Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:44, and sunset is 6:49, for 12 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 63.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30 PM. The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6 PM, and the full board in regular session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1846, astronomers Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams, and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborate on the discovery of Neptune.

Whitewater once again has a stand-alone supermarket, and like so many residents, this libertarian blogger is pleased to see ALDI in town. Note well: the public policy of recruiting a supermarket is not the matter of a single business, but of how local public officials have managed through public bodies (like the Whitewater Community Development Authority) under public laws and principles. However hard it has been, and remains, for Whitewater’s declining old guard to grasp, each of them (or any of us) is no less — but no more — than 1 of 15,000 in the city.¹

Of a supermarket, consider these two claims:

From FREE WHITEWATER on 9.19.24:

Unquestionably right. The old Sentry closed in ’15, and Whitewater went years fumbling with old-guard CDA attempts to bring a dedicated supermarket. They accomplished nothing of the kind. 

ALDI is in Whitewater because the city has a new municipal administration that brought ALDI here.

As part of a post at the Whitewater Community Foundation’s Banner on 9.20.24 :

Larry Kachel indicated that the prior property owner [DLK related] had been in discussion with ALDI beginning in 2017, but the company had concluded that the traffic counts and population did not meet their minimum criteria. Kachel hastened to add that the late Jim Allen’s persistent efforts over many years to attract a store should also be recognized. Tom Howard, ALDI’s regional real estate developer, told the Banner that the city became a viable possibility for a store as a result of the success that the company has recently enjoyed with other stores in rural areas. Jon Kachel indicated that discussions have taken place with a variety of prospects regarding the property located between ALDI and Culver’s, but nothing has come together yet.

I’ll offer six remarks:

First, the City of Whitewater — through its taxpayers — had to spend $500,000 of public money to remediate — to clean up — the site of the prior private property owner, DLK Enterprises. In the language of a consultant’s assessment:

The existing structures on the property will be demolished and the site remediated, including the removal of asbestos and lead in the buildings. This cost is significant and potentially cost prohibitive for any new development.

I’m glad the City of Whitewater accepted this proposal, yet one should be clear about what this means: ordinary people had to pay to clean up the prior, local owner’s mess. The local business did not pay this money — ordinary people did. This municipal administration, under law, through the Community Development Authority and the Whitewater Common Council, had to pay this money up front to make the deal possible.

See Letter on Developer Agreement (two pages) and Development Agreement (forty-three pages) that I received in June through a public records request.²

Second, It seems likely, if not certain, that the publicly-funded remediation has made the remaining area more suitable for sale. (The Brothers Kachel are free to thank the taxpayers of Whitewater at their earliest convenience.)

Third, and admittedly, the Banner‘s paragraph is a poor specimen on which to rely. There’s nothing quoted here; it’s a conversation or conversations related from one person to another, as though people were talking along a fence line. There isn’t even a claim to word-for-word accuracy: it’s an account of what someone “indicated,” not what someone said verbatim. It’s also told from a narrow perspective in which every reader should know the local people mentioned and in which the local men cited should be taken at face value³.

Fourth, the corporate real estate developer for ALDI, at least as recounted here, reasonably states the obvious about why ALDI would pick this city (once the property was cleaned up, of course). That statement says nothing about the many prior, fruitless local efforts to find a supermarket.

Fifth, I have no idea why someone from ALDI, whether in Batavia, Illinois, or an office in Germany, would want to be pulled into a discussion that’s more about local public policy over the last generation than ALDI (or whether he was even told accurately what the local issues are before he was asked to comment). ALDI’s corporate representative is presumably unfamiliar with the public policy mistakes at yesteryear’s Whitewater Community Development Authority, or the controversial past actions of Whitewater CDA (and the role of local landlords on that body). See Meeper Technology Loan Investigation Memo, professional reporting from WhitewaterWise, City officials: Internal investigation finds CDA engaged in ‘lack of proper documentation, communication and transparency’ when it ‘wrote off’ more than $750,000 in loans, and blogging from FREE WHITEWATER, Meeper Technology Loan Investigation, Memo and Documents.

Sixth, equally puzzling is why anyone at the Whitewater Community Foundation’s Banner would look for answers from ALDI before seeking public documents from his or her own city. The foundational issue is about years’ long local policy to seek to a supermarket, and conduct at the Whitewater CDA across a decade’s time, not any given business arriving recently.

What portion of this libertarian blogger’s contention — ALDI is in Whitewater because the city has a new municipal administration that brought ALDI here — is accurate?

All of it, every last word.

I’m glad ALDI is here — one should be clear about how she’s here.

1. Denoted as a fraction, these aged men of the old guard would each look like this: 1/15,000 or 0.000067
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2. The request, submitted and received under Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31–19.39, has more than one use.
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3. The Banner‘s author writes in his paragraph with a credulousness that suggests no awareness or no appreciation of the challenges to the modernization — normalization, truly — of local government over the last two years. ↩︎