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Foxconn

Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes

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In Whitewater, one often hears about the importance of single-family homes. Policymakers insist that the city should have more such homes. Strategies for increasing single-family homeownership often involve either restricting or inhibiting rental home purchases, or publicly subsidizing owner-occupied housing starts.

Some of those who’d like more single-family homes for Whitewater simultaneously back a Foxconn project that will destroy dozens of single-family homes near that multi-billion-dollar, taxpayer-supported project:

Angry homeowners on Tuesday night challenged the authority of Mount Pleasant to take their property for the Foxconn project, with some vowing to press the fight against the village on the issue.

At a public hearing attended by more than 70 people, about a dozen residents whose homes may be taken by eminent domain laid into village officials for the way they are seeking to amass some 2,800 acres of land for Foxconn’s planned electronics factory and associated development.

Chief among their complaints: being offered 1.4 times the market value of their small parcels while large landowners got several times the going rate for their property, and the village’s proposal to declare the 2,800-acre Foxconn district a blighted area.

Via Foxconn-area residents angry over plans to take their homes:

To take the homes of those residents and pay as little as possible for them, the village stretches the meaning of blight, using an over-broad statute, to an absurdity:

Homeowners and their advocates, meanwhile, called the plan to declare the mostly agricultural Foxconn district a blighted area “absurd,” “a ruse,” “a sham,” “fraudulent” and a “farce.”

“How on God’s earth can a beautiful agricultural area be considered blighted?” said Kim Janicek, 4204 Highway H.

But Alan Marcuvitz, an attorney for the village, said the village is properly using a section of state law that allows an area to be declared blighted even though not a single property within it is blight-ridden.

(Emphasis added.)

Those in Whitewater touting Foxconn are backing a project that threatens the single-family homes of those near the plant, destroying the houses those residents have built and enjoyed, and leaving them with far less by percentage than major landowners.

See also 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, and The Man Behind the Foxconn Project.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.21.18

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 7:08 PM, for 12h 14m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18% of its visible disk illuminated . Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1918, Imperial Germany launches the Spring Offensive:

a series of German attacks along the Western Front during the First World War, beginning on 21 March 1918, which marked the deepest advances by either side since 1914. The Germans had realised that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming human and matériel resources of the United States could be fully deployed. They also had the temporary advantage in numbers afforded by the nearly 50 divisions freed by the Russian surrender (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).

…

By late April 1918, the danger of a German breakthrough had passed. The German Army had suffered heavy casualties and now occupied ground of dubious value which would prove impossible to hold with such depleted units. In August 1918, the Allies began a counter-offensive with the support of 1–2 million fresh American troops and using new artillery techniques and operational methods. This Hundred Days Offensive resulted in the Germans retreating or being driven from all of the ground taken in the Spring Offensive, the collapse of the Hindenburg Line and the capitulation of the German Empire that November.

On this day in 1865, Battle of Goldsborough, North Carolina, ends:

The 21st, 22nd and 25th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part as three Union armies totaling 100,000 men captured the city and its railroad facilities. These were then used to supply troops moving north toward Virginia. Union forces occupied Goldsborough until April 10, 1865, the day after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Ella Nilsen and Rachel Wolfe of Vox Senetences have a summary entitled Facebook status: in deep trouble:

  • Facebook is in deep trouble over new revelations of how the personal data of 50 million users was accessed and used in the runup to the 2016 election. [Vox / Zeeshan Aleem]
  • The problems for Facebook started when the New York Times and the UK Observer published reports this weekend revealing that Cambridge Analytica collected the data of tens of millions of users without their permission. [NYT / Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr]
  • The analytics firm is owned by conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and at the time of the data leak, it was headed by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon. [UK Observer / Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison]
  • Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica, characterized the data leak as a bid to use a massive amount of Facebook data to target political ads and posts to users, to “exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” [UK Observer / Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison]
  • That’s all the more interesting because Trump’s 2016 campaign used Cambridge Analytica, paying them $5.9 million. (Ted Cruz’s campaign used the firm as well.) [Vox / Emily Stewart]
  • What Wylie is saying is that Mercer, Bannon, and other right-wing figures were using data to essentially wage a new “culture war” online, targeting people’s fears in campaigns. [Guardian / Carol Cadwalladr]
  • It’s important to note that this wasn’t a hack. And the news about the Facebook data breach isn’t really news; it’s been around for years. [Vox / Aja Romano]
  • But with the political implications of what the firm was able to do with the data, lawmakers in the US and the EU are furious and are calling for further investigations. [Vox / Zeeshan Aleem]
  • Beyond the question of what this means for our data, there are huge implications for Facebook’s business. The company’s stock took a nosedive amid the recent reports. [Vox / Emily Stewart]

➤ Ari Berman reports Kris Kobach Just Got Humiliated in Federal Court (“The Kansas secretary of state wanted to prove his claims of widespread voter fraud. Instead, he was repeatedly embarrassed.”):

Kobach’s battle against the ACLU was supposed to be a showcase for his claims of widespread voter fraud. When he ran for Kansas secretary of state in 2010, Kobach said “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive.” That led Kansas to pass the law requiring people to provide documentation including a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers to register to vote. The law prevented 35,000 Kansans from registering between 2013 and 2016.

…

Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is now running for governor, hired Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation to support his claim that illegal votes by non-citizens had swung US elections. But under questioning from ACLU lawyer Dale Ho, von Spakovsky admitted he couldn’t name a single election where votes by non-citizens had decided the outcome.

