More Predictable Than an Atomic Clock

If one read beforehand the agenda for last night’s common council meeting (1.21.20), one would have seen the applicants for various boards (particularly the Whitewater Community Development Authority). Seeing them, and knowing what the last ten years on the CDA have been like, one could have confidently predicted which candidate would be recommended for appointment. Indeed, an atomic clock, so very accurate in its timekeeping, would not have been more predictable. Whitewater’s Community Development Authority – a public body meant to serve all the community – has been a failure in meaningful metrics but a great success in finding members mostly preferred by a few local landlords and bankers. (Obvious point – I’m sure all the applicants are fine people, but a change of pace is needed at the Whitewater CDA, of backgrounds that stretch the horizons of that public body.)

Appointments don’t have to follow along yesterday’s lines.

Yet they have been this way, and it’s a measure of Whitewater’s policymaking failure that she frets over the ‘same ten people’ serving on public boards in the city, while local government picks from among the preferences of those same ten people, and so she doesn’t expand the reach of local government much beyond those same ten people.

Embedded below is the relevant portion of the meeting. The full video is also available online.

Someone asked me a bit ago why I posted earlier today on Perspectives Narrow or Wide, mentioning in that post a letter to the editor from 2017. Here’s why: because the perspective in that letter from 2017 still holds noticeable sway in Whitewater, very much to the community’s disadvantage. A conventional and narrow perspective, fawning to one family or another, is unsuited to a robust and confident people (as Americans are and should always be).

These aren’t easy topics. We would do much better in a world of easier times and easier issues. We’ve not seen that world in many years (although other parts of America have).

It’s been a difficult decade for Whitewater (and many other rural communities); after so much time, it’s hard to see how promises now about doing better in the future are to anyone’s credit.

However much one may disagree with the solutions of the New Dealers (as I do), I find it impossible not to admire their sense of urgency and commitment to others. They broke from the past. See On the Upcoming 2011 Whitewater, Wisconsin Municipal Budget (“I’m not a progressive, but at least the New Dealers knew how to depict conditions honestly, so that they might spur their fellow citizens to action. Dorothea Lange’s pictures were haunting, yet useful”).

There’s no structural impediment that has prevented an attitudinal change in Whitewater. The fault is within us, that we have not embraced the urgency these times demand, exhibiting along the way an excessive deference.

It’s a great tragedy in many of these small rural places that next time should have happened long ago.

Addendum: When voting on recommendations for applicants to different boards or commissions, there should be a vote on each recommendation for each board. As it is, the Whitewater Common Council votes on all of these recommendations in one vote to approve. Now, councilmembers don’t have to declare for or against any given recommendation (and instead less controversial recommendations are – collectively – leveraged against more controversial ones).