The Whitewater Common Council met March 17, when City Manager John Weidl shared his report and the council discussed Dan Street parking concerns, an accident on West Starin Road and other issues.
In the city manager report, Weidl reported issues such as the recent winter weather road maintenance, a new police community team and new data dashboard for Whitewater committees.
“[The police] recently formed a community impact team to discuss various strategies, including domestic violence prevention with the goal to prevent harm and deaths associated with domestic violence, educate victims of the resources available and reduce instances of domestic violence in our community,” Weidl said.
The council plans to further discuss the police impact team in the next meeting agenda. Within each service and council update, new graphics — referred to as dashboards — were shown to have information in a clear and concise manner that allowed for easy reading and data analysis.
“You might be noticing a theme here. There’s a lot of dashboards,” Weidl said. “This is how we’re gonna start reporting some of our data, and eventually we’re gonna pull it together across the organization.”
After reviewing the city management agenda, the council moved on to review the accident on the 700 block of West Starin Road near Hyland Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus.
On Feb. 11, a motorized scooter rider was struck by a speeding car while in the crosswalk. Since then, the Common Council has discussed possible safety changes to the road and have made committees look at the issue. During the March 17 meeting, however, the Council moved to not take any immediate action on the accident to allow more time to consider all the variables of the crash.
“Everybody in this room is sad to see anybody get hurt, but at the same time, I do want to approach it a little bit slower and not just take immediate action,” council member Neil Hicks said. “There’s a lot of variables that we did not know about that specific incident.”
Hicks then went on to suggest the council converse with surrounding cities to compare their regulations and management before moving on to discuss the ongoing parking issues on Dan Street.
The street has been experiencing recurring issues with cars blocking both driveways and the road during school dismissal. The Public Works Committee addressed this concern at their last meeting and suggested that no parking signs be posted on both West and East Dan Street.
“We discussed this at Public Works twice, the recommendation now is to post the west side of Dan Street for no parking and then posting the east side as well,” Public Works Director Bard Marquardt said. “Also adding some no parking signs along that north terminus to better reflect that parking along that end is prohibited.”
The next Common Council meeting is scheduled for April 9. A recording of the meeting and its agenda is available on the city’s website.