…

Over and over, the claims of voter fraud offered by Kobach and his witnesses collapsed under scrutiny. Kobach asked Tabitha Lehman, the clerk of Sedgwick County, Kansas, to share a spreadsheet showing that 38 noncitizens in the county had registered or attempted to register. But under questioning from the ACLU, Lehman conceded that only five of them had voted over the past two decades, when 1.3 million votes were cast in the county. Kobach has often said that the evidence of fraud he’s uncovered in Kansas is only “the tip of the iceberg.” In his closing argument, Ho said, “The iceberg, on close inspection, Your Honor, it’s more of an ice cube.”

(Emphasis added.)

➤ Whistleblower [the Cambridge Analytica director of research]: We tested Trump slogans in 2014:

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says the company tested Trump slogans such as “drain the swamp” and “deep state” as early as 2014, before Trump announced a presidential run.

➤ Jennifer Rubin delivers A reminder of just how wrong Trump apologists were:

The promise that he would be saved by advisers with more intellect, temperament and experience also ignored Trump’s unwillingness to hire critics who voiced their qualms during the campaign. Those who had served at senior levels in prior administrations didn’t come in. That left him with a mediocre talent pool. And now — ah, his defenders would have shuddered to know this a year or so ago — he’s resorted to hiring TV personalities.

Moreover, Trump’s insistence on bringing with him the security blanket of family members — who were neither competent nor ethically pristine — meant that whomever he officially selected for top posts would have to deal with a competing power center (Javanka). And hiring his daughter and son-in-law meant their conflicts of interest were ladled into the toxic brew of his own conflicts, nontransparent finances and foreign emoluments.

In sum, Trump could neither hire nor heed the advice of “very best people” on his staff or Cabinet. The pusillanimous Congress was never going to challenge him. But here’s the thing: By removing the GOP majority in Congress, the country can mitigate — not eliminate — Trump’s increasingly unhinged conduct. To get the institutional check that Republicans such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) promised, it seems, they need to be stripped of that majority.

➤ Explorers are Discovering Life Under Antarctica’s Ice:

America, Immigration

A Detention Machine

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America, of all places, should not be in the business of this sort of detention. Not now, not ever. We are, and always will be, at our best as a free and welcoming place.

“Maybe it is a concentration camp; I don’t want to make it look nice.” Joe Arpaio stands by his 2008 description of his infamous “tent city” jail. The former Arizona sheriff cultivates an image of toughness on immigration. In 2016, Donald Trump welcomed Arpaio’s support, saying, “When Sheriff Arpaio gives you an endorsement, you know you’re the king of the border.” Rewarding Arpaio with a presidential pardon in 2017 after the sheriff defied a judge’s order to stop immigration arrests, Trump sent a clear message that the handcuffs were off Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Every day, as many as 50,000 people wake up behind bars in immigration detention centers across America, including families fleeing violence and seeking safety in the United States. Last year, ICE arrests of non-criminals more than doubled.

Deportation Nation, a new documentary from The Atlantic, goes behind the scenes of America’s sprawling network of detention centers, where 179 people have died awaiting deportation since 2003.

“There are safer and more humane ways of doing this that are just as tough,” says John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE, in the film. “It makes no sense to me. We should ask ourselves a larger question: Why are we in this business? What do we get out of this?”

City, Local Government, Open Government, School District

A Bit More on Examples

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I’ve written about Milton as a bad example for Whitewater, and I’ve written about Jefferson this way, too. See Sunshine Week 2018 (The Bad Example Nearby), Attack of the Dirty Dogs, and Thanks, City of Jefferson!.

The Milton-related post prompted two readers to ask about my connections to that troubled school district’s politics. I’ve replied to them directly, and I’ll share my general reply here (there’s nothing whatever confidential in it, and I’ve no connection).

A key practice for a town blogger is to be open to political events and readers’ messages without becoming part of the factions contesting over local events. The best policy is one of distance, detachment, and diligence (where diligence operates from a distant and detached perch). One cannot state how important this practice is: one loses much by becoming enmeshed in a factional conflict.

When one writes about another place, doing or well or poorly, it doesn’t mean that one is connected to anyone there. (Indeed, concerning troubled places, one would have no reason to want to be connected other than by observation and reflection.)

The Milton School District is struggling (honest to goodness, it’s a mess in many ways, and a case study in how not to manage, how not to serve on a school board, and how not to advise a school district). Jefferson’s Harry Potter Festival is an example of how shabby productions become entrenched when officials’ pride causes them to double-down on bad ideas. (Whitewater’s now-abandoned waste-to-energy scheme was like this: the city’s wastewater superintendent couldn’t on his own let go of an economically and environmentally bad idea.)

Milton’s taken the wrong course on open government, and serves as a bad example for us, but even without that example one could identify and rightly oppose a retreat from open-government in Whitewater.

So many local officials and local notables mistakenly, but hungrily, see themselves as cosseted celebrities. The limelight should belong to good ideas and good causes, and to the marketplace of ideas where good ideas daily contest against worse ones. More public information, of the most accurate kind, enriches.

As for following majoritarian fashion, one can happily leave that to others. British philosopher Adam Ant always inspires: “We don’t follow fashion/That’d be a joke/You know we’re going to set them, set them/So everyone can take note, take note.”

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.20.18

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Good morning.

Spring begins in Whitewater with partly sunny skies and a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 11m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.3% of its visible disk illuminated . Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1854, the Republican Party is founded:

On this date Free Soilers and Whigs outraged by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, met in Ripon to consider forming a new political party. The meeting’s organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name “Republican” which had been suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. You can see eyewitness accounts of the meeting, early Republican campaign documents, and other original sources on our page devoted to Wisconsin and the Republican Party. Though other places have claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican. [Source: History of Wisconsin, II: 218-219]

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Britain’s Channel 4 News reports Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians:

An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.

