Over a month ago, Whitewater’s city manager, Kevin Brunner, used his Weekly Report to tout data from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance that he contended showed the strength of Whitewater’s fiscal position. (Predictably, the website of a local politician ran the figures that Brunner posted in full, without commentary.)
Brunner aimed to show that, using data from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance’s MunicipalFacts (spelled that way), Whitewater’s fiscal position was better than most of the Wisconsin cities in the 12,500 to 17,500 population range. See, Brunner’s July 30th Weekly Report.
There were two reasons to be suspicious of Brunner’s contention. First, if conditions were as bright as he claimed, the city would not be facing a fiscal shortfall into the hundreds of thousands. Second, Brunner did not include all the data that appear in MunicipalFacts.
Brunner included categories from the report that he found favorable, but a review of the actual, entire document quickly revealed that he omitted some of the data for the cities in Whitewater’s population group. (Brunner never mentioned that he selected only some of the available data. He pointed readers to a link to the report that he erroneously contended “can be accessed online” at http://www.wistax.org/pubs/. All the data are not online, but are instead only available if one buys or finds a copy of MunicipalFacts.)
I located the most recent, and complete, copy of the report, and here’s a comparison that Brunner chose not to include in his Weekly Report. The City of Whitewater depends on more shared revenue from the State of Wisconsin that just about any other city in the population group:
Shared Revenues (in Thousands)
State shared revenue payments received by municipality.
High: $4,152
Median: $901
Low: $276
Whitewater: $3,656
Shared Revenues Per Capita
Per capita shared revenue payments.
High: $325
Median: $62
Low: $20
Whitewater: $259
As Brunner’s administration is so dependent on outside assistance, and as state payments are shrinking, the administration finds itself with less than before — and that’s one reason we have a fiscal shortfall.
Other communities in our population group are simply far less dependent on Madison as a cash cow. These data were available in the printed report, but Brunner chose not to include them. (I’ll presume it was a choice, unless two of the pages were stuck together in his copy, and he simply forgot about the millions that Whitewater receives from the state that most population group cities do not.)
We have significant poverty and significant need, and a bureaucrat’s selective use of data changes none of that sad truth.