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.