(Trump’s consultants troll with the techniques that would appeal to someone like Trump.)

➤ Alexis Madrigal asks What Took Facebook So Long? (“Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them”):

While the specifics of this particular violation [data of tens of millions in Trump’s consultants’ access] are important to understand, the story reveals deeper truths about the online world that operates through and within Facebook.

First, some of Facebook’s growth has been driven by apps, which the company found extended the amount of time that people spent on the platform, as retired users of FarmVille could attest. To draw developers, Facebook had quite lax (or, as one might say, “developer-friendly”) data policies for years.

Academic researchers began publishing warnings that third-party Facebook apps represented a major possible source of privacy leakage in the early 2010s. Some noted that the privacy risks inherent in sharing data with apps were not at all clear to users. One group termed our new reality “interdependent privacy,” because your Facebook friends, in part, determine your own level of privacy.

➤ Niraj Chokshi reports Assaults Increased When Cities Hosted Trump Rallies, Study Finds:

A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.

A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.

It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.

(See Assaults on Days of Campaign Rallies During the 2016 US Presidential Election.)

➤ Alan Levin reports Russian Hackers Attacked U.S. Aviation as Part of Breaches:

Russian hackers attempted to penetrate the U.S. civilian aviation industry early in 2017 as part of the broad assault on the nation’s sensitive infrastructure.

The attack had limited impact and the industry has taken steps to prevent a repeat of the intrusion, Jeff Troy, executive director of the Aviation Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said Friday. Troy wouldn’t elaborate on the nature of the breach and declined to identify specific companies or the work that was involved.

“It hit a part of our very broad membership,” Troy said. The intrusion wasn’t something that would directly harm airplanes or airlines, he said. “But I did see that this impacted some companies that are in the aviation sector.”

Troy’s comments confirmed the effects on aviation of a Russian attack that was described more broadly on Thursday by U.S. government officials. The assault was aimed at the electric grid, water processing plants and other targets, the officials said, in the first formal confirmation that Russia had gained access to some U.S. computer systems. The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation identified aviation as one of the targets, but didn’t provide specifics.

➤ Here’s Why Airplanes Still Have Ashtrays In the Bathroom:

City

4 Points About the Work Ahead

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Whitewater’s in a time of transition. Those who have been here, who are here, and who are yet to arrive will face this truism: people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing.

Three key points stand out:

➤ The past sets the conditions from which one chooses in the present. Serial past mistakes diminish the present, and limit future choices. No one sets aside the effects of cumulative error merely by saying as much, as though a glutton who has eaten too much merely declares himself healthy. No nutrition or exercise program is that easy.

Past mistakes have left Whitewater with only a slight margin for additional error. Our city has foolishly wasted years on self-serving happy talk.

➤ All decisions are made from the present. What’s happened before is a sunk cost; one chooses presently with a recognition – but not a servility – to the past.

Eating too much for years has a cumulative effect one cannot ignore, but that effect doesn’t compel someone to keep eating on the theory that if one has finished most of a pie, one should gorge on all of it. If 7/8ths of a pie makes make someone sick, then he should forgo the last piece.

➤ Difficult is not impossible. Good news, overall, and a view sincerely held — Whitewater does not, as she once did over a century ago – face economic collapse. Her condition is less dire – she faces stagnation that represents a slow, relative decline. Stagnation can be overcome, although it operates slowly so many do not see a pressing need to address it. It cannot be effectively addressed, however, with grandiose claims, sketchy data, or all-is-well declarations.

➤ Progress depends on preserving existing gains. A retreat to lesser standards in some areas diminishes gains made elsewhere.

One can be a optimist, as I truly am, and yet see that the next few years will require a rigorous commitment to needed improvements.

On the other side of this, if we apply ourselves sensibly, waits a more prosperopus and dynamic city.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.19.18

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 7:06 PM, for 12h 05m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.1% of its visible disk illuminated . Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater CDA’s Seed Capital Committee meets at 5 PM and the Library Board at 6:30 PM. The Whitewater School Board meets at 6:30 PM, with its regular session beginning at 7 PM.

C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, launches on this day in 1979. On this day in 1865, the Battle of Goldsborough, North Carolina, begins: “The 21st, 22nd and 25th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part in the battle at Goldsborough, North Carolina, during the Campaign of the Carolinas. Three Union armies totaling 100,000 men attacked the city in order to control its strategically important railroad lines.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Karen Freifeld, Sarah N. Lynch, and Mark Hosenball report Exclusive: Sources contradict Sessions’ testimony he opposed Russia outreach:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people who told Reuters they have spoken about the matter to investigators with Special Counsel Robert Mueller or congressional committees.

Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he “pushed back” against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team.

“Yes, I pushed back,” Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 14, when asked whether he shut down Papadopoulos’ proposed outreach to Russia.

Sessions has since also been interviewed by Mueller.

Three people who attended the March campaign meeting told Reuters they gave their version of events to FBI agents or congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the accounts they provided to Reuters differed in certain respects, all three, who declined to be identified, said Sessions had expressed no objections to Papadopoulos’ idea.

One person said Sessions was courteous to Papadopoulos and said something to the effect of “okay, interesting.”

The other two recalled a similar response.

“It was almost like, ‘Well, thank you and let’s move on to the next person,’” one said.

➤ Joby Warrick reports Poisoning of Russian ex-spy puts spotlight on Moscow’s secret military labs:

Since the start of Putin’s second term, a construction boom has been underway at more than two dozen institutes that were once part of the Soviet Union’s biological and chemical weapons establishment, according to Russian documents and photos compiled by independent researchers. That expansion, which includes multiple new testing facilities, is particularly apparent at secret Defense Ministry laboratories that have long drawn the suspicions of U.S. officials over possible arms-treaty violations.

