The question stands. How is our government trying to destroy the biosphere,
or on a smaller level, what are the city governments anti-environmental
policies?
In my opinion, it all comes down to money. What we do as a society is based around what makes money. That's the idea of the Target subsidy downtown, or Block E or whatever. It's all a skeme to make more money in the end.
The main problem with this is that the environment gets left in the dust. We concentrate more on what is profitable than what is right or balanced. To date the vast majority of our environmental policies is based on oops we messed that up...what can we do to fix it?
Some things work out well, such as sewage treatment. Other things arn't so lucky, like running highways through parks, destroying powderhorn lake, Loring pond (it's pumped full with city water), Black ash seeps in Minnehaha park, Bus Hubs proposed next to parks...bla bla bla the list goes on, all with the attitude of it's the price of progress.
I think this is what people really hate. Sure we get drainage ponds that *help* clean up road run-off and it's better than it used to be a few years ago, but it usually is still worse than before we started our projects.
Example: Hwy 55 is now running through Minnehaha Park. According to D. Schulstad (city council) in a mailing before it happened;
"When checking into a restudy of this decision (to realign hwy 55) , I found it would delay the project completion date by several years (until 2004) and add nearly fifteen million dollars to the total cost. For those reasons, the City Council and Mayor chose to not revisit the recommendations and decisions made by the citizens committee several years ago. "
So now we have it...A highway through a park, all because we as a city were too cheap to spend 15 Million, and wait a few years to keep the road at it's original route.
Is this following policy? I couldn't tell you... but I can say it does follow the money, and all the protests and all the damage is the result.
But we do have cool roads and buildings and stuff...and we get them cheap!
Tom Holtzleiter
Kingfield
_______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
