Discerning Whitewater

I did an open records request pertaining to the Defund the Police movement in Whitewater.

Lynn Binnie refused to give me a portion of my request.

Jim Allen simply didn’t comply with my request. I had to forward the request to the city clerk.

I want to share a dialogue I had via email with City Council Leader Lynn Binnie:

My intent here is fairly clear… I simply asked him to put me at ease…tell me that he won’t vote to defund the police.

Out of fairness, I am posting the comment without any filter… His response:

Say I wanted to go before the city council and discuss my idea of filling Cravath Lake with banana pudding. This is a horrible idea and does not deserve any merit.

Yet filling Cravath Lake with banana pudding is a better idea than defunding the police.

I should probably add here that my comments were removed from The Whitewater Banner’s facebook page. Binnie is also an editor for this page, and knew my comments were removed…. so … my take on it is he doesn’t want to hear my opinion, and he doesn’t want an honest conversation.

Binnie would have better off just not responding. My interpretation of his answer is that while he doesn’t want to use the term “defund the police”, he is open to the idea of doing so. His actions show he is procative in this endeavor….

Another player in this mess is Kenny Yarbrough, Chief Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at UW-W. I have an email into him, hoping to get his understanding. Yarbrough wrote most of the resolution.

I have had the question asked of me, “what do we do?”

I guess it depends on how bad one wants to escalate:

• Calling your councilman/woman is about the least one can do. They appear to me to be on this path. They have their talking points and appear to be more about talking and less about listening.
• Emails are not a horrible idea.
• My speculation is that Yarbrough, McFadden, and Brandon Thomas are earmarked for this EO Committee. Two City Council members on the committee, my speculation, is Binnie and Brown. This leaves roughly two positions left on this committee. If you call your councilman/woman, my recommendation is to have notes in front of you, and make sure you mention that McFadden and Thomas are horrible choices for this committee.
• Attending the CC meetings are also an option, and speaking during them. I have a very strong commitment on Tuesday nights, but may take a night off in order to address this committee.
• Based on the anger and the numbers, recalling a councilman/woman seems to be possible. This is quite a fiefdom, but the signatures required to force a recall election would not be very high. Using the GOP’s election mapping data would make this, imho, fairly doable.

So I am going to leave this here for now. I will leave comment open on this one. Email me @ discerningwhitewater@gmail.com if you are interested in getting organized.