Whitewater, Wisconsin has a common council form of government. There are seven members to the common council, five elected from districts across parts of the city, and two elected city wide, from across the town. Together, they are both the legislative, and executive, authority in town.

We have not merely a common council, but also a city manager, an appointed official who serves for a specified contractual term. Often, one will hear that we have a council-manager form of government.

The city manager’s position is not a true executive, as an elected mayor would be. It’s an appointed position for a term, and it has no independent power apart from the common council that appoints. There are specified duties, under our ordinances and Wisconsin law, but the authority of the position does not derive from, for example, a direct election of the municipal manager by the town’s voters.

Nor is the managerial authority like that of a parliamentary system, where the executive authority derives directly from the legislative, as a British government would derive from Parliament itself (and be liable to dissolution and new elections without sufficient legislative support).

You may have heard, and imagined, that small towns like ours must surely have a mayor, elected by the townsfolk, who governs wisely and well with their support.

We have no one so elected. We have a manager, and not a mayor; unelected, and not a direct choice of the people; responsible for conventional tasks, but never with a popular mandate.

Our situation produces several problems that make governance hard. First, our elected officials often come to office with only a hundred or so votes, from a population – large to us, if not the outside world – of fourteen thousand.

Even an at large representative will likely come to office with only several hundred votes, still a small fraction of the entire town.

State and federal candidates typically receive far more votes city wide than our local politicians.

There’s no one who can claim a mandate under those conditions. We had a candidate recently declare herself, I recall, The Voice of the People, but that would only be convincing if all the town had laryngitis.

Second, the position of city manager may by design be meant as a limited and appointed task, but it’s not long before the manager-bureaucrat begins to assert himself as though he were elected by acclaim.

So, even in a rural town, one hears about the city manager’s vision, etc. It’s not long before a career bureaucrat becomes instrumental – at least in his own eyes – to the survival of a small town founded without any bureaucrats at all.

Worse still, there may slowly develop the habit of cherry picking popular tasks, or shifting between insistence that managerial authority is broad (so that the city manager can insert himself in local matters he finds interesting or laudable) and that it’s narrow (and so problems are really the common council’s fault).

Third, it’s governance that suffers in this arrangement – the basic and fundamental assurance of a citizen’s or resident that rights will be respected and laws enforced fairly.

That’s the promise of America for all Americans, and small towns are respected, from among many reasons, for the individual respect and consideration each resident would like.

Some in Los Angeles would have to spend hours just to get to a city office, and then sit while hundreds of people milled around, a significant portion of them having no idea why.

We don’t have that problem; we can find city offices without a battle against traffic.

Yet management and governance are not the same. We have a small town that has acquired urban conceits of management, planning, and public relations over simple yet fundamental governance.

One of the attributes of many small rural towns is that they risk stagnation, and thereafter decline, either relative or absolute.

For many in America, the idea of any decline seems absurd. Residents of a Maryland suburb may worry about too much growth, and crowding.

Believe it or not, we have some who share the same worries about growth. Your Maryland suburb might be ten times larger, yet we have residents in our rural town who would be as vexed about growth here as your neighbors in Maryland might be.

Yet even though we’re a small town, among us there will be different views, and a different impact, to and about growth. Not everyone will feel stagnation and decline in the same way.

A merchant may quickly notice a drop in traffic, in town, and thus in her store. The same cannot be said for city bureaucrats, or workers with private-sector jobs not dependent on the city’s economy. For them, less is not so immediately painful. A five percent decline in retail traffic may mean nothing; for the merchant, the same will not be true.

There’s a gap of this kind, even in a small place – between those who feel stagnation and decline acutely, and those who feel it scarcely at all.

It’s only after several storefronts and businesses are shuttered that residents may notice; it may be far longer still until those residents feel a damaging influence from the closings.

A bureaucrat, with a publicly-supported income, has even less reason to worry. After a while, a place that was built on individual initiative becomes a place where a few regulate without a feel for those who have to make their way in the world on private achievement.

