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The Common Council Session for June 19th as End and Beginning

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Whitewater’s Common Council meeting of June 19th had more than one agenda item, but which item one emphasizes says something about one’s seriousness.

For those most interested in awards and honors, the end of the current municipal administration did not disappoint. Whitewater’s outgoing city manager announced an award from a municipal bureaucrats’ association for the city’s Innovation Center.

I’m sure it’s genuine, but genuine only in the way that a dressmakers’ association might honor a new railway design – they’d be free to offer an award, but it would hardly be persuasive.

The administration went out as it came in, with a self-flattering award. (The idea that the award was truly for all the city is absurd: this project was the expensive idea of a few, patting each other on the back about an empty shell of no popular interest or value.)

Not much later on, the administration offered a proposal for another community survey, and a strategic plan to greet a new city leader. The most recent survey was flawed, and yet the administration proposed another one, despite acknowledging problems with the last survey’s sample.

There, too, one finds a hallmark of the outgoing manager: little regard for sound reasoning or reliable data. All these years, with study after study, one saw only the same – a glib and superficial use of information for bottom-shelf public relations.

The Common Council wisely declined to undertake another community survey, or another strategic plan, this year. Whitewater has enough to do, and she can do those things directly, rather than though one more task force, survey, commission, etc.

It’s odd that a member of the administration would ask the council how the city will know what residents think without a survey. Common Council is meant to be, if it is meant to be anything, a representative body.

Every morning, I look up the weather, and post the forecast from the National Weather Service’s website. If one day the power went out, I’d still be able to tell what it was like outside, simply by going outside.

Any new city leader (whether manager or mayor) who’s worth his or her salt will do the same, and so will those already elected to represent their fellow residents. Whitewater’s outside and all around us.

Postponing a survey and a strategic plan was the right decision for the city, and a welcome recognition of the simple, practical tasks ahead. In this way, the session was part end, part beginning.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.20.12

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Good morning.

A windy Wednesday with a high of ninety-three is the forecast for Whitewater.

This morning at 8 AM, Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets.

On this day in 1975, a blockbuster hit America’s movie screens:

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls today in 1816 as one of claim-staking, or at least claim-defending:

1816 – Troops Arrive at Fort Crawford

On this date troops arrived at Fort Crawford. After the War of 1812, the United States Congress approved a plan to erect a chain of forts along the Fox-Wisconsin-Mississippi waterway. In 1816 Fort Crawford was erected on a mound behind the main village of Prairie du Chien. It was a four-sided enclosure made of squared logs, set horizontally. At the two opposing corners stood a blockhouse. Soldiers’ quarters formed the walls of the fort, faced the parade ground, and accommodated five companies. By the middle of the year, the 8th Infantry had established three posts on the east bank of the Mississippi: Fort Edwards, Fort Armstrong and Fort Crawford, the latter named for the Secretary of War. [Source: The History of Wisconsin, Volume 1, SHSW 1973, page 97]

Google’s daily puzzle is fit for naturalists: “The rising population of the only immortal animal species is spreading across the globe. Where did this predator originate?”

City, Law, Open Government, Planning

The Long and Good Meeting

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Last Monday, June 11th, Whitewater’s Common Council and Planning Commission met jointly, to receive a sixty-two-page .pdf presentation from Graef Consulting as part of a zoning rewrite project. The meeting lasted about three hours, during which members of Council and the Planning Commission heard residents’ views on the presentation.

The easiest description would be to say the consultants presented, some residents voiced concerns, and thereafter Council gave direction for modifications to the zoning rewrite project. That’s true, and it’s how a meeting like this should work: review leads to adjustment.

Still, to describe the meeting so simply would miss important aspects of the evening.

I’ve embedded the full video below. It’s lengthy, but in it one will find more than an evening’s unfolding agenda – there are telling references to Whitewater’s past, and to signs of a better future. A few general remarks appear below.

Interest. Dozens of residents attended, and many spoke. Those who say Whitewater’s residents are apathetic are wrong. When issues of interest arise, residents attend in solid numbers.

If anything, much of the last eight years (and before) has had the consequence of discouraging ordinary residents’ participation in favor of a small, stodgy clique that prefers only its own counsel. It’s only natural that, on political occasion after occasion, residents would avoid those sorts of meetings.

