Jim Graham seems to be repeating what I've been saying: Thta our city government has a perverse tendency to march blindly into costly legal actions. This is where I wonder at the quality of legal advice they get. Does no one wave red flags? Or do they believe that taxpayers care more about what they do than the lawsuits it brings down the road. I haven't forgotten LSGI, so to me it does matter. The stream of lawsuits is one of the reasons I supported an election bid by a libertarian. Not that I think libertarian ideas can work, just that questions needed to be forcefully raised. In my diehard DFL neighborhood, the libertarian candidate managed a third of the vote, showing me I was not the only voter disgruntled by this trend of suit after suit. My take on the cases Jim raises is that sometimes the politicians simply have to say "No" when they don't want to. Our pocketbooks cannot afford their need to be pleasers.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Don't we re-elect CM's next November? Neal, I agree with you on locations. We need to get the message to whoever will listen that doing things downtown is a hardship on citizens. I went to the Citizen's Fair, and the space requirement was so tiny it could have been held in any of the park buildings around the city. It was like holding a cardgame in the Metrodome. Think, government, think!!! Wendy, I wouldnt try to scare anyone with increased crime or a deteriorating city. The political system has rewarded privilege from the moment that the founding fathers started working on it. Look at how slavery got grandfathered. It striked me as odd right now that the legislation banned tax-increment financing. Look at how many good old boys got gravy from it. But nonetheless it is a fact. So, as they said at our community meetings, the challenge is to arrive at a different source of funding. Maybe the city could charge more for parking? Increase its parking violation fines? I haven't been up that long at the time I write this, so my brainstorming isn't as good as it sometimes is, but it seems to me that there must be ways to raise money to keep rehabilitating the city so it will remain the kind of place even suburbanites will want to visit. I applaud the substance of Gary Hoover's post on democracy and freedom. I think the crux of it is that so many people care so little about democracy and the spin doctors know it. By wearing people out with spin, the insiders can make special-interest projects fact before the engines of resistance get going. I guess this is what Norm Coleman would label "getting things done". There is some truth in the saying our government is the kind we, as a society anyway, deserve. They repeat what worked before. I just computed my year-to-year property tax change. It is .1699. A bit high, though absent Ventura and the House GOP, it probably wouldnt have been that high. But, again, my INSURANCE COMPANY will sock me with a premium that is 65 percent higher. I wonder why there's no complaints about this, considering the causes are quite similar. And this raises another question. A lot of foolish financial decisions were made based upon rosy predictions by economic experts. Given HOW WRONG they seem to have been, what will happen with their forthcoming predictions? Will they now state all the reasons things could turn out different? Number 1 reason, as always Human Stupidity. Why did so many investors bet on a hand that held only a pair of treys? Thanks Michelle Mensing for the honest truth about the tax situation. I'm wondering if there are ANY of the people complaining now who actively fought any of the exorbitant handouts to business in the Sayles Belton-Cherryhomes regime? I know I objected every single time, starting from the attempted Richard Burke ripoff (give me $7 million so I can have an acceptable profit margin). And I burned my CM's ears about it, too, going to candidates meetings and being the only one willing to bring up the uncomfortable truth. I never believed we had money for this sort of thing. For that I got scornful catcalls of "oh, now we're told if we give money to business BABIES won't get to eat!" It was a pretty lonely battle for most of the decade. The one exception I remember was the 70-30 vote to require a referendum for certain deals. And for THAT, we got threats of all the terrible things that would happen to us BECAUSE we didn't cough up on signal. THIS is what we're paying back for, our unwillingness to be a piggy bank for billionaires. Never let anyone tell you anything different. ------------ Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site http://webhosting.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:mpls@;mnforum.org Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