It’s easy for a bureaucrat to talk about customer service, when his customers are a mostly captive audience. It’s hard to see how it happens in a place that’s not very large, and where city politicians and career-appointees should be close to their constituents.

Yet, even when those constituents are described as customers, the result is the same: a surprising gap between bureaucrats and ordinary residents.

In my next post, I will discuss how thin and fragile is the constituency for local leaders.

America is a dynamic and competitive place. The rise of America, from defeat of a haughty empire, her expansion across an entire continent, to her current prosperity owe to individual liberty, free enterprise, and a hope for peaceful commerce with the world beyond.

A people with these values could not be expected to stand still, live complacently, or remain unchanging. The liberty we enjoy as a right requires no fixed outcome. America has no definite end, no fixed objective – liberty is a daily condition, to be exercised and expressed as each generation sees fit.

Those who founded the city lived in conditions different from our own, and we’d have had no progress at all if we lived in the same conditions of industry, medicine, and technology. Machines they could scarcely imagine – and surely could not create through planning – improve our daily lives.

America’s invitation to the American dream is not an invitation to an unchanging, white-tie affair. She is not so formal and fixed in her invitation – America sends out only come-as-you-are invitations.

There are some here, perhaps a few hundred, who are very sure that they have a right to rescind America’s genuine invitation, and replace it with a substitute. No matter how shrilly they insist that the substitution represents a genuine representation, it’s a betrayal of both Whitewater’s actual origins and America’s dynamic promise.

The students who came here more than a generation ago sometimes lived as borders in local homes, taking a room within a private homeowner’s house. Those where the conditions of student life in many places at that time, decades ago. That arrangement was surely comfortable for otherwise suspicious locals, who had students under their watchful eyes, in metaphor and practice.

Yet, beyond our small town, American college life was changing. As we grew richer, so did our children, and in their waxing prosperity they came to expect places of their own, with other students, without status as borders in a house.

Increasing prosperity for our nation changed expectations and abilities for students. You can imagine how this has affected some longtime residents – how it has unsettled them, how they long for the old way of borders and busybodies.

Too bad for those who want that older way – American success and advancing standards have swept these old ways aside, and they will never be back. Those who wish we might go back, as a city, have no hope whatever that their wishes will be fulfilled.

America extends an invitation to students with modern and prosperous expectations, and nothing a few hundred complainers will say or do can resist that changed national standard.

What these small and selfish people want – to hold others back through every addled and asinine regulation imaginable – cannot succeed. Three hundred million people across this continent have established a new standard that no one here can roll back.

That doesn’t mean they won’t try. Try they have, and will. The outcome will be the same, there efforts amounting to nothing.

And what of the many immigrants, most from Mexico, who have come here? They are more numerous than our last census count suggests, and now are surely more than one in ten of our population.

Other rural towns would consider it a deliverance that any number so large might move among them, stay, and raise families. We have the dream of so many other places, and yet a few here secretly and quietly consider it a nightmare.

There are few things more disgusting, despicable, and empty than Americans – of all people – who despise immigrants. It’s as close to a perversion of the American dream as one can imagine.

It’s also imprudent and self-destructive. Our economic future depends on attracting others, to come and live among us. We should be grateful for every last one.

When some oppose students, or immigrants, on the basis of what’s supposedly good for Whitewater, we should be clear that that opposition is in opposition to American progress and principle.

Small rural towns in America have their best chance of survival as small, rural, American towns.

By contrast, opposition to American opportunities and progress only condemns a town to comparative decline, no matter the steadfast opposition of a dimwitted, listless few.

If you’ve read recent studies or articles about small town America, then you have read that many rural towns struggle to maintain residents. They find themselves shriveling and withering, unable to assure a prosperous future for the next generation of residents.