Russian officials insist that the research in government-run labs is purely defensive and perfectly legal. But the effort has come under increased scrutiny in the wake of allegations of Moscow’s involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain. Both were sickened by exposure to Novichok, a kind of highly lethal nerve agent uniquely developed by Russian military scientists years ago.

“The big question is, why are they doing this?” said Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical and biological weapons expert with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. In a newly released book, “Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia,” ­Zilinskas and co-author Philippe Mauger analyze hundreds of contract documents and other records that show a surge in Russian research interest in subjects ranging from genetically modified pathogens to nonlethal chemical weapons used for crowd control.

➤ Michael Biesecker, Jake Pearson, and Jeff Horwitz report Trump wildlife protection board stuffed with trophy hunters:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new U.S. advisory board created to help rewrite federal rules for importing the heads and hides of African elephants, lions and rhinos is stacked with trophy hunters, including some members with direct ties to President Donald Trump and his family.

A review by The Associated Press of the backgrounds and social media posts of the 16 board members appointed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke indicates they will agree with his position that the best way to protect critically threatened or endangered species is by encouraging wealthy Americans to shoot some of them.

One appointee co-owns a private New York hunting preserve with Trump’s adult sons. The oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., drew the ire of animal rights activists after a 2011 photo emerged of him holding a bloody knife and the severed tail of an elephant he killed in Zimbabwe.

➤ Clive Irving contends Elon Musk’s ‘Big F**king Rocket’ Is a Big F**ing Deal:

Elon Musk, the maestro of SpaceX, has figured out a new way to fly into deep space. In doing so he seems to have disrupted all previous proposals for returning to the moon and reaching beyond to Mars.

Musk is gambling on the success of a project that is a radical departure from anything seen before—and far simpler than any competing space program. It is centered on a 157-foot long spaceship named BFR (Big Fucking Rocket). No kidding: That’s longer than the longest version of the Boeing 737 and, with a width of 29 feet it’s eight feet wider than the Airbus A380 super jumbo’s fuselage.

It will be designed to be used in three ways: to carry three kinds of payloads—people, cargo, or fuel (playing the role of a tanker to refuel other vehicles in space).

➤ This Artist Creates Mesmerizing Moving Sculptures:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.18.18

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 05m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.2% of its visible disk illuminated . Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1963, the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, rules in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Constitution requires state courts to appoint attorneys for criminal defendants who cannot afford to retain counsel on their own.

On this day in 1953, the Boston Braves announce that they will move to Milwaukee. (They later moved to Atlanta to become the Atlanta Braves.)

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Chris Hayes explains What ‘Law and Order’ Means to Trump:

Time and again, the president denounces “illegals” and “criminals” and the “American carnage” they wreak on law-abiding Americans. He even advised an audience of police officers to rough up suspects they were arresting.

Yet this tough-guy stance disappears when the accused are in the president’s inner circle. In defending Rob Porter, the White House senior aide accused of abuse by both of his ex-wives, the president wondered whatever happened to due process while praising a man accused of giving his wife a black eye. (Mr. Porter denies the abuse.)

As tempting as it is to hammer Mr. Trump for his epic hypocrisy, it is a mistake. The president’s boundless benefit of the doubt for the Rob Porters and Roy Moores of the world, combined with off-with-their-heads capriciousness for immigrants accused of even minor crimes, is not a contradiction. It is the expression of a consistent worldview that he campaigned on and has pursued in office.

In this view, crime is not defined by a specific offense. Crime is defined by who commits it. If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.

…

A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations. The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.

…

If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.

➤ Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr report How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions:

LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

…

Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”

…

But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.

➤ Danny Hakim and Matthew Rosenberg report Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians:

When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.

“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

But Mr. Nix’s business did have some dealings with Russian interests, according to company documents and interviews.

Mr. Nix is a director of SCL Group, a British political and defense contractor, and chief executive of its American offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, which advised the Trump campaign. The firms’ employees, who often overlap, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.

…

Cambridge Analytica also included extensive questions about Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in surveys it was carrying out in American focus groups in 2014. It is not clear what — or which client — prompted the line of questioning, which asked for views on topics ranging from Mr. Putin’s popularity to Russian expansionism.

➤ Jason Stein and Patrick Marley report Eric Holder, Tammy Baldwin call for action on Russian Twitter trolls’ Wisconsin meddling:

State and federal leaders from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to members of the Wisconsin Legislature called Friday for a federal response to news that Russian Twitter trolls sought to stoke racial division in the wake of the August 2016 unrest in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that Russia-linked accounts got thousands of retweets for their racially charged posts made only hours after the chaos in the Sherman Park neighborhood and less than three months before the 2016 presidential election won by President Donald Trump.

After a Madison campaign visit Friday on behalf of state Supreme Court candidate Rebecca Dallet, Holder said Congress should hold hearings on the Russian interference in Milwaukee and said the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office should investigate, as well.

“If you have the connection between that kind of effort and a foreign government, yeah, that’s the basis for a federal investigation,” Holder told reporters. “I think it’s incumbent upon people both at the state level and the federal level to hold hearings, to find exactly who was behind that and what was the impact of that effort.”

(Emphasis added.)

➤ Explore the Valley Protecting Hawaii’s Ancient Plants:

 

For the past 1,500 years, Limahuli Valley on Kauai has been a green haven, a wilderness preserved to exist just as the native Hawaiians experienced it. It is home to plant life unlike anything found in the rest of the world, with many endangered plants thriving in the valley. The Limahuli Garden and Preserve hopes to continue their conservation efforts so these plants can survive for generations to come. Join director Kawika Winter for a tour of this lush nature preserve.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.17.18

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Good morning.

