Here is Part 2 of my post on the 8/20 PFC meeting.
Freedom of Expression Resolution. In the spring, the Common Council, on a 5-2 vote, passed a resolution re-affirming rights of free expression.
The resolution was reviewed, but not adopted at the August PFC meeting. The reception – but not adoption – offers insight into authority of the Council, PFC, and leadership of the police department.
It is true that the PFC, and neither Council nor City Manager, oversees the Whitewater Police Department. If you ever read on a city website or elsewhere that the City Manager oversees the police department, that’s misleading and incomplete. Authority does not run from the City Manager, around the PFC, on major matters of promotions, etc. Approval authority runs from the PFC to the department.
(Quick question: when the City Manager recently celebrated a promotion within the department, did the PFC approve it first? If it did not, then why did it do so in other cases? If the PFC has approved validly in some cases but not others, then why not explain – in the City Manager’s Weekly Report, the distinction? That would be good and common policy elsewhere, but it’s ignored here. To defer to others is to fail the city.)
I’ll ask another question: What does it mean when a member of the PFC, when asked to adopt the resolution, remarks that a member of Council said it (freedom of speech, presumably) was “already stated in the Constitution.” One can re-affirm what appears already.
More to the point, what value is a member of the PFC who cannot read the Constitution for himself, rather than rely on the opinion of someone on Council? There must be more than one copy of the Constitution in the city, and as it is already clear, the PFC has independent authority to consider the matter.
A man, presumably literate, having talked, preached, and chatted up residents of the city for years, might have the occasion to read and decide for himself. No need to look elsewhere: one who can open a great Book can read a slender Constitution. A member of a commission like this should be able to exercise his own research and review, of a document that, after all, should be familiar to him in his voluntarily assumed role.
If I applied to a board on geometry, one might expect that I knew a bit of Euclid. Relying on other residents, politicians, CliffsNotes, etc. just lacks respectable diligence.
It hardly matters how one receives a resolution, or often if one adopts it at all; it is enough to see that receiving with ‘appreciation,’ without independent reflection, is part laughable, part shame.
Next PFC meeting, according to the notes: November 19th. How many even know?
I will finish the week (my posting week ending on Saturday), with a series on the constitutional lawsuit against Meyer and the City of Whitewater.
No one who has followed this suit would be surprised that we have a PFC that’s ineffectual. If we had better oversight, we would have fewer embarrassments. Instead, we have more embarrassments than we can handle, and if the city could sell them to other communities, we would have a fine side business in these troubled times.