At last night’s Council session, City Manager Clapper mentioned two upcoming budget topics of particular interest: funding for Downtown Whitewater and for the Janesville Transit Bus.
The two items could not be more different: expenditures for Downtown Whitewater support local merchants, while the Janesville Bus supports a bumbling, dissembling Janesville bureaucrat’s ambition for his town at the expense of our own.
I’ve mentioned the budget as one of the four big public policy topics of the fall, and look forward to both discussions (October 28th for Downtown Whitewater, November 6th for the Janesville Bus.)
In some ways, I’m sorry even to mention the two requests in the same post. Downtown Whitewater doesn’t deserve the taint of being discussed in the same post as the bus (a project that, if it were ever successful on its own terms, would undermine local shopping in favor of Janesville’s merchants).
We don’t do enough for brick and mortar, and certainly not compared with the amounts we waste on taxpayer-subsidized, bottom-shelf tech ventures in a futile effort to make the Innovation Center look innovative.
(I sometimes think some of these gentlemen would stick an iPhone in a pig’s mouth and call it a mobile communications platform if they thought anyone would marvel at it.)
But for brick and mortar here in town – well, that’s slipped from fashion these last few years. That’s too bad – there’s more to be done there, if it’s to be done anywhere.
A renewed commitment to existing, conventional merchants and new ones over sketchy tech ventures is a better direction for this city.
Even in the busiest of times, these are two projects worth watching. I’ll write about each before their scheduled discussions at Council.