St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 02m 48s of daytime. The moon is a new today. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1776, the Siege of Boston ends as British forces evacuate the city:

The siege began on April 19 [1775] after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, when the militia from surrounding Massachusetts communities blocked land access to Boston. The Continental Congress formed the Continental Army from the militia, with George Washington as its Commander in Chief. In June 1775, the British seized Bunker and Breed’s Hills, from which the Continentals were preparing to bombard the city, but their casualties were heavy and their gains were insufficient to break the Continental Army’s hold on land access to Boston. The Americans laid siege to the British-occupied city. Military actions during the remainder of the siege were limited to occasional raids, minor skirmishes, and sniper fire.

In November 1775, Washington sent the 25-year-old bookseller-turned-soldier Henry Knox to bring to Boston the heavy artillery that had been captured at Fort Ticonderoga. In a technically complex and demanding operation, Knox brought many cannons to the Boston area by January 1776. In March 1776, these artillery fortified Dorchester Heights (which overlooked Boston and its harbor), thereby threatening the British supply lifeline. The British commander William Howe saw the British position as indefensible and withdrew the British forces in Boston to the British stronghold at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 17 (celebrated today [by Bostonians] as Evacuation Day).

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Deals, of whatever kind, should not be made outside the law:

➤ David J. Lynch and Michael Birnbaum report European Union releases 10-page list of potential targets for retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products:

The European Union Friday made public a 10-page list of American products that are potential targets for retaliation if President Trump refuses to exempt the allied bloc from his new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

The list offered the most detailed glimpse to date of the likely targets for E.U. action, including products selected for maximum political impact in the United States. Among them: Bourbon, a specialty of  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky; cranberries which grow in House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s native Wisconsin; orange juice from Florida and tobacco from North Carolina, two political swing states that are rich in electoral votes.

“It’s pretty clear they’re trying to wake up American legislators, who are the only ones in government who can influence the president on this issue,” said Chad Bown, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

(Trump’s economically counter-productive tariffs will lead to retaliation that will hit Wisconsin particularly. They have maps, and copies of the U.S. Congresisonal directory, in Europe.)

➤ Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Gets Mnuchin Travel Documents:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has billed taxpayers for the most expensive flight options available at every turn, appearing to never even consider flying commercial as his predecessors did, according to previously unreleased documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Mnuchin’s flight records following a military jet trip to Fort Knox, KY with his wife, Louise Linton, which coincided with the eclipse. The Treasury Department failed to turn over any records, leading CREW to sue. Months later, CREW received records which, though heavily redacted, showed that Mnuchin apparently abused his access to military and non-commercial aircraft for both business travel and occasional personal travel.

“From the documents we obtained, it appears Secretary Mnuchin considers first and foremost his own comfort and ease, leaving the protection of taxpayer money at the bottom of his list of priorities,” CREW Chief FOIA Counsel Anne Weismann said.

The documents CREW obtained show that between the spring and fall of 2017, Mnuchin took eight separate trips on military aircraft at a total of nearly $1 million. None of the requests for White House Mission designation — needed to use the government aircraft — explicitly state or otherwise suggest how they are at the explicit direction of the president.

“The public still has no reasonable explanation for why Secretary Mnuchin apparently has never used commercial aircraft while his predecessors did, or why he needs military aircraft that can accommodate 120 passengers when his travel manifests contain far fewer names,” Weismann said.

(Read CREW’s report here.)

➤ Dan Friedman writes Trump White House Worked with Newt Gingrich on Political Purge at State Department, Lawmakers Say (“Trump officials called civil servants “turncoat” and ‘Obama/Clinton loyalists’ “):

White House and State Department officials conspired with prominent conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to purge the State Department of staffers they viewed as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump, two top House Democrats allege in a letter released Thursday.

The letter states that an unidentified whistleblower shared documents with Democrats on the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees showing that a group of White House officials pressed political appointees at the State Department to oust career civil service employees they described with terms like “Turncoat,” “leaker and a troublemaker,” and “Obama/Clinton loyalists not at all supportive of President Trump’s foreign policy agenda.”

As described in the letter, those actions would likely violate federal laws protecting federal civil servants from undue political influence.

➤ An impressive American fighter plane deserves an impressive coat of paint:

City, Local Government, Open Government, Public Meetings, Public Records, School District

Sunshine Week 2018 (A Methodical Approach)

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Writing about a topic is a deliberate, often slow, process. Something happens – perhaps of concern – but one may not address it immediately. A bit of waiting can be a sound response. Along the way, an original perspective may change, and a project grow larger (or smaller). See Steps for Blogging on a Policy or Proposal.

In November, I began thinking about the absence of some school board meetings on the City of Whitewater’s Vimeo page (https://vimeo.com/cityofwhitewater), a page that hosts both municipal public meetings, community events, and sporadically Whitewater Unified School District meeting videos. (Indeed, the WUSD website directs visitors via a link on http://www.wwusd.org/page/2459 to the city’s Vimeo page.)

Now readers may have heard, as I have, that in nearby Milton there are school board members who think other kinds of videos should take precedence over board-meeting videos. It’s a false choice: there’s room for all kinds of recordings. 

In any event: open government recourse under Wisconsin law is an individual right; it does not matter if two, or twenty, or twenty-thousand think otherwise. One need not take a poll, hire POLCO, or even accept the opinion of office-holding polecats from Milton.

