Nearly 400 people supported the Whitewater Breakfast Kiwanis Club’s annual pancake breakfast on March 8.
Whitewater Kiwanis Breakfast Club thanks everyone for a terrific pancake-day fundraiser on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who attended and donated to Kiwanis, to all of the businesses that contributed, and to all of the wonderful volunteers.
“We are grateful to everyone in our community who helped to make the Pancake Day a success! Every year we love to see people enjoying our pancakes and Jones sausages. The camaraderie and friendship in Whitewater is amazing, and people are so generous with donations that help us help children,” said Corey Davis, Co-President of the Whitewater Kiwanis Breakfast Club.
“We are so grateful to our volunteers of all ages who helped to plan, set up, serve pancakes, clean up and more. We couldn’t do this without them,” said Penny Ardelt, chair of the breakfast.
Whitewater Kiwanis is a group of dedicated volunteers who help both children of the Whitewater community and the world. The club raised funds to make possible the recent installation of the city’s first piece of inclusive playground equipment, a We-Go-Round, in Starin Park. Annual donations are also made to provide shoes and winter clothes for students, as well as support for organizations such as the Whitewater Food Pantry, Bethel House, The Community Space, and the Whitewater Youth Soccer Club.
If you have an interest in helping youth in Whitewater, you can check out Whitewater Kiwanis on Facebook and join our Club by contacting Corey Davis at coreydavis77@yahoo.com
Kiwanis is a global organization of volunteers dedicated to improvingthe world one child and one community at a time.
Join us for an Open House of our BRAND-NEW 2nd Floor Advanced Assisted Living! Wednesday, March 12th from 4:30-6:30 pm come on over to get the first look at this new space and living option at Fairhaven. Private tours for our 3rd and 4th Floors will also be available. We are excited to show this floor off to all….see you Wednesday Night!
City of Whitewater Plan & Architectural Review – Monday @ 6:00 p.m. Agenda includes PUBLIC HEARING FOR REVIEW AND POSSIBLE APPROVAL Consideration to Approve and Recommend to Common Council a change in the District Zoning Map to Rezone Parcel # 292-0515-3233-008 at 500 N Tratt St. from AT (Agricultural Transition District) to R-3 (Multi-Family Residence District) and /WUP 00359 from R-3 (Multi-Family Residence District) to AT (Agricultural Transition District.) Whitewater Municipal Building Community Room, 312 West Whitewater St. *In Person and Virtual Citizens are welcome (and encouraged) to join our webinar via computer, smart phone, or telephone. Citizen participation is welcome during topic discussion periods. Please join the meeting from your computer, tablet or smartphone. https://meet.goto.com/749292677 You can also dial in using your phone. Access Code: 749-292-677 United States: +1 (646) 749-3122 Get the app now and be ready when your first meeting starts: https://meet.goto.com/install
City of Whitewater Public Works Committee – Tuesday @ 5:00 p.m. Agenda includes Discussion and Possible Action regarding the addition of a right turn only lane on southbound Prairie Street at Main Street, and Discussion and Possible Action regarding reducing parking and adding a sitting area at Parking Lot C. [This lot is adjacent to the mural.] Cravath Lakefront Room, 2nd floor, 312 W. Whitewater St. *In Person and Virtual AGENDA Citizens are welcome (and encouraged) to join our webinar via computer, smart phone, or telephone. Citizen participation is welcome during topic discussion periods. Please click the link below to join the webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83198282604?pwd=cDdLWjUvTTRqRUQ4UVcwQWcrcW1BUT09 Telephone: +1 (312) 626-6799 US Webinar ID: 859 3695 9081 Passcode: 019093
City of Whitewater Referendum Public Information Session regarding Police and Fire/EMS Referendum – Tuesday @ 5:30 p.m. Join from PC, Mac, iPad, or Android: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84951123016?pwd=8O0n8A40XtonGgFeh3FFOqWL0n2pZn.1 Webinar ID: 849 5112 3016 Passcode:322958 Phone one-tap: +13092053325,,84951123016#,,,,322958# US +13126266799,,84951123016#,,,,322958# US Join via audio: +1 312 626 6799 US Where: City of Whitewater Municipal Building, 2nd floor Cravath Lakefront Conference Room, 312 W. Whitewater St.
