I’ve posted earlier about a March 16th candidates’ forum in Whitewater. This post continues a discussion about the upcoming election, in which candidates for council aren’t the only candidates on our local ballot.
A few additional remarks appear below, about the races and candidates.
Unopposed is a bad thing. Most of our races, for common council or school board, are single-candidate affairs. Three council members are unopposed, two of whom are incumbents. Both school board candidates are unopposed.
That’s good for incumbents, but bad for our politics.
Pressing issues. The council candidates all had issues they considered most pressing: town-gown issues, retaining residents in town, growing the tax base, or the disconnect between students and the city.
They’re all solid concerns, and related ones, too.
University relations. Divisions between residents, as students and non-students, an unwillingness to live in town, and slow growth are connected problems.
Funny, about this: for all the talk of university-city cooperation, university officials have done too little to assure a better municipal climate for the students on whom their careers depend. Support for students on campus should extend to advocacy on behalf of students when they’re off campus.
If that had happened in a diligent way, years ago, there’d have been better progress by now. Working for the university should include advocating for students while they’re in town, rather than looking on them (and complaining about them) as a unruly hindrance to the city’s progress.
Some of these gentlemen working on campus want to boost the university as though it were composed only of men like themselves, the projects for which they’ve taken taxpayer funding, and the occasional athletic accomplishment in which everyone naturally can take pleasure.
Those men wouldn’t have jobs, those projects wouldn’t have homes, and those teams wouldn’t have victories without a campus of many thousands of students.
Accelerating public project schedules. Consider the following question: what could someone on council do to expedite a given public project?
It’s a predictable question, and an impartial one if one isn’t asking about one’s own area of employment.
I’d ask a few questions of my own, in reply:
(1) Do we need another public project?
(2) Are there private alternatives to additional public spending?
(3) What’s the lost opportunity of spending on that public project; are there greater public needs?
(4) Is there a justification for an expedited public-project schedule? Those wanting something more quickly should offer a clear and convincing justification for that request.
Houston. There was a joke during the 3.16 forum about zoning, to the effect that Whitewater wasn’t Houston, a place with very limited zoning regulations.
That’s true, we’re not: Houston has a decidely lower unemployment rate than America’s national percentage.
Wanting to grow the tax base means more than the sugar-high of other peoples’ tax dollars for white-collar projects. Until we’ve solid, private growth like that of Houston, jokes about limited zoning elsewhere offer laughs but – for us – nothing more.
Tomorrow: The At-Large Race between Patrick Singer & Andrew Crone.