FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.19.12

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s Thursday will be a mostly cloudy day, with a high of eighty-eight.

The city’s Community Development Authority meets today at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1940, facing great odds, Churchill launched his “V for Victory” campaign in Europe.

Also on this day, in 1799, French soldiers in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone.

Here’s a video first — a clip of a snow leopard and her cubs in their den, from Mongolia —

Google’s daily puzzle combines war and peace: “A Revolutionary War colonel, famous for resisting a siege at Fort Stanwix, had a grandson who became a literary legend. What’s the grandson’s name?” more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.18.12

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Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will bring a partly sunny day, with a high of ninety-one, and an east wind at five to ten miles per hour.

On this day in 1940, Democrats nominated Franklin Roosevelt for a third term:

Google daily puzzle tests one’s knowledge of the Ancients today: “An ancient Greek philosopher thought that not all madness was bad. In a famous play, he named four types that he considered gifts from the gods. What were they?”

  more >>

City, Development, Green Energy Holdings, Local Government, Open Government

An Open Letter to the Interim City Manager on a Proposal between Whitewater and Green Energy Holdings

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Good afternoon.

Here’s a post to follow previous ones on this website, and a story today in the Janesville Gazette, about a proposal between the City of Whitewater and Green Energy Holdings for a waste digester.

The project has been touted as a large one, but large claims for municipal projects require substantial justification.

In today’s newspaper story, Whitewater’s Interim City Manager, Cameron Clapper, is quoted, in response to questions about the project, as saying that “I know of no such problems…It is my understanding that we have a memorandum of understanding with Green Energy and all conditions either have been met or are expected to be met.”

Although these remarks are reassuring, there must be a careful, substantial basis for that confidence. We would surely agree that this is no private endeavor, but one to which our city of many thousands is a party.

Open government is good government.

If the City of Whitewater has information to corroborate the soundness of this proposal, then why not post that information on the city’s website? The city has a fine website – why not create a page with thorough information about the project for all Whitewater’s residents?

To help in that regard, for convenience, I’ve collected in this one message links to two of my three, prior posts on the deal, with reasonable, simple questions about the project. (The third of those prior posts was about a Daily Union story, and addressed the press rather than local government.) Other questions may arise, but these seem a good starting point.

The questions appear as a postscript to this note. (The original posts have follow up, explanatory questions below each main one.) The Interim City Manager owes me no personal response to this note; I neither expect nor want one.

Our community, though, does deserve much more information than it has received about this project. In that spirit, I’ve sent this post via email to Mr. Clapper’s attention.

Yours,

JOHN ADAMS

www.freewhitewater.com

P.S. Questions about the GEH Proposal

(For a comprehensive list of all posts about this proposal, FREE WHITEWATER now has a designated category.)

From Preliminary & General Questions about a Proposal with Green Energy Holdings —

1. What’s the actual name and business form of Green Energy Holdings?

2. Green Energy Holdings, Inc. was registered as a Wisconsin corporation on 4.3.12. Why so recently? How – under what form — was it doing business previously?

3. If GEH registered as a Wisconsin corporation in April, with whom was the city negotiating previously?

4. How did the city first learn of this proposal?

5. Which employees from city staff worked with GEH – under whatever business form — during the nine months’ time that Brunner mentioned?

6. If city employees have worked for a long time, why is there so little information available?

7. Why has there been no document of any kind – other than the proposed development agreement – shared with the public about this proposal!

8. How many digester sites does GEH own and operate now?

9. In the sites that GEH operates now, what value have the GEH plants contributed to the community?

10. Where is GEH’s headquarters now? [7.17.12: is this a WI or an out of state company? Is there a licensing deal between an out-of-state and a Wisconsin company?]

11. Why does GEH’s corporate filing with Wisconsin use the same post office box address as the one listed for Northern Concrete Construction?

12. How has GEH calculated its reported claims of economic or property value added to a community?

13. How did GEH arrive at a target figure for incremental property value claimed for a Whitewater digester?

14. Before submitting a draft proposal to the Common Council, did Whitewater’s city manager or others on his staff undertake or request an independent analysis of claimed incremental value for a digester?