Thereafter, of course, the same people who bemoan their discouraging politics will insist that lack of participation is proof of popular support. (A very smart person reminded me of this recently: Whitewater’s town squires mistake the discouragement their closed policies have created with approval: “See, no one’s objected!”)

When people have an issue that matters, they’ll turn out.

As the city becomes more open, they’ll turn out more often for political meetings.

Substance & Procedure. I’ve written more than once that I’d prefer fewer municipal restrictions, but sometimes that view doesn’t prevail. That’s to be expected.

Still, there are really two concerns in every debate: particular substantive views on a topic (left, right, center, etc.), and views about the procedures through which the topic should be considered. Some of those procedures are so important that they represent a substance all their own.

As important as any particular outcome is the fairness of the procedures by which the outcome is achieved.

About key procedures one should be tenacious. There’s no reason to compromise on fundamental, procedural fairness. Of course, there are people in the city who’d rather have a small group in a backroom decide everything. Those few people deserve no deference, and should be met with tenacious opposition whenever necessary.

They will never again have the Whitewater they selfishly and presumptuously controlled for so very long. There’s still work ahead – openness requires a continuing diligence.

An open meeting like that of Monday, June 11th is good for the city. There will be others like it.

Improved Enforcement. During the meeting, Latisha Birkeland, Neighborhood Services Director, talked about the importance of uniform enforcement (apart from zoning). She briefly described some of the changes that she’s brought to her department since arriving here.

That’s noteworthy for three reasons. First, residents on every side of this issue have complained for years about equitable enforcement, but nothing useful happened until Birkeland became Neighborhood Services Director. These are the years of Whitewater’s administrative past: ignoring complaints from residents of every ideology and viewpoint. Dozens of meetings, each to no lasting effect, despite countless promises from Whitewater’s city manager.

Sadly, it took a new department head – someone from outside – to bring some measure of normalcy to enforcement inside the city. I’m hopeful that we’re doing better; we should have done better years ago, long before Birkeland arrived.

Relatively Calm. We’ve had contentious meetings over the years, but this one was calm and reasoned.

Why?

I think it’s because an informational meeting, long before final decision-making, reduces tension. A well-publicized meeting, where the only definite outcome is discussion, is less intense than one where a binding decision will be made.

The more notice there is, the less rushed the process, the calmer the meetings. Removing a sense of urgency removes tension.

Consultants. Whitewater has had more than her share of consultants, but Larry Witzling and Carolyn Esswein of Graef are probably the steadiest and most phlegmatic I’ve yet to see in the city. There’s a value in that, independent of any particular recommendation. We’ve had far too many edgy and prickly consultants, and it’s reassuring that we’ve found even-tempered ones. They held their cool, even after three hours.

Whitewater deserves that, and got that, on Monday the 11th.

The Joint Council and Planning Commission meeting was, I’d say, a good one. There will be potholes along this road, but nothing we can’t avoid, if only we’d try.

Common Council Meeting 06/07/2012 from Whitewater Community TV on Vimeo.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.19.12

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be another hot day, with a high temperature of about ninety-six.

Tonight, Common Council meets beginning at 5:30 PM. Among the agenda topics will be evaluation of search firms to assist with the selection of a new city manager.

On this day in 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved, after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the US Senate.

Google’s daily puzzle asks “what occupation did gunfighter Doc Holliday and patriot Paul Revere have in common?”

Press

When Content Doesn’t Matter Anymore

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Often, one doesn’t need a medical license to tell that a person’s sick. Even without the ability to diagnose an ailment, one can see that another’s tattered clothes, lapsed hygiene, and lethargy are signs of an underlying illness. These signs point to symptoms, but those symptoms – those pains within the sick person – may come from one of hundreds of disorders. By outward signs alone, there may be no way tell what afflicts someone. Still, one knows there’s something wrong with the struggling person.

In a newspaper, one may see several signs of a sickness: limited and low-quality advertisements, cheap newsprint, smudged ink, etc. Yet, of all possible signs, the most telling is when the very heart of the paper – its reporting – becomes weak. If the newspaper lets reporting lapse, it has let its most important attribute rot.

