November 29, 2003
Bridges on the downtown side of the river??
Three questions
1. Is such dense construction on the bluff environmentally sound?
2. Why would the county or the city want Trooien to be the developer? Shouldn’t all possible developers be given a chance for consideration?
3. Trooien would still owns/control the
November 22, 2003
The Leaky Pen was at the WSCO meeting Monday night. WSCO seemed to run the meeting well, handling crowds beyond what anybody could have possibly imagined beforehand. The site was cramped but the logistics seemed to be well handled.
Bob Hammer of PED and former councilmembers Collins and Megard were there to help observe the goings-on and they had an outside facilitator to run the meeting.
I couldn’t help but notice that ballots were all numbered and wonder if ballot secrecy might have been compromised. But I am not sure that a secret ballot was ever guaranteed. However, since I suspect that most people would have been expecting a secret ballot, it does seem that people should have been warned that their ballot might not be secret. [And they may have been; I wasn’t able to hear the whole meeting.]
The political bigwigs there included HFH Coleman, LDC Thune, and Senator Pappas. There likely were others whom I couldn’t see or whom I did not recognize. None of them was given the opportunity to speak. I guess that that just didn’t seem appropriate. But somehow I could not imagine a meeting of my own District where Bostrom or [then mayor] Kelly would stay totally quiet.
We have not taken a position on Bridges here and I am not about to change that now, but I do think there are lessons for people in all districts who want to maintain some sense of organizational stability to keep in mind.
1. Keep your bylaws clear on who can and who cannot participate. While broad participation is desirable, the criteria need to be clear and verifiable. For example, businesses in District Five can be represented at all meetings and business representatives can serve on the Board of Directors, but there needs to be a letter on file designating the representative and each business is limited to one rep. In addition, two-thirds of the Board must be residents.
2. Don’t allow the majority of your board seats to be up at the same time. Stagger terms.
I don’t know how well the outgoing WSCO board involved or tried to involve the public in its decisions on the flats and JLT in particular, but have heard that many people felt excluded. While I imagine that a lot of this was because they did not bother to involve themselves more than because somebody keeping them from being involved, I also suspect that if the more one can do to keep the public feeling that they are involved in the processes and decisions during the year, the less likely an organization would be to face what amounts to a hostile takeover.
I will probably add more on this later. RS
September 17, 2006
Why all the hoopla over who gets credit for funding more police officers? I think it was a good idea, but also think we need to do the required parallel spending on clerks, attorneys, judges, and other people who are needed to do the follow-up work.
Bostrom and Montgomery suggested a levy increase so more officers could be hired. The Gang of Four cannot afford to be outdone on the issue of crime so they came up with pretty much the same increase to do pretty much the same thing. The question seems to be how one manipulates the numbers to count the new officers and there must be a need for them. After all we are taking people from other duties to put them on patrol and are paying overtime – overtime which if not paid at overtime rates can go farther as paid at a regular.
August 22, 2006 Well, it looks like the big Holman dyke debate is over. I cannot tell who, if anybody won. It required a fracture in the Gang of Four to get the matter resolved. Maybe that will eventually be seen as the biggest result of the decision.
Reply
8/27/06 from Midway Barb
What inflation of terms! That “dyke” will be there forever. The Gang of Four will not be around for long, might even be gone with this year’s election.
Response to Midway Barb
[8/29/06]
It is good to hear from you Midway Barb. It has been a while. You may be right. Admittedly the Gang of Four has a limited future. We don’t have career councilpersons anymore anyway and LDC Benenav’s election to judgeship would break up the Gang we know now. However, I suspect that the dyke/floodwall would have made it through somehow anyway, whatever improvements to the structure or City-MAC relationships HFH Coleman and LDC Helgen are claming.
May 30, 2006
Our City Council has now approved Target’s new Midway store plans. I am not a lover of “our Target.” I have been boycotting Dayton-Hudson/Target since I ended my employment with them in 1970 and see no reason to change that now, so I won’t be meeting any of you there,
But I am wondering:
Target is and will be dependent on people in automobiles. Even if LRT comes through, Target [or any
other store at that site] will still be dependent on people arriving in
automobiles. LRT stops are planned at
Snelling and
April 30. 2006
Cinquo de Mayo is approaching. This reminds me that on a recent Cinquo de
Mayo we officially changed the name of a portion of
Martin Luther King got a Boulevard.
John Ireland got a Boulevard.
Frank Kellogg got a Boulevard.
Pelham [whoever he was] got a Boulevard.
Phalen –a scurrilous person -- even got a Boulevard, as did
the
Is a Street a higher or lower rank than a Boulevard? Cesar Chavez only get a Street.
[And Pierce Butler got a Route -- whatever that is and wherever that fits in the hierarchy.]
April 17. 2006
Well, it is official.
Ford Motor will quit making trucks at
I don’t know what the best use for the site is. I do note that the city could use something that pays good property taxes. We also need good jobs, but I seriously doubt that many of the jobs lost here will be jobs local people held. Maybe the Port or somebody could come up with something[s] which will also provide good jobs [although it is unlike that they can find jobs that have the pay and benefits Ford provides] Or maybe some residential use can come in. The views would be staggeringly good. But there has to be a lot of pollution under the site likely including some places Ford’s institutional memory has lost and likely containing some substances whose harm has not yet been discovered or quantified. Considering this, one has to wonder if Ford would ever allow such development.
I also don’t know the bookkeeping techniques big business uses, but wonder if the site is not of more value to Ford cleared and sitting than it would be sold.
April 1, 2006
ENOUGH! ENOUGH! The tobacco Taliban has won [at least for know and we suspect firmly since minority rights receive so little respect when the righteous attack them]. We all know that you can no longer smoke in any of our city’s hospitality establishments.
But do we need a trolley so HFH Coleman and LDC’s Thune and Helgen and their cohorts can travel around the city and blow symbolic smoke in everybody’s eyes. If this is exercise in degradation was not funded with taxpayer money [as has been claimed] it still tells us a lot about ban proponents.
It tells us that these people who claimed to want to help the small businessperson whose livelihoods they are assaulting, they would not waste funds to take a tour around town to symbolically thumb their noses at bars and patrons. And if they were really concerned with health, maybe a contribution to a bona fide health research organization or a fund which helps provide care to the impoverished and uninsured would have been a better move.
We are all hypocrites sometimes. When we talk about ourselves we see “little inconsistencies;” when we are discussing somebody else we see “rank hypocrisy.”’ But I think I am not out of line to call ANSR and the gang of four and the present HFH Coleman fit the label.
[Of course, we have discussed before the strange inconsistency of how many in the Tobacco Taliban pretend to be “pro-choice.”]