Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Whitewater: "Discover Your Center Of Opportunity"

According to this piece in the Journal Sentinel, the city of Whitewater is using a direct mail campaign to try to attract business to the area. Kevin Brunner, Whitewater's city manager quoted in the article, applied last year to be city manager of Oshkosh.

4 comments:

Working To Make A Living said...

Direct mail to attract business. WTF, the direct mail I get ends up in the trash . Now free beer and hookers, that would get someones attention. Even better yet, lets use taxpayer money to subsidize new business for them to come in and provide some menial low paying jobs, then turn around and fail leaving citizens footing the bill. Folks then start screaming about how high their taxes are, being pissed the media points their half baked ignorant rage at education system cutting even more programs. (shit i'm getting chest pains better quit) I have an idea, how about taking all that wasted tax money. Set up an industrial research facility( we do it with drug companies at the universities)whose mission is to research, design, implement new methods of manufacture green sustainable products. Once an idea is feasible the plant is located in the same town and the research facility continues to provide support. This can all be achieved with cooperation of business. Accept one caveat. Each patent and idea that the facility comes up with is the property of people.

CJ said...

A great idea.

Mr. Brunner was my top choice for city manager. He's a real go-getter.

His hands-on approach to engaging the university, minority groups and revitilization of Whitewater's downtown are impressive. No wonder the citizens of Whitewater did not want to lose him to Osh.

Steve Barney said...

Look's like Whitewater is providing us with a good example of collaboration between a community and its college, too. More examples:

University-Community Collaboration for Better Public Spaces | Smart Growth | US EPA
http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/univ_collaboration.htm


How can UWO collaborate with the City of Oshkosh? Oshkosh is a university town, after all. The US EPA may be able to help us figure this out (see contact on above EPA webpage).

Steve Barney said...

In particular, I strongly recommend chapter 13 (the last chapter) in the EPA publication cited in my previous comment (above). It's all about Wisconsin's Smart Growth and comprehensive planning law, and it's a real eye-opener.