (in no particular order): Development in Downtown Whitewater (Follow-Up), A New Ethics Ordinance, Polling Places in the City (Further Considerations), and Steps for a Public Interest Campaign.
Dinosaur footprints become puddles after Colorado rainstorm: