In many ways, Whitewater’s present fiscal and economic success depends on getting as far past the last administration’s outlook as possible. Our former city manager from 2004-2012 mastered a reverse Midas touch: turning what he grasped not into gold, but lead. We can – and I am confident will – get beyond those ill effects, but much of Whitewater’s current condition depends on working that prior under-performance and over-promising out of our political system and economy.
In this way, we’re like a patient recovering, slowly but surely, from a years’ long fever (if so long a fever were even possible for ordinary people).
One reads that Walworth County’s Board, predictably, has approved a multi-million-dollar parkland purchase for which our prior municipal executive, now a county employee, has been a champion. I’m not a bit surprised – advocates of the proposal failed earlier in 2013 get a super-majority for the project, and waited until 2014’s budget vote where that wasn’t required.
(They needed a super-majority earlier this year because they hadn’t planned for the parkland properly in this year’s budget. Theirs is almost a satire on sub-par performance.)
I’ve opposed the parkland proposal, as one can see from prior posts I’ve written about the pricey idea. It’s both wasteful and childishly presented.
But, honestly if selfishly, I am at least grateful that the principal champion of this idea now makes policy in Walworth County, and not Whitewater. Although we feel the effects of mediocrity in Elkhorn, at least the intensity of that mediocrity is attenuated through greater distance from our city.
By necessity, one would contend tooth-and-nail over Whitewater, but one should prefer even more that necessity not present itself.
In this way, I’m reminded about a final passage from War of the Worlds, about which I’ve written before. After the Martians fail in their efforts against Earth, they commence a new campaign against Venus:
Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in character.
One should have sympathy for the Venusians, of course, but still might be forgiven for a feeling of gratitude that some troubles were no longer so close at hand…