City of Whitewater Public Information Session on Trippe & Cravath Lakes by City Staff and the Lakes Advisory Committee – Wednesday @ 11:30 a.m. Starin Park Community Building, 504 W Starin Rd
City of Whitewater Referendum Public Information Session regarding Police and Fire/EMS Referendum – Thursday @ 1:00 p.m. Where: Starin Park Senior Center, 504 W Starin Rd.
(Above photo courtesy of Olivia Zinanni: Kacie Carollo, Maggie Trautsch and Bri McCurdy celebrate after defeating UW-La Crosse in the second round of the NCAA Division III Tournament)
Still Dancing … Warhawks Advance to Sweet 16 for Fourth Consecutive Season
The UW-Whitewater women’s basketball team punched its ticket to the Sweet 16 for the fourth consecutive season with a thrilling 50-49 win over UW-La Crosse Saturday night in Kachel Gym.
The Warhawks advance to face another familiar foe – UW-Stout. This time UWW will be on the road heading to Scranton, Pennsylvania for their Sweet 16 matchup. Tipoff against the Blue Devils is set for 4:30 PM Central on Friday, March 14. In the other game of the sectional, Johns Hopkins will take on the host university, Scranton at 7 PM. More information will be posted when available.
Saturday’s game was the epitome of a WIAC battle – fast pace, physical play and stifling defense from both squads. The first half score was indicative of the shutdown defenses as the teams went into the locker room tied 20-20.
The second half was a continuation of the first, with ties and lead changes abounding. By the end of the third the Eagles had the upper hand by just one, 37-36.
Bri McCurdy (St. Croix Falls, Wis./St. Croix Falls) turned phenomenal defense into offense early in the fourth. Poking the ball away from the Eagle guard just a second into the quarter, her steal led to a wide open layup for Mallory Oloffson (Normal, Ill./Normal Community) off a Katie Hildebrandt (McFarland, Wis./McFarland) assist to give UWW the lead, 38-37. Hildebrandt scored on the next possession with a layin for a three-point Warhawk advantage less than a minute in forcing a quick UWL timeout.
On the other side of the break, the Eagles drained a three-pointer to knot the game, 40-40. Oloffson broke a two-minute scoring drought with a layup to hand the Warhawks the lead, 42-40, with just over six minutes to play. Two minutes later, Oloffson made one of two at the line to extend the lead to three with 4:19 to go.
The Eagles registered their first points in nearly five minutes with a layup at the 3:15 mark to cut the gap to one. They hauled in a defensive board and knocked down a three for a quick five-point swing to reclaim the lead, 45-43, with 2:37 on the clock.
Kacie Carollo (Whitewater, Wis./Whitewater) answered, driving hard to the basket for a layin to tie it up, 45-45 with two minutes left. Both teams got to the basket in the final two minutes trading layups. The Eagles took the lead – Whitewater countered to tie it up. UWL once again grabbed a two-point advantage and, once again, the Warhawks responded. Carollo found Hildebrandt down low for a layin on that final layup that tied it 49-49 with 33 seconds remaining.
As the game came down to the wire, the atmosphere in Kachel was electric. UW-La Crosse called timeout after Hildebrandt’s layup to plan an offensive set. They opted for a three-pointer as the clock ticked down. As the shot went up, it had a chance but just found the front rim and Carollo elevated for the rebound. Head Coach Keri Carollo immediately called for a timeout to advance the ball.
Inbounding from the near side, right by their home bench, the Warhawks looked for Carollo but the Eagles had her tightly guarded. Instead, Hildebrandt took the inbounds pass, immediately drove to the rim and was fouled on the shot. The senior forward hit the first free throw to give the Warhawks a 50-49 lead with 2.3 on the clock. Her second shot hit the back rim, bounced near the top of the backboard and was tipped around before landing out of bounds as the final horn sounded. The officials signaled for replay to check both time and possession.