It’s a hard problem, and efforts to overcome a decline in population – no matter how strenuous and sincere – often fail. The best efforts of these places might seem laughable, were they not so sad.

Whitewater, Wisconsin does not confront the desiccation that afflicts these other places. Two groups – vibrant and energetic – give Whitewater opportunities and hope that shriveling places elsewhere do not have.

We have thousands of students on a campus in town, and thousands of immigrants, mostly from Mexico, who have come to Whitewater. These groups offer us possibilities that other rural towns cannot hope to match.

Without them, this town would collapse – as it once did – into poverty and disgrace. The City of Whitewater, and all its proud Scandinavian and German residents, would live in a bankrupt and decayed shell of a town without students on campus and so many immigrants willing to venture their futures here.

Why did they come? America brought them here – the American dream of an education or a job, the hope of a good life regardless of race or ethnicity or class. America at her best supports and encourages as much, as part of the dream of a better life.

We are a nation of individualists and optimists, and the American way encourages respect and tolerance for diverse dreams and ambitions. It hasn’t always been so, surely. Some of our worst moments have come when we have departed from our fundamental principles.

In their hopes and ambitions, the students and immigrant newcomers to our community are closer to the founders of this town than to those who now claim to represent their legacy.

They’re far closer – regardless of age or ethnicity, those who come here for an education or a place in the community embody an ambition and adventurous spirit more like those who settled here than long-standing residents who decry their presence.

They did not come uninvited – America extended an invitation, and a certain and specific one. In my next post, I’ll describe that specific American invitation, and why it threatens a certain, small group of stodgy, dull, and listless residents.

Walk around Whitewater, and talk to those who are elderly, lifetime residents, and you’re sure to catch their nostalgia for an older Whitewater. About the Whitewater of their youth, and how the town has changed, I will comment later.

For now, I’ll describe how the present day residents, often Scandinavian-American and German-Americans, among our town’s elderly are mistaken to think that they embody the same industry and initiative as their forebears.

They don’t represent that settler’s initiative, and they don’t represent modern American trends well, either.

First, our past. We’re big in nostalgia, on that hazy backward glance, without the real reflection and pain that the glance might occasion.

Those who came here came to hard conditions, and faced those conditions alone. They brought their families with them, or had children here, in conditions more primitive than those on the east coast. Children were born, raised and taught, and set out on their own, in conditions that would call for the intervention of child welfare officials today.

In writing as much, I may sound like one of those elderly residents myself. I have a different point to make. Having lived here and claimed a heritage that was built on initiative and improvisation, they now find themselves opposed to others, against the initiative and improvisation of newcomers.

This is a dynamic in many places, but in ours, too: that the elderly whose place in the community owes to settlers and pioneers now contend against a modern-day pioneering spirit of newcomers, from elsewhere in America or from Mexico.

You can guess that the original settlers to this place were a hard scrabble lot. These were not fancy people. Many were rough and tumble, having come from European villages that were little more than shabby, dank hovels.

Now, though, one would think that every Scandinavian or German background was one of opulence and privilege, and that it is only others, from other parts of the world, who are vulgar.

Hardly.

Now I have mentioned the elderly, but it’s not only some of our septuagenarians and octogenarians who feel this way. There’s a certain kind of working class or middle class resident, of any age, who feels the threat of the new.

And in response to this threat, they support regulations, restrictions, and requirements that would never have been placed on them. Like graduates of a college who demand higher standards only after receiving their degrees, these residents want to raise the entrance now that they’re in.

From the individualism on which America was founded, they now espouse restrictions for others, all in the name of preserving a community that could not have come into existence under similar restrictions.

What, specifically, of the new threatens our elderly or long standing residents? They are among the greatest advantages of our town, ones that preserve us, and offer hope for the future, but are the very things that some residents find most threatening.

I’ll consider both in my next post.

In 1837, a group of settlers left Milwaukee for the area now Whitewater, and arrived after little under a week’s travel. They were the first settlers to arrive at a place where only tribes had lived before.

