The Star Tribune would have R.T. keep Planning Director Chuck Ballentine, Development Director Steve Cramer, and City Coordinator Kathleen O'Brien. How fortunate we have Mpls-issues as a foil to this powerful influence. Each of these players has a coterie that insulates and screens commentary - for example, the Star Tribune knocked off a reference to Minneapolis as a European garden city and homeland to the Lakota and Anishinabe cultures in my recent letter about Annie Young. These are important contextual phrases but they landed on the opinion page cutting room floor. Here's the missing language:
"There's a lot of smart environmental practice in Annie's portfolio: the Green Institute's innovative building design, the Re-use Center, community gardening, movement away from nasty chemicals and dependence on petrochemical products, restoring native prairie elements - good ecological practice and strong contributions to Minneapolis' heritage as a European garden city and as homeland of the Anishinabe and Lakota cultures." So what? Well, the crew around the mayor-elect are hunkering down with stacks of resumes. R.T.'s got a lot on his plate and I wonder just how green-friendly that back room lot are. Then there are the faceless battalions behind the incumbent planning director, development director and city coordinator and those worthies themselves. I have to say that my institutional memory of their institutional memory does not reassure me on the question of green-friendly initiatives. These are advocates for business as usual. They have baggage. The Star Tribune has the city coordinator asking how much less a role city hall should play in community-building. It would be refreshing to have a city hall that envisions community gardening as a permanent feature in our urban landscape, opportunities for urban "back to the land" gestures keeping our city green for future generations. Less city hall, more *grassroots* community building. It would be helpful to have some innovative thinking about reuse strategies in the hierarchy that supervises the Inspections Department. What an onion-peeling process is happening in that continuing saga! Less of that business as usual, please! How about a planning director who once again invites major league public involvement in the city's forward vision - remember Paul Farmer's focus groups and invitees from other cities who talked about their innovative strategies? The Planning Department under Chuck Ballentine shelters a cadre that devalues neighborhood thinking - the Mississippi Corridor Neighborhood Coalition example comes to mind to this veteran of the abrasive early days of planning for the St. Anthony Falls Historic Distict. We Islanders fairly ran the Mississippi Riverfront Interagency Design Team into the ground, promoting a much more culturally and historically sensitive development than was being contemplated by the professionals' less populist processes. We'll hear more about current stonewalling by Mr. Ballentine et al. at the Riverview site hearing this coming Tuesday afternoon and the continuing tin ear in the city's senior planning bureaucracy is no more an asset now than it was thirty years ago. MCDA's director is in a terrible pickle. There's no money, honey. Can't pay the rent! I remember Phil Handy as a earnest young man explaining the TIF process to a roomful of council members and others straining to grasp the new ideas. Boy, did that catch on! Fast forward to the gaggle of veterans behind Steve Cramer who must now strain to grasp the idea that TIF is way past its prime. We can't afford business as usual. It's downsizing time not because these aren't able professionals but because the money isn't there to float that very big boat. I trust R.T. and the new leadership of the city council will look very hard at creating a more supple handle on development and I wish my MCDA friends well, but there's a new light shining now that spotlights the ecological laundry list the Star Tribune saw fit to cut out of my letter about Annie Young. It will be useful and cost effective to move aggressively in this direction and I don't know whether the folks at MCDA are ready for the twenty-first century environment-savvy habitues of the Green Institute. Well, here we are anyway! Fred Markus Horn Terrace Ward Ten _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