After the review, the officials put 0.3 seconds on the clock and the call on possession stood – the Eagles had the ball. UWL called timeout to advance the ball, choosing to inbound from near their bench.
The inbounds pass was a lob near the basket, but Carollo jumped in front and swatted the ball away as the horn sounded and Kachel erupted.
Rebounding has been a huge piece of the Warhawks’ philosophy this season and it paid off Saturday. UW-Whitewater held a 41-28 advantage on the glass and allowed just a single offensive rebound for UWL. The Warhawks hauled in 14 offensive boards scoring 15 second chance points in the contest.
Hildebrandt led the way with 14 points. Carollo set another career record Saturday in a fitting way – hitting her number, twice, for a double-double. Wearing jersey number 13, Carollo scored 13 and pulled down 13 rebounds to break the program record for career double-doubles with 29. Oloffson also posted double digits in the scoring column with 11 on 5-6 from the floor.
By Lynn Binnie Whitewater Banner volunteer staff whitewaterbanner@gmail.com
A major road reconstruction project will be taking place on Walworth Avenue this summer, and the installation of a new gas line that’s currently underway by We Energies is a forerunner. Public Works Director Brad Marquardt told The Banner that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, which is managing the road construction, gave the utilities in the area a heads-up encouraging them to perform any needed upgrades beforehand.
Marquardt indicated that the construction on a short road segment west of Highway 12 is scheduled to begin in late May. After the school district’s summer break begins, the construction will proceed east from Highway 12 to Janesville Street.
Normally road construction in the city is its own responsibility. The Walworth Avenue project, however, was selected to be included in the funding provided to the state under the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Consequently, the state will be responsible for 80% of the cost, leaving the city with only 20%.
Of course, the road construction will necessitate a “local traffic only” order for an extended period of time. Regular users of the street have probably felt for a long time that the road needed help.
Remember to “spring forward” this Sunday morning. Once again in the past year there have been calls for eliminating daylight savings time. Polling shows that a majority of Americans detest the practice: 62% would prefer to end it, according to a March, 2023 poll by YouGov, but respondents were divided between those (50%) who would like to have permanent daylight time (DST) and those (31%) preferring permanent standard time.
What’s the status of that Senate bill to end time changes? (From NPR)
In March 2022, the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The intent behind the bill was to make daylight saving time permanent starting in the spring of 2023.
And at first, it looked as though it might become a reality. The Senate passed the bill through an expedited process and with unanimous consent — legislative rarities in this day and age.
But the bill wasn’t taken up in the House. Memberscited higher priorities, like a budget deficit and the war in Ukraine, but there was also a growing chorus of criticism aboutthe bill’s approach.
Every year since 2022, including 2025, the Sunshine Protection Act has been reintroduced. To be enacted it would have to pass both houses and be signed by the President.
So for now, the tradition remains intact.
The site called savestandardtime.com promotes making standard time permanent. It states, “Permanent Standard Time is the honest, natural clock, set to the sun. Daylight Saving Time is a false clock, designed to wake us an hour earlier than Standard Time every day. Data and history show permanent Standard Time is best for health, mood, safety, education, productivity, wages, environment, and civil liberties. Ditch DST! Save Standard Time!“
As Daylight Savings begins, it is a perfect time to “spring ahead to safety” and tackle a few critical emergency preparedness updates for the coming spring season.
Smoke Detectors and Carbon Monoxide Detectors: All residences are required to have both types of detectors on every level, including the basement, but not the attic or storage areas. Now is a good time to replace the batteries in your detectors and push the test buttons to be sure they’re working properly. Replace your detectors every five years.
