It has often been said of ancient Israel that her excellence lay in how she differed from her less thoughtful and less civilized neighbors. Not the common and vulgar practices of others, but her own singular beliefs and practices, made her great.
Nearby Fort Atkinson has, over recent years, been both an economic rival and source of good ideas for Whitewater.
Those days are probably drawing to a close. That city’s adopted a closed-government posture on the departure of her last city manager, has floated a one-person interview process to ‘learn more’ about a replacement, is busying hounding food trucks while denying doing exactly that, and to look at Fort Atkinson’s streets is to see more empty shops than in recent memory.
There’s a common theme in this, and it seems to confirm what commenter JB remarked about the departure of Fort Atkinson’s city manager recently, in reply to my post, Young Doesn’t Always Work:
I won’t pretend to know the whole story here, but perhaps the reason for leaving is of her own doing. After all, when someone comes in and challenges the “status quo”, there are bound to be a few disagreements. Perhaps her vision for the future of the city didn’t quite match that of the establishment? I’m not sure if it’s fair to chalk it up to “she’s too young to handle this”.
That sure looks right after all that’s happened recently.
I doubted Evie Johnson’s youth; I should have looked more closely at others’ old ideas.
If it should be true that Fort Atkinson will slide backward, the loss is hers, but only ours if we make the mistake of copying the bad ideas of our neighbors.
Being open to best practices – as we should always be – requires first actually finding those worthy practices.
Sadly, we likely have to look farther than Fort Atkinson to find them.