When reporting goes, when it stops being inquisitive of, and a break on, political power, the paper’s future is bleak. The easiest way to tell the reporting’s gone is when it’s not even the paper‘s reporting anymore. If the front page doesn’t belong to the paper, shared with a reputable news service, one spots a sign much worse than an sickly person’s commonplace badges of distress.

A front page that offers space for sows’ ears, although labeled as silk purses, is so ill that it has lost even the memory of what it feels like to be well.

That’s more than illness; it’s the conviction that chronic sickness is a kind of health. One seldom finds a person who holds that conviction and yet returns to genuine wellness.

Law, Libertarians, Liberty

Justice Kennedy the….Libertarian

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The Cato Institute’s David Boaz teases the venerable Time magazine about its cover story on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s supposedly inscrutable jurisprudence. (Time is a survivor – it’s really the only remaining newsmagazine of its kind; it’s fared far better than rival publications.)

Massimo Calabresi and David Von Drehle write in that magazine that

Efforts to fit Kennedy’s major opinions into a clear, coherent philosophy have met with little success. He generally sides with the court’s conservatives but is not tethered to any particular constitutional doctrine. “There is no grand unified theory for Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence,” says Viet Dinh, a leading conservative court watcher….

More and more cases are decided based on his idiosyncratic values.

As Boaz observes, those idiosyncratic values wouldn’t seem so idiosyncratic if one simply called them libertarian, that is, as a part of a jurisprudence grounded on liberty:

Justice Kennedy seems to be very concerned with liberty. He often sides with conservatives on economic issues (which are actually never mentioned by Time) and campaign speech, and with liberals on civil liberties, gay rights, and school prayer. Pretty inconsistent, huh?
Or then again, maybe Justice Kennedy has a basically libertarian view of the world and the Constitution. The word “libertarian” never appears in the article. Perhaps it should.

And it’s not like the idea of Justice Kennedy’s libertarianism is a deep, dark secret. The writers might have consulted Helen Knowles’s book The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. Or Frank Colucci’s book Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty. Or Randy Barnett’s Cato Supreme Court Review article on the Texas case, “Justice Kennedy’s Libertarian Revolution.”

Libertarianism can take heart from this story for two reasons. First, libertarian ideas are influential (after all, Calabresi and Von Drehle see Kennedy’s vote as a decisive one). Second, libertarian ideas are influential even if they’re not called libertarian.

Not a bad position in which to be, all considered.

Posted originally on 6.18.12 @ Daily Adams.

Music

Monday Music: The Halo Soundtrack

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Millions of people have played the video game Halo, or one of its several successors, and they haven’t just played a game – they have played a game with a memorable soundtrack. It conveys so well the action and suspense of a battle between humanity and a fanatical, multi-species enemy called the Covenant.

Enjoy.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.18.12

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s Monday begins with a chance of thunderstorms and a high temperature of ninety-four.

On this day in 1812, the War of 1812 began, with fighting lasting into 1815 —

 

Google has a nutritional question for its puzzle of the day: “You’re enjoying breakfast with Acer saccharum from Canada as a condiment. At least what percentage of it is sugar?”

City, Corporate Welfare, Federal Government, Government Spending, State Government

The Innovation Express Generac Bus: ‘Public Transit Is Not Expected to Make Money’

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The ‘Innovation Express’ – even less efficient, more costly, and more unjustified as crony capitalism than anyone might have thought!

There are two stories at the Janesville Gazette that do their damnedest to justify federal, state, and local subsidies ($83,005) for a bus that benefits principally a few workers from multi-billion-dollar Generac, but even cheerleading can’t conceal the serial errors behind this project.

(Online, the Gazette combines the stories into a single one, “Riding bus to Whitewater a ‘no-brainer.'” In the print edition, there are two stories, one below the fold on the front page, and other inside on page 9.)

Quick summary: Multi-billion-dollar Generac Power Systems lobbied for federal, state, and local taxpayer money for a bus route that would take its employees to and from their homes in Milton and Janesville to work in Whitewater. Although most of the riders have been Generac employees, most of the money has come from taxpayers, not from cash-flush Generac. The cost of the bus per rider is over $40 per passenger trip, considerably more than the costs for a group of Generac carpoolers.

For more on this topic, see A Local Flavor of Crony Capitalism, A little consistency would be in order, A Generac bus by any other name, and The Generac Bus and Bottom-Shelf Messaging.

