There’s a lot of talk about marketing public projects in Whitewater, but the best marketing is sound policy. So sound, really, that it’s not marketing at all.
Yet, for all that talk, Whitewater’s bureaucrats stick to a simple script, repeating the same tenuous or dodgy claims.
Nonetheless, occasionally one finds something new, like this odd remark, from City Manager Brunner, about the relationship between Whitewater’s Innovation Center and Pres. Obama’s state of the union address:
This is what it’s all about,” Brunner said, referring to President Barack Obama’s call in his State of the Union speech Tuesday for business growth and innovation, “creating an environment with the support for small businesses to grow, and then have them go to other buildings in the park.
Oh, my. One can guess — correctly — that nothing but nothing about this slapdash project embodies Barack Obama’s vision for America. I’m a critic of much federal spending under the Obama administration (and that of George W. Bush, too), but never once have I thought that this boondoggle represents the federal administration’s idea of quality.
Here would have been the better course for Whitewater’s leading career bureaucrat:
Don’t take the money when you’ve no sound use for it, don’t issue public debt when you’ve no sound use for it, don’t exaggerate about the project to the point of absurdity, don’t try to pick winners (as you don’t know any), and concentrate instead on reducing taxes and regulations on existing, real businesses.