I received the following press release that I am happy to post: 

Milwaukee, WI – June 25, 2009 – The Racine / Kenosha Professionals Dementia Care Network, a program of the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Racine County Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC) will co-host a program for healthcare professionals called “Dementia Care: Making Every Day Meaningful” on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 from 8:15 – 10:15 a.m. at UW-Parkside, Tallent Hall, 900 Wood Road in Kenosha.

The program is being offered at no charge; registration is required.The program will help healthcare professionals understand the unique activity needs of persons with dementia. By using life story as a guide, participants will learn valuable communication tips. The presenter for this program is Diane Baughn, Education and Training Services Manager, Alzheimer’s Association. Certificates of continuing education will be available.

To register, please contact Paulette Kissee at 262-595-2387 or via email at paulette.kissee@alz.org.

The Alzheimer’s Association is a national non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating Alzheimer’s disease through the advancement of research, to enhance care and support for all affected and to reduce the risk of dementia through the promotion of brain health. The Alzheimer’s Association, Southeastern Wisconsin chapter provides information, education, and support to people with Alzheimer’s and related dementias, their families, and healthcare professionals throughout an 11-county region. For more information about Alzheimer’s disease and local services visit www.alz.org or call the 24-hour Helpline at 800-272-3900.

In our small town, with the added needs of customers at cafés during the summer, there is no reason leaders of our police department could not patrol regularly in the summer.

If we are short-staffed, then those who lead might regularly walk through our downtown. To whom much is given, much is expected.

Not the dumb show of a Citizen Police Academy, or ride alongs, but true service of sworn leaders.

It’s odd and funny sometimes how a merchant will hear, from some on Whitewater, Wisconsin’s Common Council, how his or her business desires are not legitimate, not the right desires. Not from everyone in office, but from some.

This took two forms at the June 16th Common Council meeting. First, one heard from our oldest politician that, the weather being bad (one way or another) throughout the year, there was no point in a restaurateur establishing a sidewalk café in spring and summer.

Never mind that these cafés exist in other Wisconsin cities. They do – if only one would imagine a world beyond the westside Taco Bell.

What’s odd – and so smug it’s funny – is the idea that this or that politician is in a better position than a entrepreneur to assess risk in the market. It’s not that merchants always succeed, but that they’re more likely to succeed in market ventures than bureaucrats and politicians.

The second example of political conceit is the notion that regulations a politician proposed as somehow reasonable and easy to implement. The 30% food receipts requirement for an outdoor is like this.

Why 30%? It’s a requirement with no reasonableness behind it, as our conditions make it difficult to achieve. There’s no reason to think that 30% is more fair than 35, 31, or 41.3, for example.

One number pulled from the air is as good as another, beguiling rhetorical power being the only difference.

If it’s all just guesswork – and it is – I propose a different percentage.

0.

Our last Common Council meeting is available online.  (See, Whitewater Common Council, 6/16/09.)   Over half an hour into the meeting, there was discussion of sidewalk cafés for some establishments near the Cravath lakefront. 

The Council had a first reading of an amendment to the local ordinance application to these cafés.  There were two proposed changes to the ordinance: (1) remove a requirement that establishments with café have a minimum of 30% food sales to be eligible to operate a café, and (2) that the required plans for the cafés — the arrangement of tables, etc. — be simpler, less elaborate.    The proposed amendments passed first reading, on a vote of 6-1.  

It’s odd to listen to the discussion, because so much of it sounds like so much of Whitewater — overly-regulatory, with objections based on supposedly raucous behavior, but without a willingness to discuss how to manage or prevent that behavior (should it occur), short of prohibition.  

Prohibition is the dumbing down of policy, the lazy man’s way to try to prevent a problem, all the while ignoring the other problems prohibition causes. 

A few remarks — 

The 30% requirement for food sales — This was a foolish requirement, twice over.  First, it’s just too burdensome.   This only sounds easy to someone who doesn’t grasp how many other requirements a business faces.  One’s supposed to measure all this, so carefully?  This is a non-merchant’s idea of a good idea.  It would only sound sensible to someone who did not have to run a restaurant.  Anyone else would accept it only begrudgingly.  It’s a giveaway that advocacy of this requirement cries out — does not understand a merchant’s life.  

What’s a sidewalk café?  There’s a too-clever moment, when those who oppose that alcohol consumption at the cafés contended that they favored sidewalk cafés, or the “café concept,” but not “sidewalk taverns.”  It’s a seemingly clever attempt to distinguish between two kinds of dining experience, and marginalize the one that includes consumption of alcohol. 

The problem, of course, is that most people — in Whitewater, in Wisconsin, or elsewhere in America — will understand that cafés often serve alcohol.  The linguistic distinction — sidewalk cafés vs. sidewalk taverns — only seems clever to people who don’t (or won’t) try to understand how ordinary people think about cafés like this.  It’s the kind of rhetorical distinction that seems so powerful in a room of a few people, all of the same view, but fails to persuade ordinary people, with a broader perspective.  Whitewater’s an echo chamber, and its leaders talk mostly to themselves and a like-minded few.   

(It’s why, when outsiders look at Whitewater, and point out simple local mistakes, there’s shock and indignation among the town’s elite.  These town squires have not thought half these issues through, using only each other as sounding boards, tell each other what they want to hear, and then express shock when others point out how ill-conceived actions here often are.  Huh, what, me?)  

