I'm not sure whether Terrill Brown has not read my earlier posts or is
intentionally trying to misrepresent them but his post this morning had
misrepresentations and inaccurate statements. I'm sorry to fill people's
mailboxes with more of this but I feel I need to correct his statements:
As I've laid out in great detail here before, when I was at the Downtown
Council I went to Target Corporation and made the case that downtown needed
more affordable shopping. They had no downtown stores and no plans to build
them, so I am proud of the fact that I convinced them to put the first urban
Target...and the first urban mid priced store of its kind...in downtown
Minneapolis.
A Mayor should be a person who can make a sales pitch on behalf of the
city, and I have proven I can do this...for large projects like Target, or
for smaller ones I helped bring to town, like Chez Bananas restaurant or the
Farmer's Market to Nicollet Mall.
As a development consultant, I worked
on a project that would have put the Target store on the block Dayton Hudson
and Carlson Real Estate own on the south end of the mall...where the Target
headquarters is today. The key to that project was to build it on land the
corporation already owned, and put tenants above it that could make this
project work without a subsidy. We worked on this for about a year but as
the real estate market collapsed, it became less viable.
(One of my ideas for making this project viable was to put a parking ramp
for St. Thomas College into the project. At the time St. Thomas did not
need that much parking, but it is interesting today that the controversy
surrounding the current St. Thomas expansion...that is to include surface
parking...could have been avoided if these two uses could have been matched.
Another plan was to incorporate a Lunds so when we get around to debating
this, I can add some direct background.)
About a year later Target decided they wanted to study this again so they
hired me to work with their store design people to see how this could work
on a block downtown, and to help pick a developer.
Terrill asked me to "disclose" my contract. I've very openly disclosed that
before. If he's interested in how much I made I think it was about $2,000.
I was never an employee of Target as Terrill states.
My experiences gave me a very deep understanding of this project, the
economics, the design issues and the politics. So when I say the project
could have been built for millions and millions less I do it with some
background.
R.T. Rybak
www.rtformayor.com
_______________________________________
Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy
Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more:
http://e-democracy.org/mpls