If a response depended only on recordings of school board meetings, one could request them through the Wisconsin’s Public Records Law Wis. Stats. §§ 19.31 – 19.39. If the district proved unwilling to make available regularly the video records of its school board, one could under Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law Wis. Stats. §§ 19.81 – 19.98 see that those videos were privately recorded and then made available at FREE WHITEWATER.

Hannibal’s determination to cross the Alps during the Second Punic War is the subject of a famous, attributed remark. A more inclusive paraphrase in the plural, applying equally to any person’s recourse, is even better: ‘we will find a way or we shall make one’ (inveniemus viam aut faciemus).

While discussing this with others inside and outside Whitewater, someone kindly gave me a suggestion: why not compare the contents of existing videos with local accounts of the meetings? Perhaps one could develop a series of criteria to compare what happens at a meeting as recorded with how a others report it, item by item, meeting by meeting.

That’s a larger project, and larger still if, as someone else also suggested, one included both a good sample of school board and common council meetings.

My aim was low; others’ better suggestions raised that aim higher.

A project to obtain records (or record them if a public body retreats from its longstanding practice) is not the same as comparing video records with existing efforts. Not the same, but related.  One can do both.

That will take a bit more time, and the working out of the right order of it all, but that doesn’t matter. I’m happily in Whitewater forever.

Cats

Friday Catblogging: Being Kind to a Cat

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In the video below, a cat owner describes ways to show affection that a cat will understand. They’re good ideas, but some cats will like some of these ways more than others – your cat’s mileage may vary.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.16.18

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 7:03 PM, for 11h 59m 52s of daytime. The moon is a new today with 1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1926, Dr. Robert H. Goddard tests the first liquid-fueled rocket:

Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. Present at the launch were his crew chief, Henry Sachs, Esther Goddard, and Percy Roope, who was Clark’s assistant professor in the physics department. Goddard’s diary entry of the event was notable for its understatement:

March 16. Went to Auburn with S[achs] in am. E[sther] and Mr. Roope came out at 1 p.m. Tried rocket at 2.30. It rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs., after the lower half of the nozzle burned off. Brought materials to lab….[15]:143

His diary entry the next day elaborated:

March 17, 1926. The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn…. Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.[15]:143

The rocket, which was later dubbed “Nell”, rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended 184 feet away in a cabbage field,[56] but it was an important demonstration that liquid propellants were possible. The launch site is now a National Historic Landmark, the Goddard Rocket Launching Site.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger report Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says:

United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.

They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers had successfully compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.

In the following months, according to a Department of Homeland Security report issued on Thursday, Russian hackers made their way to machines with access to critical control systems at power plants that were not identified. The hackers never went so far as to sabotage or shut down the computer systems that guide the operations of the plants.

Still, new computer screenshots released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday made clear that Russian state hackers had the foothold they would have needed to manipulate or shut down power plants.

“We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” said Eric Chien, a security technology director at Symantec, a digital security firm.

“From what we can see, they were there. They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation,” Mr. Chien said.

(Again and again, one sees that Putin’s regime is adversarial to America. See Department of Homeland Security, Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors.)

➤ David Frum considers The Words Trump Refuses to Speak (“For the most verbally belligerent president in history, Trump’s comments about Russia’s nerve-agent attack have been conspicuously weak”):

The most verbally belligerent president in history—who has abusive things to say about allies like Japan, South Korea, and Canada—cannot summon up any harsher adjective for a nerve attack on NATO soil than “sad.” Today’s tentative words and belated actions are already being hailed by Trump partisans as proof that at last the president has gotten tough. The Republican National Committee released a statement today hailing Trump’s “TOUGH ON RUSSIA RECORD.”

The balance of forces within the Trump administration apparently does not forbid all criticism of Russia or Vladimir Putin. Nor does the president veto all actions against Russia. While the president still refuses to implement the sanctions voted on to punish Russia from intervening in the 2016 election, he has allowed other sanctions to go forward and has sold lethal weapons to Ukraine.

But if it’s not nothing, it’s also true that it has taken extraordinary pressure to move Trump even the small interval he has moved. It’s progress, and it’s welcome. But it does not begin to dispel the haunting doubts about why Trump so hesitates to condemn Russia and Putin—not nearly.

➤ Misha Glenny calls for Hitting Putin Where It Hurts:

It is now high time for Britain to make a concerted effort to ascertain where all of this fabulous wealth comes from. Russian oligarchs have made an indelible mark on London. Some own newspapers, others our most successful soccer clubs, while many more own huge chunks of high-end property in the most fashionable parts of the capital.

And some of those characters are close collaborators and friends of President Putin. Thanks to some tenacious journalists, it has come to light that the children of Vladimir Yakunin, the former head of Russia’s railway network and a Putin pal, have been purchasing luxury houses in the capital through anonymous companies. This is now an ever more popular trick — squirreling away corrupt money by passing it on to relatives in the hope that it will evade scrutiny.

If Mrs. May is convinced that Russia is behind this attack, then she needs to devise a way of getting to President Putin’s friends and collaborators. And that means great transparency. She should reintroduce the stalled proposal to force anonymous companies to reveal the sources of their cash. If any members of Parliament or the cabinet tried to oppose a move now, their motives would immediately look suspicious. Now is the moment to confound her critics by acting decisively.

(An oligarchy cares for nothing so much as its oligarchs.)

➤ It’s PutinCon today – 3.16.18 in New York City:

Live streaming is available via YouTube at PutinCon 2018.

The Putin regime is the gravest threat to democracy and Western values that exists in the world today. Putin’s power as Russia’s leader is based in fear, mystery, and propaganda. Putin has wielded violence as the key tool in shaping a system that gives him unrivaled power and wealth, both within Russia and worldwide.