If you’re reading from the east coast, 1837 may not seem nearly as early or as hazardous as original settlements in your home state. It was hard, though, to travel the distance from Milwaukee, over uncertain terrain.

Those early settlers came to Whitewater with ambition, commitment, and dedication to a hard task. Yet they came without something that so many earlier colonial settlements had – they came without the backing of king and financiers, without a great court behind them. They came as a group, risking as individuals and families.

There is, in that settlement, and so many others like it throughout the Midwest, a fundamental belief about small-town America. In stories and film, small towns like Whitewater are often exemplars of individual effort, endurance, and achievement. The individual liberty and enterprise that America’s founders saw as part of the American promise is supposed to be a cardinal virtue of small town life.

Perhaps America’s lost her way, grown jaded and soft, but surely that’s not true for a place like Whitewater, Wisconsin. The admirable and the good of American individualism and private energy should be alive here, in my town, if anywhere.

One of the themes of this website is that small-town Whitewater has lost its way, drifted from the ambition and energy and private ingenuity of America, into the habit of declaring success rather than achieving it. The more we insist – sometimes comically – on our own exceptionism, the farther we slip from what is truly exceptional and astonishing about America.

I’ll not speculate about whether the kind of individualism and commitment Whitewater’s settlers exhibited flourishes elsewhere in America. I am quite sure that it does. Sadly, we’ve abandoned it here, in favor of a culture that resists private initiative, and insists on the role of a small but intrusive local government in residents’ lives.

Whitewater’s an example of what goes wrong, what still goes right, and what could be far better, if we set aside an empty and self-serving local exceptionalism for the true and American exceptionalism of individual liberty, private initiative, and openness to new people and ideas.

America began as a collection of villages and towns, of tribes, settlers, colonists, and later, citizens. We had no indispensable great city, no Rome or London, on which all depended.

We still don’t. Yet, we have changed, so very much, and America is no longer a collection of small, rural towns. When we refer to small-town America, we refer to something now the exception. We’ve become a nation of big cities and suburbs, with rural America more a matter of geography than population.

I live in Whitewater, Wisconsin, a small town of fourteen thousand in southeastern Wisconsin. You may have stumbled on this website one way or another, and are curious about life here.

It may not be what you think. When people ask me about small town America, I often ask them in reply: What do think rural America’s like?

I find people from suburbs or big cities often have two ideas about life in a small, Midwestern town: that there’s a lack of cultural offerings, and that everyone is like something out of Mayberry RFD, happy, honest, and homespun.

Neither’s true. We may lack the prominent museums of major cities, but easy travel and an easier Internet brings art and theater and music to an entire continent, of which we’re no less a part. We’re home to a college campus of the University of Wisconsin system, and we have the benefits of music and theater there.

We’re also a more prickly, difficult, and uncertain place than a Hollywood depiction or local marketing campaign would suggest.

There’s a scarcely noticed irony in Whitewater, a town that proudly describes itself as an exceptional community: the more we insist on our exceptionalism, the farther we fall from what is truly exceptional about small town America, and all America. The insistence on looking good, and insisting that all is good, makes neither truly possible.

Rural America – like all America – was built on genuine principles that required neither embellishment nor insistence. Somewhere along the way, Whitewater (and other towns, surely) lost confidence in the embrace of fundamental American principles of individualism, openness, and accountability.

Beneath the empty cheerleading and shrill insistence that all is well, wonderful, and exceptional, there’s a real town – sadder, harder, less confident, and more troubled.

Yet, more beautiful, too, than any saccharine account. Our town is better, and can be far better still, when we face the truth of our condition. The solutions to the problems of rural America are not hard to find – they’re right before us – in an abandonment of the slogans and gimmicks, and in a return to initiative, enterprise, and integrity.

Over the next month, I’ll describe some of the places and people of our town, looking behind the superficial, to tell you more about what Whitewater, Wisconsin’s truly like.

