The March 5th issue of the Register has an above-the-fold story entitled, “City manager’s request for hiring freeze receives support.” Whitewater City Manager Kevin Brunner’s plan, as the Register recounts it, is to implement a hiring freeze on full or part-time city jobs until August 1st. The Common Council supported this effort, with the exception of backfill hiring for a position on the police department.
The Register notes that “….Brunner reiterated the plan is not a cost-savings measure. ‘The bottom line is that I think it is disingenuous to hire someone and then not be able to pay them in the future,’ said Brunner. ‘The (state budget) deficit could have a greater impact than what has been projected. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there now.”
Register Editor Matt Schwenke goes on to write that “While city attorney Wallace McDonell said Brunner could have instituted the hiring freeze without council approval, Brunner said that he did not want this to become a ‘polarizing’ issue and asked for the council’s support.”
Can anyone believe, in this deep recession, with budgetary and fiscal challenges both locally and nationally, that a mere hiring freeze of city workers is so ‘polarizing’ that Brunner cannot act without Common Council’s imprimatur? If not this, and if not now, then when, ever?
Where, by the way, in a climate when millions of jobs have been lost these last months, is the groundswell for hiring replacement City of Whitewater employees? If this might be a polarizing issue, then it’s polarizing only within the walls of the Municipal Building — no one else of any sense would complain about a freeze.
To whom much is given, much is expected; to manage the city is to make at least a few decisions, in troubled times, without a task force, commission, PowerPoint show, mission statement, or another’s pat on the hand. Can the former City Manager of the Year (selected, I think, by other city managers, not voters) not exercise a little authority without his finger to the wind?
One could pretend all of this is sensible, prudent, or admirable. It’s not.
A council member, longtime politician, and website publisher, by the way, notes that in this matter he will “support the city manager.” Too funny – it was the city manager who sought Council’s support — all this reciprocal hand-holding leaves our politics nothing so much as a support group, not a serious legislative or executive authority.