PutinCon will show how thin the façade of his control truly is. This gathering of Russian democracy activists, Kremlin experts, Putin biographers, law enforcement professionals, historians, foreign policy leaders, and intelligence analysts will tell the story of how Russia is crippled by totalitarian rule.

➤ One can learn a bit about The ‘Most Elusive’ Man in North America:

Somewhere in the mountains of Vernon, British Columbia lives a 76-year-old man by the name of Dag Aabye. He has no cell phone or email address. Revered by locals for having escaped from the shackles of modern society, he is the champion of the 80-mile ultramarathon aptly named the “death race.” Aabye is the oldest person to have ever finished the race.

Determined to locate and interview Aabye, filmmakers Adam Maruniak and Justin Pelletier spent weeks canvassing the nearby town, leaving postcards with their contact information. They visited the bar that the reclusive septuagenarian is said to frequent and even summited a mountain in search of him—to no avail. Then, the day before the co-directors had planned to scrap what they thought was a futile project, Dag called them from a payphone. Their resulting documentary, Never Die Easy, is named after Aabye’s motto.

“Never die easy,” Aabye says in the film. “To me, there is no age. Age is something other people put on you. You put a person in an old folk’s home, and this person’s gonna die pretty quick because you tell them, ‘You’re old now—you’re ready to go.’”

True to local lore, the filmmakers were taken by Aabye’s ardent self-reliance and motivation. “In our final moments with Dag,” Maruniak said, “he embraced us both and told us, ‘Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, and always have a mountain in life to climb.’ Those words will resonate with us forever.”

City, Local Government, Open Government, Public Meetings, Public Records

Sunshine Week 2018 (City, District, and State)

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Local readers may have heard, as I have heard, that area officials know that there are ways around municipal ordinances and school district policies on open government. There’s no surprise in hearing this: there is no human construct that cannot be circumvented; there are few professing a public interest who do not simultaneously feel the pull of self-interest.

Imagine how unfortunate it must be, for some, to see open government as a burden, obstacle, or threat. On the contrary, like a church or library, an environment of open government should, properly, comfort and inspire.

For today, it’s useful to list in full the City of Whitewater’s Municipal Code, Chapter 2.62 (Whitewater Transparency Enhancement Ordinance) & Municipal Code, Chapter 2.66 (Public Records), the Whitewater Unified School District’s policies on open government, and state statutes on open meetings and public records.

Policies, ordinances, and statues are different, of course. That’s a subject for another day. In any event, digital publishing affords nearly unlimited space, so one can, easily, be methodical and thorough.

More tomorrow.

➤ City of Whitewater’s Municipal Code, Chapter 2.62 (Whitewater Transparency Enhancement Ordinance):

2.62.010 – Purpose.
The purpose of this chapter is to maximize public awareness and participation in City of Whitewater Government. (Ord. No. 1804A, § 1, 10-5-2010)

2.62.020 – Posting requirements.
(a) Agenda notices for all council, committee, commission and board meetings, requiring legal notice, shall be posted seventy-two hours in advance. If an agenda item is added between twenty-four and seventy-two hours prior to the meeting, it shall require an affirmative vote of a majority of the members voting to take up the matter. (b) All council, committee, commission and board agendas shall be posted online on the city website seventy-two hours in advance of the meeting. (c) All council, committee, commission and board packet materials, that can be reasonably scanned, shall be posted online twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting. The city shall provide an electronic notification feed alert, indicating that new information is available regarding an upcoming council, committee, commission or board meeting, to any party that has subscribed to the feed (requested notice from the city of the updated information). (d) All requests for proposals and requests for bids shall be posted online as soon as is practicable. (e) The council and all committee, commission and board meeting minutes shall be posted online within thirty days of the meeting. If the body does not meet within thirty days of the meeting, the minutes shall be posted within fourteen days of the next meeting. (Ord. No. 1804A, § 1, 10-5-2010)

2.62.030 – Information technology requirements.
Beginning December 1, 2010, city council, community development authority, plan commission and police commission meetings shall be videotaped, and the video shall be posted online. (Ord. No. 1804A, § 1, 10-5-2010)

2.62.040 – Meeting procedures.
(a) All council, committee, commission and board meetings shall have a public input agenda item to allow citizens to make statements on matters that are not on the agenda. (b) All council, committee, commission and boards shall allow the public an opportunity to comment on substantive items on the meeting agenda. The council, committee, commission or board shall have the discretion to impose time limits and other reasonable procedural rules concerning the public comment. (c) If the agenda for a council, committee, commission or board meeting includes staff reports or other reports, a specific description of the item to be reported on shall be listed on the agenda and said report(s) shall be limited to the specific items listed in the agenda. (Ord. No. 1804A, § 1, 10-5-2010)

2.62.050 – Failure to abide by chapter provisions does not cause actions to be invalid.
The failure by any council, committee, commission or board to adhere to the provisions of this chapter shall not cause any action by said council, committee, commission or board to be invalid. (Ord. No. 1804A, § 1, 10-5-2010)

➤ City of Whitewater’s Municipal Code, Chapter 2.66 (Public Records):

Chapter 2.66 – Public Records
Sections:

2.66.010 – Definitions.
[The following words, terms and phrases, when used in this chapter, shall have the meanings ascribed to them in this section, except where the context clearly indicates a different meaning:]

“Authority” means any of the following city entities having custody of a city record: an office, elected official, agency, board, commission, committee, council, department or public body corporate and politic created by constitution, law, ordinance, rule or order, or a formally constituted subunit of the foregoing.

