--- Carol Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think that an alternative solution to making the
> Park Board full time would be to substantially
> reduce its duties or eliminate it completely and
> have the City oversee the parks
Carol Becker makes so many arguements that by the time
I had written down all that I wished to refer to I had
written her whole post.
We've had this conversation before. Shudder the
thought that we should eliminate the Park Board and
have the city oversee the parks.
As I tried to point out in my post "trees" the city
council and the Mayor cannot be relied upon to protect
the environment which is or should become one of the
prime functions of The Park Board.
Despite what Lisa McDonald may say in her campaign
literature and what the Mayor might profess in debate,
neither of them, supposedly wielding considerable
power and influence at City Hall, can or will step in
to save some 100 year old trees on Minnehaha Academy's
campus from being destroyed.
Can we expect anything different from future Councils
and Mayors? I would certainly hope so but the fact
remains and will so in the future that they have a
much broader range of constituents that often put them
at odds with the environment whereas the Park Board
will answer to no one but individual citizens for
their stewardship of the land they govern.
By no means should the Park Board ever be eliminated.
It is even more essential now than at any other time
in our city's history. It should be the civic
conscience, or superego if you will, that holds our
community's more destructive urges in check. as a
matter of fact, the City Council might do well to seek
the opinions and counsel of MPRB on certain matters.
I am very suspicious of the pwer-grabbing tendencies
of certain councilmembers who complain their
constituents are not being responded to by park board
members. Does the city give the Park Board members
cell phones, aides, or anything to help keep in touch
with people.
I'm more than a little sick of all this beating up on
the Park Board.
As far as duplicative services, Carol Becker is right
on. She and I have talked about this very fact in
prior correspondence. But why stop with the Park
Board?
Why doesn't the city and all it's independent boards
merge operations of all their services or as many as
it makes sense to do.
Who plows the lots at libraries for instance? This
past winter it looked like no one at Walker but beyond
that do they have their own maintenance and custodial
service? The school system? The Park Board? Why aren't
we consolidating the nuts and bolts operations at the
very least.
Why isn't the internal services fund and the goal it
attempts to achieve used throughout the city boards of
operations. I mean does every piece of the city's ITS
equipment whirr and calculate and print, etc 24/7 or
does it have additional capacity that can be used by
the Park Board, Library Board, etc and/or can we add
30% less hardware, say, to a central system and
achieve better than 30% eficiency.
Why do city streets department employees handle waste
on Nicollet Mall while Solid Waste handles garbage
collection on commercial corridors. How often does the
city feel compelled to purchase a new piece of
equipment when operating a piece of equipment on 2nd
or 3rd shift would serve the purpose just as well.
Does the Park Board do garbage collection in the dead
of night when the noise will bother no one and another
set of city eyes will be on the streets and in the
parks?
The city has tried to address some of these issues
between them and the Park Board prior to now but could
we speed up the pace IF we are assured that all
parties are keeping up their end of the bargain. Just
as Carol mentions park streets not up to the standards
of the city public works I suspect the park board has
fears of relinquishing power for the same reasons
Carol cites.
Will the parks receive adequate police protection or
will officers be called away from park patrol whenever
someone at 3rd Precinct authorizes a posse of 12 to
cross the river and start a gunfight at Mickey's
Diner?
And at the mention of streets constructed by the city
public works that measure up to their high standards,
I'm less than enthused by the recent Hennepin and
Nicollet repaving projects. And who is keeping track
of the multitude of private utility contractors who
are constantly tearing apart our streets and laying
them back down in less than the prior condition in
which they found them. Trying riding your bike
downtown, or anywhere, and hit a patch of soft tar
where once before there was hard asphalt!
Both R.T. and Lisa McDonald talked of a merged agency
of Planning/MCDA or an approach that makes economic
development work better in the greater context of
community development and planning. I'm not entirely
sure what they mean by that. The implication is that
we have this rogue agency (MCDA) out there working on
its own.
I think it makes sense simply from an efficiency and
communication aspect. They seem to share conducive
elements toward achieving their separate missions but
I was mindful of Steve Cramer's obvious frustration at
the attitudes of some during the Ryan/Padilla Spear
debacle when he felt he was pursuing the goals set
down for the agency by the very council which was
condemning him.
I STILL HATE THE BUILDING AND THINK IT NEVER SHOULD
HAVE BEEN BUILT but before Lisa put out her position
on merging the departments I was testifying during the
Ryan/Padilla hearings that "the cows had left the barn
a long time ago" and that the time to have addressed
the Ryan problem was years ago when American Red Cross
was built next door.
The planning commission was a big part of the problem
on this one but then why should they be expected to
have any vision when one of their most vocal members
who also chairs Z&P exhibits so little vision herself
and can barely see beyond her mayoral ambitions.
And if things are as bad as Lisa says and worse, as I
know, why hasn't she worked toward that end on the
council already? The truth: it is not nor has it been
to the advantage of Council members or the Mayor to
change the system and bring these agencies together
when MCDA is the tree from which they, all of them,
have plucked the plums.
These sorts of changes, especially consolidation of
services between the independent boards, nobody wants
to talk of for fear of putting up red flags before
city unions.
We face the perfect time to consolidate. With an
unprecedented number of city employees scheduled to
retire in the near future we can achieve much through
attrition. The time is at hand and we need a Mayor and
Council less intersted in patronage and more
interested in people.
The Mayor does not like rhetoric and surely this is
rhetoric. Yet she is also a prime practitioner of the
craft. Look the word up in your dictionary and tell me
what it says. The Mayor makes it a pejorative term. It
is not! The skillful use of words rallies nations and
peoples to throw off the yokes of oppression, to
topple tyrants, remove less effective leaders and to
redirect the course of future events.
Would the Mayor have accused Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois,
Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Roy Wilkins,
Kweisi Mfume, etc of spouting empty rhetoric?
Tim Connolly
Ward 7
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