15. Other than Whitewater, in what other communities does GEH have present plans to build?

16. One of those other, proposed communities is Maribel, Wisconsin. What is the status of the project in that community?

17. Before submitting a draft proposal to the Common Council, did Whitewater’s city manager or others on his staff undertake or request an independent analysis of the environmental impact of the project?

What impact will the processing of food waste in the facility have on the surrounding land, air, and water?

18. Before submitting a draft proposal to the Common Council, did Whitewater’s city manager or others on his staff receive visit other communities, and interview residents in those cities, about existing GEH projects?

19. How much public money will be required for this project, and how much of the investment will be privately funded, from GEH?

From Questions for the CDA about a Proposal with Green Energy Holdings —

1. Don’t both Whitewater and the State of Wisconsin have prohibitions against conflicts of interest among officials?

2. Shouldn’t we have a government, including all who serve on boards and commissions, meeting – at a minimum – the standards that our city’s ordinances, and our state’s laws, require?

3. How were these remarks [about supplies for the developer from a board member’s own employer], just less than 12 minutes into the session, from the CDA board chairman Jeff Knight, and a CDA member Jim Allen, consistent with even that minimum standard?

4. Why does the CDA chairman assume approval of a deal even before going into closed session?

5. In light even of a potential conflict (and that’s a generous interpretation), why did the CDA member and chair vote on this proposal?

6. In light of a potential conflict (again, a generous interpretation), why did the CDA member and chair vote on the GEH proposal?

7. In light of a potential conflict (again, a generous interpretation), why did the CDA member and chair even participate in this part of the CDA discussion?

8. In light of a potential conflict (again, a generous interpretation), will the CDA member and chair continue to participate in CDA discussions of GEH?

9. What did the CDA know about this project at the time it deliberated preliminary approval?

10. If GEH is providing private funding, have audited financial statements for the company been provided to the city and CDA for the purposes of ascertaining whether GEH can meet its commitments?

11. Why was there nothing about GEH in the CDA’s online agenda packet?

Beautiful Whitewater, City, Film, Press Release

Summer Movie Matinee at Seniors in the Park

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Here’s a treat for today @ 12:30:

Get out of the heat on Tuesday, with the Summer Movie Matinee at Seniors in the Park! We’re going back to the Good Ol’ Days, with a movie short, a cartoon, and a Feature Film! There will even be free popcorn and Movie theatre candy!

First up is a Little Rascals short, “The Bear Shooters,” (1930); followed by a 1942 Superman cartoon, “Terror on the Midway,” and then, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the 1951 landmark science fiction classic!

Get out of the heat at Seniors in the Park, this Tuesday, July 17, beginning at 12:30 p.m. Seniors in the Park will be Movie Theatre cool!!!!

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.17.12

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s Tuesday will be sunny and hot, with a temperature of 101 degrees, and a west wind at 5 to 10 miles per hour.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1955, Disneyland opened:

 

The Wisconsin Historical Society records that on this day in 1832,

Fort Koshkonong Construction [Was] Completed

On this date General Henry Atkinson wrote General Winfield Scott that he had finished constructing Fort Koshkonong. The fort, constructed of oak logs, was abandoned when the army pursued and defeated Black Hawk at the Battle of Bad Axe in August of 1832. The logs from the fort were then used in the construction of houses in the community now known as Fort Atkinson. By 1840, little of the original fort remained. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride, p. 107]

Google’s daily puzzle is perfect for astronomers: “About how many times would you have to circle the Earth, at the equator, in order to travel 1 parsec?”

Local Government, New Media, Open Government, Press

The Collapse of Serious Local News

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When even a news outsourcing firm’s criticism of local journalism has a sad ring of truth, one can see how far newspapers have fallen. It’s also why bloggers and other citizen journalists now fill a role that some newspapers have abandoned.

Journatic is a company that provides supposedly local stories to the American media, and it’s the cause of a journalism scandal: Journatic has been using fake bylines on some of its stories, and many of the stories are actually outsourced and written in the Philippines. The NPR program This American Life reported on Journatic’s methods, press critic Jim Romenesko has blogged about it, and the Atlantic Wire’s posted about coverage of the story.