“Custodian” means that officer, department head, division head, or employee of the city designated under Section 2.66.030 or otherwise responsible by law to keep and preserve any city records or file, deposit or keep such records in his or her office, or who is lawfully in possession or entitled to possession of such public records and who is required by this section to respond to requests for access to such records.

“Record” means any material on which written, drawn, printed, spoken, visual or electromagnetic information is recorded or preserved, regardless of physical form or characteristics, which has been created or is being kept by an authority. Record includes, but is not limited to, handwritten, typed or printed pages, maps, charts, photographs, films, recordings, tapes (including computer tapes), and computer printouts. Record does not include drafts, notes, preliminary computations and like materials prepared for the originator’s personal use or prepared by the originator in the name of a person for whom the originator is working; materials which are purely the personal property of the custodian and have no relation to his or her office; materials to which access is limited by copyright, patent or bequest; and published materials in the possession of an authority other than a public library which are available for sale, or which are available for inspection at a public library. (Ord. No. 1782A, 5-4-2010)

(a) Except as provided under Section 2.66.070, each officer and employee of the city shall safely keep and preserve all records received from his or her predecessor or other persons and required by law to be filed, deposited or kept in his or her office or which are in the lawful possession or control of the officer or employee or his or her deputies, or to the possession or control of which he or she or they may be lawfully entitled as such officers or employees. (b) Upon the expiration of an officer’s term of office or an employee’s term of employment, or whenever the office or position of employment becomes vacant, each such officer or employee shall deliver to his or her successor all records then in his or her custody and the successor shall receipt therefore to the officer or employee, who shall file the receipt with the city clerk. If a vacancy occurs before a successor is selected or qualifies, such records shall be delivered to and receipted for by the clerk, on behalf of the successor, to be delivered to such successor upon the latter’s receipt.
(Ord. No. 1782A, 5-4-2010)

2.66.030 – Legal custodian(s).
(a) Each elected official is the legal custodian of his or her records and the records of his or her office, but the official may designate an employee of his or her staff to act as the legal custodian. (b) Unless otherwise prohibited by law, the city clerk or the clerk’s designee shall act as legal custodian for the common council and for any committees, commissions, boards, or other authorities created by ordinance or resolution of the common council. (c) For every authority not specified in subsections (a) or (b) of this section, the authority’s chief administrative officer is the legal custodian for the authority, but the officer may designate an employee of his or her staff to act as the legal custodian. (d) Each legal custodian shall name a person to act as legal custodian in his or her absence or the absence of his or her designee. (e) The legal custodian shall have full legal power to render decisions and to carry out the duties of an authority under Subchapter 11 of Chapter 19 of the Wisconsin Statutes and this section. The designation of a legal custodian does not affect the powers and duties of an authority under this section.
(Ord. No. 1782A, 5-4-2010)

2.66.040 – Public access to records.
(a) Except as provided in Section 2.66.060, any person has a right to inspect a record and to make or receive a copy of any record as provided in Wis. Stats. § 19.35(1). (b) Records will be available for inspection and copying during all regular office hours. (c) A requester shall be permitted to use facilities comparable to those available to city employees to inspect, copy or abstract a record. (d) The legal custodian may require supervision during inspection or may impose other reasonable restrictions on the manner of access to an original record if the record is irreplaceable or easily damaged. (e) A requester shall be charged a fee to defray the cost of locating and copying records as follows: (1) The cost of photocopying each page shall be set by the city clerk and set forth on a schedule which shall be kept in the clerk’s office. Any increase as determined by the clerk shall be subject to the approval of the common council. The cost will be calculated not to exceed the actual, necessary and direct cost of reproduction. (2) If the form of a written record does not permit copying, the actual and necessary cost of photographing and photographic processing shall be charged. (3) The actual full cost of providing a copy of other records not in printed form on paper, such as films, computer printouts and audiotapes or videotapes, shall be charged. (4) If mailing or shipping is necessary, the actual cost thereof shall also be charged. (5) There shall be no charge for locating a record unless the actual cost therefor exceeds fifty dollars, in which case the actual cost shall be determined by the legal custodian and billed to the requester. (6) The legal custodian shall estimate the cost of all applicable fees and may require a cash deposit adequate to assure payment, if such estimate exceeds five dollars. (7) Elected and appointed officials of the city shall not be required to pay for public records they may reasonably require for the proper performance of their official duties. (8) The legal custodian may provide copies of a record without charge or at a reduced charge where he or she determines that waiver or reduction of the fee is in the public interest. (f) Pursuant to Wis. Stats. § 19.34, and the guidelines therein listed, each authority shall adopt, prominently display and make available for inspection and copying at its offices, for the guidance of the public, a notice containing a description of its organization and the established times and places at which, the legal custodian from whom, and the methods whereby, the public may obtain information and access to records in its custody, make requests for records, or obtain copies of records, and costs thereof.
(Ord. No. 1782A, 5-4-2010)

2.66.050 – Access procedures.
(a) A request to inspect or copy a record shall be made to the legal custodian. A request shall be deemed sufficient if it reasonably describes the requested record or the information requested. However, a request for a record without a reasonable limitation as to subject matter or length of time represented by the record does not constitute a sufficient request. A request may be made orally, but a request must be in writing before an action to enforce the request is commenced under Wis. Stats § 19.37. Except as provided below, no request may be refused because the person making the request is unwilling to be identified or to state the purpose of the request. No request may be refused because the request is received by mail, unless prepayment of a fee is required under Subsection 2.66.040(e)(6). A requester may be required to show acceptable identification whenever the requested record is kept at a private residence or whenever security reasons or federal law or regulations so require.

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