It’s the season, across Wisconsin, for municipalities to present and approve their 2010 budgets. The process varies by city – some finish quickly, some extend the discussion from October into November.

We are among that latter group – although we are a small town, our municipal budget is a big matter, with considerable discussion.

Last week, the Whitewater Common Council began its review of Whitewater’s proposed budget.

The lengthy meeting was televised, and is available on Blip.tv:

http://blip.tv/file/2750574

The proposed draft of the Whitewater city budget, as presented to the common council, is available online:

http://www.ci.whitewater.wi.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1277

A few observations:

1. Necessary, but not sufficient. Whitewater won’t do without at least minimal services, notably for public safety, so we’ll not get by without a budget. Beyond that, I think we deceive ourselves about how much we must spend and do as a city, and how much it matters.

There’s a big feeling among a small few that the success of Whitewater depends on what city government spends and borrows. In this view, success depends on a series of taxpayer-financed public works projects, either to (1) get the city moving, so to speak, or (2) as an end in themselves.

I don’t believe either has, or will prove, useful or effective. Initiative to initiative, project after project, and still no appreciable change in our socio-economic condition.

We still have high poverty, a struggling working class, and a middle class neither as large nor secure as a more prosperous town might have. The city has not, and through its large public programs probably cannot, change that condition.

2. Impediments are easier. if we cannot spend enough publicly for gain, we can spend and regulate enough for loss. It takes far less to discourage private achievement than it does establish a successful public project (if it can be done at all).

One need only burden a community with a few regulations and restrictions – how many feet for this, how many steps for that – to convince entrepreneurs to go elsewhere.

We have done so very well in this regard – all the talk about being a center of opportunity runs up against the barriers to actual, private achievement.

City government should be smaller in both cost and scope. We spend too much, on grand projects, than we should. Small savings of thousands mean little compared with millions each year, and millions more in bonds, to fund grand projects.

Reducing the cost of government is only part of a solution – reducing the burdensome regulations on construction and operation of a business means just as much. Every tedious regulation on private business activity operates as a penalty against private creativity and community prosperity.

Want to build a better community? Stand out of the way of those who actually know how to build something. In the meantime, while others are building, see that our laws, are regulations, are clear, simple, and fairly enforced.

A project will always seem more exciting, but there is more gain in avoiding regulatory harm than in all the Innovation Centers we might ever have.

3. Trends matter. A leaner budget is surely better than a fat one, with so many unemployed and the number of jobless only increasing. Yet, a year does not a more attractive and inviting city make. It will take several years, and a retreat from the empty dream that Whitewater can grow though big public initiatives, before this will be an inviting community for ambitious newcomers.

(We often attract second-tier investments when we give away vast, favored incentives in construction and preferences to bring someone here. Either they were too weak to get going without municipal breaks, or they were strong enough, and bargained us against their need. The better policy would be a low cost of entry for all.)

One year will not erase our sad reputation as an overly regulated place, or a place where enforcement is spotty, or a place where attention to the next big thing leaves everyone else in the cold.

We jump from project to project, view to view, too easily. Yesterday’s task force might as well have been last century’s task force, so rapidly are initiatives discarded.

We should stick with one policy, and make it a trend. Less government, at less cost, is our path to prosperity.

4. Deliberations and Notice.. Readers have probably seen coverage of the October 20th council meeting highlighting the lack of notice that council gave about a smaller increase – or no increase – in the levy than the proposed budget.

I’m not sure what to make of this concern, as part of the legislative, deliberative process involves uncovering and considering alternatives based on a public discussion. Some ideas are likely to develop only at the first – of a series – of public, council meetings on the budget.

It’s hardly odd that ideas might develop at a council session. In that environment – an open, public setting – one finds perhaps the best, fairest, most open forum for considering a budget.

The contention that all of this should have been decided earlier is unpersuasive. more >>