Emergency Go Bags: Be sure to have a basic emergency kit in your home with supplies, food and water to last you and your family for at least three days. Other items like a battery powered radio, flashlights, additional batteries, and first aid kit should also be included. For more information, please visit https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
Emergency NOAA Weather Radio: Spring brings the threat of tornadoes. Make sure you have an emergency weather radio. It’s like having a tornado siren in your home. When it goes off, go to a safe place. Remember, the outdoor warning sirens are only intended for people to hear outdoors.
National Weather Service Wireless Emergency Alerts: Wireless Emergency Alerts are emergency messages sent by authorized government alerting authorities through your mobile carrier. Government partners include local and state public safety agencies, FEMA, the FCC, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Weather Service. No signup is required. Alerts are sent automatically to WEA-capable phones during an emergency. For more information, please visit https://www.weather.gov/wrn/wea
(Comedy/Drama) Rated R (language); 1 hour, 30 minutes (2024)
On a Seniors tour to Poland to honor their grandmother, two mismatched cousins reunite, but their travel leads to misadventures for this familial “Odd Couple.” Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, Kieran Culkin; Oscar nominations for Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (Best Original Screenplay). A fun and touching film.
Seniors in the Park is located in Starin Park, 504 W. Starin Road. Although there is no charge to attend, regular participants are encouraged to join Seniors in the Park. The annual fee for residents of the Whitewater Unified School District is $10 and non-residents is $15. The funds support about half of the cost of our front desk staff person for 15 hours per week. The rest comes our of our fundraising monies. If you cannot afford the fee, we have a fund that will cover it for you. Fees are accepted at the Starin Park Community Building or online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk/
Opinion | Whitewater shows how moral panic distorts immigrant debate
By Julien Grayer, Michael Friedson and Tabitha Whitehead | guest column Julien Grayer and Michael Friedson are assistant professors of sociology and criminology at UW-Whitewater. Tabitha Whitehead is an undergraduate research assistant at UW-Whitewater.
Feb 27, 2025
In this 2023 photo, a student walks on the UW-Whitewater campus. RUTHIE HAUGE
“Whitewater has been a focal point in our country’s ongoing politicized hysteria concerning immigration. This town of approximately 15,600 has seen a recent influx of migrants from Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America. This influx has captured the attention of the national media, starting with coverage of a letter in December 2023 addressed to the White House from municipal police chief Daniel Meyer.
The rhetoric of prominent politicians has framed Whitewater as a site of a social crisis stemming from crime in the immigrant community. We are given pause about this rhetoric by past research on immigration and crime.
We reviewed decades of academic articles and did not find evidence linking increases in a place’s immigrant population to greater levels of serious criminal offending. We discovered instead an abundance of findings to the contrary, indicating that greater immigration is associated with lower offending rates.
Immigrants have a 60% lower chance of being incarcerated than those born in the US, according to a recent study by Stanford University economist, Ran Abramitzky and colleagues. In Texas, arrests for violent crimes are more than twice as common among U.S.-born individuals than among undocumented immigrants, claims research sponsored by the National Institutes of Justice.
The concentration of the immigrant population may have spillover effects making a place as a whole safer. Studies have repeatedly found that crime tends to go down when immigrants move into a previously distressed city neighborhood. Immigrants often come to an area with an eagerness to start small businesses, improve their skills and attain upward social mobility, thereby enhancing demand for properties, property value and the local tax base. All of this is a formula for urban revitalization and safer streets.
In Whitewater, we have recently witnessed a burgeoning number of small businesses, many catering to the international migrant population, and a concomitant increase in local property values.
As sociologists and criminologists, we are also familiar with how crime is portrayed in media and public discourse and how these portrayals fuel fear in the popular imagination. In Whitewater, we have observed what our field calls a moral panic, or the framing of a minor or nonexistent problem that sensationalizes it into a societal crisis. A moral panic draws its power from real public anxieties about complex issues like cultural change, inflation or declines in sectors of the economy. It displaces those anxieties by blaming easily identifiable and unpopular scapegoats who lack power to resist their demonization.
