I am one of the few people who bothers to read the Weekly Report of Whitewater, Wisconsin’s City Manager, Kevin Brunner. Read it I do, and in the August 13th edition, one sees this announcement about a second tenant for the under-construction Innovation Center:
Construction on Schedule for Whitewater Innovation Center; Another Tenant to Lease Space in Center
See Pictures.Construction of the Whitewater Innovation Center, the first building in the Whitewater University Technology Park, is right on schedule with an anticipated completion date of January 1, 2011. All of the structural steel has been erected and interior walls are currently being installed. The exterior walls will be constructed soon with a projected early October total enclosure of the building planned.
Also, a second tenant in the building has been announced. The Jefferson Eastern Dane Interactive Network (JEDI), a distance learning/virtual classroom consortium that serves nine southern Wisconsin school districts will lease an 800 square foot module on the Innovation Center’s second floor. JEDI’s five employees, including JEDI Director Dr. Leslie Steinhaus, will be moving to the Center next February from their current offices in Milton.
This announcement is nearly beyond parody.
The second tenant for the center is, like the first, a publicly-funded educational tenant now located in Milton, Wisconsin. In fact, this “second tenant” now shares space in the same building as CESA 2, the Cooperative Educational Service Agency, the selected anchor tenant for the Center. That’s right — the larger school agency is moving, and so the tiny school agency — now located in the same building at 448 E. High Street, Milton, WI 53563 — is moving too.
They not only have a public source of funding in common, and the same address, they also have the same phone number (608-758-6232)!
Actually, the connection is closer still, as the JEDI Network’s own history page reveals:
JEDI is leased by the Wisconsin Department of Adminstration [sic] on behalf of the participating school districts and MATC. The DOA issued a competitive Request for Proposal (RFP) from a consortia of the region’s telephone and cable television providers. The basic technical requirements were defined and cost estimates prepared based upon the required features, engineering studies, and vendor consultation.CESA #2, as management agents for JEDI, made application to the Wisconsin State Trust Fund Loan program in order to obtain the necessary funding for the project.
Emphasis added. Here’s a link to a website screenshot.
This is hardly a second and independent tenant, by any reasonable definition. Calling this a true second tenant is laughable. There’s a shady, dodgy aspect to these descriptions that conceals the real and distorted nature of this project.
I have no doubt that CESA 2 does good work, but here’s their own description, from the CESA 2 webpage, to which I’ve linked:
….[CESA 2] help[s] school districts share staff, services and purchasing, and provide a link between local districts and the state. All services provided are determined by participating member school districts. Special education for disabled students is the service CESAs most commonly provide schools….
Here’s the JEDI description, from its website:
The Jefferson-Eastern Dane Interactive (JEDI) is a distance education network of the following school districts: Cambridge, Deerfield, Fort Atkinson, Jefferson, Lake Mills, Marshall, Palmyra, Parkview, Whitewater as well as
MATC and UW Whitewater
These are not private tech businesses, or new startups — they are publicly-funded entities moving to a new, multi-million dollar building, itself the result of taxpayer dollars and taxpayer debt (through bonds).
Brunner is well-past shameless in describing this as an “Innovation” Center and “Tech” Park. It’s closer to a public-sector employees’ remodeling effort. But it says much about how tone-deaf Brunner is, that he cannot see the ridiculousness of his own announcements.
(Funnier still is Brunner’s implication that mentioning Dr. Leslie Steinhaus — former administrator of our public school district — is somehow a positive contribution to his announcement. For more on Steinhaus, whose entire school district tenure was as an extended exercise in mediocrity — see, Dr. Steinhaus vs. Student: Student Wins!)
And yet, for it all, we surely have not heard the last embarrassment concerning this wasteful, shameless project.