Discerning Whitewater

Are you aware that (last week) the Whitewater City Council allocated $40k-50k to politic and promote their November referendum?

I saw this prior to the meeting, but had no idea the amount since they did not provide the information.

The claim is that the referendum is for the Fire Department. This would be a Fire Department that was solvent just two months ago.

The city has committed several million dollars to upgrade the library. In my opinion, this is a waste of money. How many people need to be serviced in order to make these millions worthwhile?

The city also just committed several million dollars (just a few weeks ago) for new fire equipment. I remember sitting in that city council meeting as the justification for the new equipment was horrid. No study was done showing the cost of maintaining the current equipment for another 5-10 years. Just a comment about getting replacement parts (which is by no means justification for millions on new truck(s)). I remember seeing the fire truck sales guy at the meeting, leaving for celebratory drinks and dinner shortly after this discussion 🙂 .

Was this a quid pro quo? You can be the judge.

Throw in the ~$1.6 million on Trippe and Cravath Lakes…. only to make them worse! Behind the scenes, the finger pointing is quite interesting.

The city does not have my trust with regard to this referendum. They seem to be spending money they already do not have.

Take a moment and imagine if the city spent fifty thousand dollars trying to get a business to come to Whitewater. Right now, the city does not even know how to measure business growth in the city.

Here is the full meeting. You will need to go to the end, like 1:15 or so. Chuck Mills makes a good point that if the referendum was so good, they would not need to spend so much money promoting it.

I likely won’t be voting for it.

Then there is the school board referendum.

There is some hub bub over the last school board meeting. I sat next to Henri Kinson during the meeting. I looked over at his notes, so I saw that there was a battle coming.

I believe Henri has some righteous anger towards this referendum. He made a lot of good points. Our per pupil costs are very high. The decisions made to keep kids home during COVID cost the district plenty.

I found Steve Ryan’s lack of self control interesting, interrupting Kinson several times. First he claimed that kids in school the whole time. Then he claimed they did the best with what they had…. unfortunately everyone around us did so much better. When Kinson says that an admission of fault is in order, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Ryan acknowledges “anything” in order to get Kinson’s support for the referendum.

And Casey Judd’s only input was with regard to communities with less money per pupil doing better… mocking, saying maybe we should spend nothing on kids so they will get better scores.

I think there is room for improvement. This improvement starts with the spring election and getting rid of Judd and Ryan. For what it is worth, I strongly support Thayer Coburn. I think he has done a great job over the last year or so…. Word on the street is that Judd is not running again (not that he would have a chance of winning). Some pseudo conservatives in town have found a couple retired teachers to run in spring. I will not support that without some serious discussion.

Anyways, let me know your thoughts. School Board video down below. Subscribe below also.

-mike