The more extreme version of this view is when residents pretend Whitewater’s a magical place, unique from the rest of America.  That’s a magical notion, because it’s not at all reasonable  It’s also a dangerous notion, as rights common to all are either ignored or interpreted wrongly, in the most politically and bureaucratically self-interested way.  

Safety and security.  There’s a worry that sidewalk cafés will lead to patrons passing alcohol to those under drinking age, creating disturbances.  The cafés would operate at low volume times in Whitewater, but there’s a fear that all of this will lead to the raucous, the disorderly.   Other cities with universities operate cafés that serve alcohol, and we’re not — and will not be — Singapore, in any event.   If the answer to ordinary life is not prohibition, then it’s not raw numbers, crude increases in government personnel, either. 

We have a municipal leadership that uses all the language of modern business — every catchphrase ever coined — but recoils from even simple consideration of efficiencies.  

If it should be true that we’ve not the staff to monitor a few cafés near our municipal building, then we should adjust our staff.  If we need more staff, to do what other cities do routinely, then we should consider more staff, but also — no less — how present staff are allocated.  Both matter, but we never talk about allocation of staff in Whitewater, just headcount across the board. 

If the City believes that more officers are needed, and is prepared to offer detailed reasons for it, including when demand is highest, and show how personnel are used now, then that’s a debate those advocating more personnel should be prepared to entertain, received openly.

I see no reason, by the way, why there should only be sidewalk cafés.  If, as was once true, some people want to sell hot dogs, or have a push cart here or there. I’d be for that, too.  Deciding against hot dog sales was a bad idea — we should allow as much, and give others outside a small zone the chance to sell, too (for commericial or civic purposes, either).  It won’t be, at every moment, the most orderly scene, but we’ll not descend into Lord of the Flies, either.   As it is, the possibility of a cafe does not a cafe make.

I’ve some catching up to do on our last Common Council meeting.  The last Police and Fire Commission meeting had a posted agenda so short that it was easy to tease about it.  The agenda crammed item after item, including two police officer interviews, into a proposed 20 minute window.  (See, Whitewater’s Latest Police and Fire Commission Meeting, of May 2009.) 

Well, at the latest Common Council meeting, there was a quick — but futile, I think — discussion that the meeting was longer than 20 minutes.  In fact, there’s was quick mention that it lasted past eight o’clock.  There now, everything’s better – move along, nothing to see, here.  

Predictably, Chief Coan can’t explain why the agenda allotted only 20 minutes for so much.  No one at the meeting noted who wrote the agenda, and that’s the problem, of course. The agenda’s not a perfunctory matter, not a clerical obligation, but an official announcement that should have come from real oversight from the Police and Fire Commission.  I don’t know where the agenda comes from, either.  

One need only look at the agendas of Whitewater’s PFC over the years, improved only by a colorful logo on recent ones, to see that they look like a spare, half-hearted effort.   

That’s the problem with the whole Police and Fire Commission, though.  We’ve had problem after problem with leadership in this city, and anything that involves department public notice (not involving self-congratulatory announcements) resembles little more than a reluctant child’s homework — as few words, and as much white space, as possible.   

If we were Camelot, where all was well, maybe it wouldn’t matter. 

This, however, is not Camelot, Jim Coan’s not a legendary king, the PFC’s not a knights’ roundtable, and we’ve not a class of nobles presiding over an idyllic kingdom. A few hundred want to believe as much, but believing does not make it so.  

Real work, a thorough agenda, for a meeting in a suitable chamber, televised, would be a start. 

Just a start, but something.  

I’ve contended previously that, whatever the trouble with the State of Wisconsin’s budget, municipal and school district declarations that cuts made were forced as a consequence of declining state aid masks the responsibility and accountability for choosing one cut over another. 

(See, Inbox: Reader Mail — Budget Cuts, General and Specific,  Inbox: Reader Mail — Options for School District Budget Savings, and Dr. Steinhaus vs. Student: Student Wins!)

One sees now, not so long after the District declared that layoffs were inevitable because of the Wisconsin budget impasse, that layoffs are rescinded, an administrative salary freeze is possible, and other budget options may yet be available. 

Good for those involved and affected – one need not succumb to a false inevitability.

Contending that specific cuts in Whitewater’s public school district were inevitable because of Governor Doyle, the Democrats in Madison, etc., was false.  That responsibility, for the result, was always a local responsibility. 

I’m not a Democrat, but a libertarian.  Yet, for that difference, I’ve not thought to blame Governor Doyle for choices we make here, as we do have choices before us.  

It may come that local politicians and bureaucrats of the City of Whitewater will be tempted to take this same tacking, and blame Madison for choosing between alternatives in Whitewater. 

It will be no more true for our small town than it was for our small district.

Over at the City of Whitewater’s website, visitors will find links to Common Council agendas, minutes, and video recordings of council sessions.

The links sometimes run behind the postings of the recordings, available online at Blip.tv.

Here’s the page for the City of Whitewater’s videos on Blip.tv:

City of Whitewater on Blip.tv

Japan’s response to her own deep recession of the 90s shows how many mistakes even an advanced nation may make in trying to restore prosperity. America is making some of those same mistakes now.

Over at the Reason.tv, there’s a three-minute video that summarizes the findings of Reason Foundation policy analysts Anthony Randazzo, Michael Flynn, and Adam Summers.

Where Japan went wrong then, and where we’re going wrong now…

The full study is available at Avoiding an American Lost Decade.