I'd like your support
Thank you all for being loyal readers, and welcome to all those that have recently subscribed!
I have an important announcement: I'm now offering paid subscriptions to my newsletter. While I will continue to offer much of my work for free, some readers have asked how they might support me, so I thought I would give them the opportunity. Also, I am a slow writer and doing this takes a lot of time. I would love to continue, and your financial support would really help. Otherwise, I may have to get another job.
Where we’ve been
Over the last six months, I think I’ve managed to cover a wide range of topics. Here are a few for those who have only recently subscribed:
A deeper look (Part I, Part II) at the motivations for the Common Council's attempts to reduce its size and impose term limits
My attempt to understand how schools in Wisconsin get funded
A conversation with John Larry, former candidate for Alder of 8th District and contentious member of the City’s committee on policing and systemic inequities formed during protests that erupted in late-2020.
On the effort to ban no-knock warrants within Wauwatosa
Behavioral problems in Wauwatosa schools and the research behind restorative justice as a remedy
Wauwatosa's potentially $100 Million dollar capital improvement project to reduce flooding in the Schoonmaker Creek watershed (I, II)
The approval of John Vassallo's 28-story high-rise apartment building next to a residential neighborhood of single family homes (I, II, III, IV)
A look at teacher turnover and administrative bloat in the Wauwatosa School District
Where we’re going
Paid subscribers will generally receive two emails per week. In the past this has usually included one longer piece that goes in-depth on a single topic, event, or agenda item and one shorter piece that provides a high-level summary of the past week’s school board and city council meetings. In time, I’d like to offer more in-depth interviews, expand to other topics or events going on within the city, and perhaps add some non-news items like book reviews or longer essays that would nevertheless relate to issues in the community. I’m open to suggestions about what you’d like to see.
In terms of subscriptions:
Free subscribers will continue to get at least one email per week.
Monthly subscriptions will be $6. For comparison, a regular digital monthly subscription to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel costs $14.99 per month.
Yearly subscriptions are $60 per year
If for some reason you’re feeling generous and just want to give extra money to support my work, you can purchase what Substack calls a Founder's subscription for $200. If you do this, I'll probably want to meet you and ask why.
Throughout the year I will probably take off a week or two for vacation, and there's typically a two-week period where I'm traveling for work. I won’t be sending out any newsletters during these times.
Why I’m doing this
There are many reasons, but I’ll mention three.
First, I think local journalism is important. And I think it’s relatively more important now, because there is just a lot less of it than there used to be. Over 1,800 local newspapers have shut down over the last twenty years, and Wauwatosa's last local newspaper closed over 15 years ago. The loss of local newspaper coverage can lead to worse public finances, less competitive elections, greater corruption, and more political polarization. For Wauwatosa, local news coverage has been consolidated into the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s once-weekly WestNOW insert that also includes advertisements, news from Elm Grove, news from West Allis, and more advertisements. Just last month, Gannett, the owners of the Journal Sentinel and ten other local publications in Wisconsin, eliminated hundreds of jobs throughout the state after terrible second quarter financial results. It’s not looking good.
This is unfortunate, because in a democracy, the informed citizen is of immense importance. And yet school board meetings are interminably long, public finance is confusing, and the machinations of local government obscure. It would be nice to have someone paying attention to these things so you don’t have to. While my tolerance for boredom is not infinite and in matters of public finance I am no more than a dilettante, I think I can provide a unique perspective that only minimally distorts reality (you can read a little more on my background here).
Second, Wauwatosa is a great place to live. But housing is expensive, infrastructure is old, racial tensions are…elevated, and people are really concerned about what their kids are learning in school. These are all issues that I’m interested in not just because they affect the residents of Wauwatosa but because they are at the center of public discussions nationwide about what it means to live in a pluralistic society, to build and maintain a community, and to achieve the American Dream.
More broadly, civic life is atomizing, people are losing trust in public institutions, and many people are rightly concerned about the future of their communities and their country. They worry that something fundamental to a flourishing or cohesive civic society has been lost or abandoned without necessarily being able to articulate what exactly it is or why it has occurred. These are big topics that aren’t necessarily connected to how the City spends its ARPA funds or why Froedtert hospital doesn’t want to pay property taxes, but they are topics that motivate my interest in community and government and frame the way I look at and think about certain events, and I’d like to write more about them in the future.
Finally, I think there’s something important about cultivating the democratic spirit. My son cannot read yet, so he only cares about what I do all day to the extent that I tell him I can’t play with him, but I would eventually like him to learn that it is good and noble to care about and be involved in his community. I’m the wrong guy to bring to a protest (too unenthusiastic), I’d probably be a bad politician (too disagreeable), but perhaps I can be a good observer and a thoughtful critic of what I see.
Finally, finally, I’ll end with a quote. Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition to voice her worries about the difficulty of human action and political freedom in a period of unprecedented technological progress. A technological progress that despite its great aid to human labor, efficiency, and wealth nevertheless left many with a diminished sense of agency, autonomy, and competence in their own lives and in their communities. Though the book was written in 1958, it has a certain resonance even today, and I think the final line sums up my general philosophy:
What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
So, if you like my writing; if you want to support local journalism; if for some reason you appreciate strange digressions on political theory, the philosophy of science, or economics when reading the news; or if you’re just interested in your community, would like to understand what’s going on, and don’t really care about that other stuff: I’d love for you to subscribe.
As an elected official and now paying subscriber, all I can say is roast me so I can be better at my job serving Wauwatosa and making the world a better place for our kids.