Here’s one of the ways that the founder of Journatic, Brian Timpone justified fake bylines and American ‘local’ stories aggregated by the thousands in the Philippines:

But the worrisome part about all this is that places like the [Chicago] Tribune use this service in the first place. The Tribune fired 20 members of its staff and replaced them with Journatic. Timpone’s theory, which he explained to Mathew Ingram of GigaOM in April, is that this hyper-local news is essentially comprised of press releases and doesn’t require an actual reporter on the ground. He said:

The base of community news is what they call in the industry ‘process news,’ and it doesn’t really require a reporter, it just needs some cleaning up.

But, as This American Life‘s Koenig notes, the reporters Journatic does have — even the ones like Ryan Smith — get paid so little that it is worth more for them to churn out as many stories as possible without reporting or any other due diligence, and local newspapers are no longer sending reporters out to do the old-fashioned work. She ends the piece by explaining that while newspapers are firing, Journatic is hiring.

(From the Atlantic Wire post of 7.2.12, with original quote from GigaOM on 4.27.12.)

Journatic’s unsettling excuse for its own assembly-line product: that local news is hollow, a collection of press releases, needing no reasoned examination of official actions. Perhaps Timpone doesn’t think he’s ahead of the curve: he may think he’s simply profiting from a prior change in many community papers.

He’s all-too-right about that prior change, and it’s been a decline in quality that’s bad for America.

Newspapers’ negligence in allowing officials to act without press oversight — and worse — in turning printing presses into fiddles to be played — has left our country markedly worse off.

We often get closed, mediocre, inefficient, dodgy government as a consequence.

One would rather read than write. The return of a press that reviewed officials’ actions thoroughly (and did a better job of it than ever before) would be a great gain for America. Far from wanting newspapers to decline, I hope (optimist that I am) that the press will become more vigilant of authority.

If newspapers refuse, however, to write about political authority with the reasonable scrutiny it deserves, one is compelled to read and write.

Posted originally on 7.16.12 at Daily Adams.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.16.12

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s Monday will be sunny and hot, with a high of ninety-nine, and southwest winds at 5 to 15 miles per hour.

Our weather may be unpleasant, but there are natural conditions that would be worse, as in this video from British Columbia:

On this day in 1945, the atomic bomb was first tested successfully:

Google’s daily puzzle asks about symbols: “A cartomancer shows you a dark man and a widow together. What, using the most common terms, are you looking at?” more >>

Twitter

Recent Tweets, 7.8 to 7.14

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13 Jul
@DailyAdams
Amazon same-day delivery: How the e-commerce giant will destroy local retail Slate Magazine http://slate.me/SkAIrv

13 Jul
@DailyAdams
UFO sightings are more common than voter fraud | Mother Jones http://bit.ly/Nr0W9V

13 Jul
@DailyAdams
57 new food items at WI State Fair this year, including pork donut http://bit.ly/Mr261R #porkdonut

13 Jul @DailyAdams
Joe Paterno, at the end, showed more interest in his legacy than Sandusky’s victims Washington Post http://wapo.st/NqgcE4

12 Jul @DailyAdams
Team USA will be dressed in uniforms made in China ABC News http://bit.ly/Lio3Fb #embarrassment

12 Jul @DailyAdams
Wisconsin leads the nation in mink-pelt production http://bit.ly/LijN8P #badbusiness

12 Jul @DailyAdams
Romney’s Bain Story Is Falling Apart? Could he really be foolish enough to lie about his departure? http://bit.ly/Nsg0os

11 Jul Libby Jacobson @LibbyJ
http://Whitehouse.gov petition to make the TSA follow the law. #SignItMaybe? http://bit.ly/P14W2J
Retweeted by John Adams

11 Jul @DailyAdams
Indeed it should: “@CatoInstitute: #TSA Should Follow the Law – http://j.mp/MihpAh ”

10 Jul @DailyAdams
That’s the size of it: Holder Calls Voter ID Laws ‘Poll Taxes’ http://bit.ly/LNnNLa

9 Jul @DailyAdams
Krugman contrasts Romneys George and Mitt http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/opi

9 Jul @DailyAdams
Law Enforcement Requests for Cell Phone Records at All-Time High http://bit.ly/MWagEL #surveillancestate

9 Jul Cato Institute @CatoInstitute
NEW Podcast: USDA, Organics and ‘Big Food’ http://j.mp/RQxdsJ (h/t @COBrown)
Retweeted by John Adams