Months ago, Generac proudly announced – with Gov. Walker in attendance — that it would create hundred of new jobs at the Whitewater plant. Shortly afterward, when it was clear that Generac wouldn’t be hiring those workers in Whitewater, the corporation started looking for taxpayer money to support a flimsy (but much touted!) business plan that, in fact, didn’t even consider how Generac would meet a professed need for hundreds of new workers.

(Whitewater has many unemployed residents, and an educated population with a university, but somehow Generac’s supposed needs simply cannot be met in Whitewater.)

A ‘No-Brainer.’  Never mind the use of a hackneyed and condescending expression – calling the bus a no-brainer doesn’t insulate the Generac-subsidizing bus from legitimate scrutiny and criticism.  If boosters of this plan think that a headline settles the question of corporate cronyism, they’re mistaken (and they simultaneously think too little of the Gazette‘s readers).

Free Riders and Subsidized Rides.  The story is about a free promotion, where riders don’t even have to pay a fare to ride — of course riders would like an offer like that.  They ride the bus, and get to ‘sleep on the way to work,’ at the expense of others.  It’s almost too funny that this comes close to the economic concept of the free ridership problem (getting something like this for nothing), and yet the Gazette somehow presents this idea as a good one (as proof of how lucky these riders are).  (A further discussion of  public goods is available online.)

These are, after all, not indigent people — they’re riders going to their jobs, who could afford to drive or car-pool.  This isn’t a service for the poor – it’s a subsidy to Generac, to fill the gaps in its publicized but shoddy business plan.  Government doesn’t owe Generac or its employees special treatment.

‘Public Transit Is Not Expected to Make Money.’  The total cost of this bus is $128,310, but Generac pays only a minority share of about 20% – most comes from taxpayers who have no connection to Generac.

Astonishingly, Janesville’s Transportation Director, Dave Mumma, is quoted as saying that public transit is not expected to make money.

What he’s really saying is that he’s not required to show a cost-benefit to anything he does – that it’s okay to be inefficient, wasteful, and ever-needier, because he should not be held accountable to the consequences of his spending.  Consider the arrogance of that claim – that ordinary concepts to evaluate a service don’t apply to his work – that he may take from others, to benefit Generac and its particular workers – without regard to the needs of the community.

Why not?   He is, by his own criterion, free from evaluation – he doesn’t have to make money, break even, etc. – he happily dwells in the world of perpetual loss, unchecked inefficiency, and taxpayer subsidies.

What’s that about bus size, again?  When asked whether a smaller bus might be most efficient for a small number of riders, Mumma objects, replying that “Seventy percent of the cost is sitting in the driver’s seat. That cost would be the same whether the driver is driving a bus or a van.”

It’s hard to tell whether Mumma is being disingenuous or is simply ignorant.  First, the cost that matters is the total cost, not a part of it, and so if a smaller vehicle would save fuel, emissions etc., it would be the better alternative.

Second, and this is critical, Mumma is wrong to think that the actual cost of using a large bus is the price tag of $128,310.  It’s not – the cost of using a larger bus when a smaller one would do is the money spent plus the opportunities forgone by using the wrong-sized bus.  Every time Mumma chooses the wrong-sized bus, society loses out, as a larger bus is taken from a better use, and a smaller one denied a more fitting use.  There’s a price to choosing poorly that exceeds Mumma’s narrow explanation of expenses.

If that’s too hard for officials in Janesville to understand, they might want to get on the bus – on a free fare day, of course – and travel to Whitewater, for an introductory course in economics at our university.

Don’t Worry, Whitewater Will Pick Up the Tab.  What happens if fares don’t even pay for a small portion of the total cost?

Here’s the answer:

Any shortfall in the amount raised from fares would be made up by Generac and Whitewater, meaning the city of Janesville would not be left with any cost, Mumma said.

Janesville residents get a subsidized ride, but City of Whitewater taxpayers will be paying more if fares don’t meet expectations.  (As for Generac, it should be paying for all of this now, not just a minority portion.)

This program should never have been publicly funded, to boost one cash-flush business.

There’s a selfish corporate and bureaucratic disregard for anyone other than a few behind a plan like this – in which a big corporation and a larger city’s officials take money from ordinary people and a smaller city for their own benefit.