Immigrant groups have been a common target for these social problem campaigns through much of U.S. history. In Whitewater, Aurora, Colorado, Springfield, Ohio, and elsewhere we have recently observed similar processes of scapegoating these groups for allegedly being a drain on public resources and for committing a litany of violent crimes. The isolated crimes that are committed by members of the groups are sensationalized and taken to represent the behavior of the groups as a whole. Latinos, being overrepresented among immigrants, are especially hard hit currently by the resulting stigmas.
As a moral panic progresses, the anxieties at its origin are amplified or, some might say, blown out of proportion. For instance, in crime-related panics like that which has transpired in Whitewater, it is typically assumed that crime and public endangerment are rising, even when this is contrary to available evidence. Official crime statistics, provided by the FBI, do not support claims of an upward trend over the past several years in Whitewater’s crime rates. We will focus here primarily on a selection of the so-called “index crimes,” which are a set of serious street crimes designated by the FBI.
Homicide, the most severe of crimes, remains extremely rare in Whitewater. The tragic killing in August of a university coed was Whitewater’s first known homicide since 2016. Four robberies (i.e., thefts by force) were reported in 2023, one more than in 2021 or 2022, but a number that was matched or exceeded in each of the five years from 2013 to 2017.
Of greater concern, regarding violent crime in Whitewater, are the 31 aggravated assaults recorded in 2020. This is more than double the average number of assaults taking place annually in the prior decade and is the highest number recorded in Whitewater during the past 40 years. But it predated — and thus was not caused by — the immigrant influx, which started in 2022.
Aggravated assault numbers have fallen rapidly since, with 18 being recorded in 2023. This translates to a 2023 aggravated assault rate (i.e., assaults per 10,000 residents) roughly consistent with Whitewater’s longer-term average.
Recent property crime figures similarly do not raise cause for concern about a crime surge in Whitewater. The number of burglaries in 2023, though greater than in either of the prior two years, were less than half the annual numbers reported a decade earlier. Auto theft remained rare in Whitewater in 2023, with just five reported for the year, half the number of cars reported stolen in 2016 or 2018. Just 120 thefts (of items other than motor vehicles) were reported in 2023, while it was typical for 200 or more thefts to be recorded annually in the early 2010s. Note that these counts include only property crimes reported to the city police, and reports to campus police are typically small in number.
An influx of immigrants, such as that experienced by Whitewater, inevitably creates possibilities and challenges. An increase in serious street crime is not one of these challenges in Whitewater. To address Whitewater’s actual challenges in a practical and proactive fashion, scarce public resources should not be wasted on imagined problems.
Saddling immigrants with the stigma of perceived criminality will make it harder for them to earn a living and otherwise adjust to their new environment. Greater difficulties in adjusting create real costs for the public and police.”
Julien Grayer and Michael Friedson are assistant professors of sociology and criminology at UW-Whitewater. Tabitha Whitehead is an undergraduate research assistant at UW-Whitewater. The Banner appreciates having the authors’ permission to republish this article.
Editor’s note: The Banner reached out to Police Chief Dan Meyer with the offer to comment on this article. We appreciate his response, which follows unedited.
“While index crimes are an important consideration when determining the safety of a community, noting solely those statistics does not paint a holistic picture. Here in Whitewater, only 3% of our calls for service ultimately result in a incident that will be tallied by the FBI as an index crime. The larger impact for our community has been the increase in overall call volume, up 90% from 2010 to 2024, with no increase in staffing during that time. That has significantly decreased our ability to proactively police. As our staff becomes increasingly reactive, we become less capable of preventing crime, and it becomes more challenging to form the types of positive relationships necessary for a highly functioning police department. Police presence or lack thereof, more than anything else, is what determines the relative feeling of safety in a community.”
Editor’s note: Per the following graph, which was provided by the police department, their calls for service were increasing significantly before the surge of immigrants into the city. It is noteworthy that the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States in 2020. Studies indicate that crime declined that year nationally overall, with the notable exception of violent crime, especially homicides. UW-Whitewater student local residency was also reduced. Our significant increase in immigration is generally believed to have begun in late 2021 to early 2022.
