From the Janesville Gazette, June 5, 2012: Brunner credits team effort for successes at Whitewater.
From the Daily Union, August 22, 2012: Whitewater council mulls dismal budget assumptions.
One might try to reconcile these accounts, of course, but the effort would be pointless. The former’s just an odd history, an ill-timed goodbye gift to Whitewater’s last municipal manager.
These stories represent two very different ways of seeing the city: by wishful yearning so intense it’s simply a fiction, or by a candid look at life in the city as we know it to be. One insists that the city is only what one says it is; the other that the city can only be what one makes of it. Candor in the first case is an impediment to the grand dreams of a few; candor in the second case is the only way by which the plain dreams of the many will be, truly if imperfectly, fulfilled.
There’s a generational tension in this, too, not wholly of age but of outlook: those who insist upon a sparkling view of the present are fewer in number each year; their decline is irreversible. In part that’s through retirement from the scene, but even more so it’s through the inescapable truth that this city — or any city — cannot be made better through fairytales, awards, and grand projects that are, collectively, just dumb show.
We can (and will) have a better future – but getting to that better time will test this small community. Some things will have to be set aside, just as time itself will set aside the empty claims of the last decade. Yet, no matter how hard — and there are both enduring fiscal and new environmental challenges facing the city — we’ll get through all this.
There’s much to say about all this, in a thorough and deliberate way, and no time better than in the weeks and months ahead.
Our city’s fiscal problems did not begin yesterday, but they can be overcome.
Not simply managed, but truly overcome.