Here's a story the Southwest Journal did last year on Kate (and tangentially, Dave) Anderson:
http://www.swjournal.com/articles/2003/05/29/news/export7146.txt
In the above referenced story, it states that the Lake Harriet concession is the only one to consistently make money during the past decade. Yet it was widely reported that in 2001 it lost $127,000, and that it was the second year in a row that it lost money.
How do you reconcile polar opposite results? Did the Park Board give the Southwest Journal cooked or false figures for its 2003 story, after releasing figures showing losses in 2000 and 2001? My belief is that there was gross mismanagement and employee theft, and that the Park Board lead by Bob Fine attempted to bury that issue and divert the public's attention with talk of bringing Dairy Queen franchises into the parks. And that diversion tactic appears to have worked.
The concessions have been in the parks for over 100 years. In about 1906, if memory serves, the last private business operating a concession in the parks was pushed out. The Park Board has numerous rules about allowing commercial operations and advertising in the parks. Since then, until very recently, the Park Board has broken even or made a small profit on its concessions.
Theodore Wirth's vision, and that of the Park Board in the first half of the 20th century, for those concessions was to provide a service to the public and an opportunity for employment for neighborhood youth, and the learning and other community benefits that go with it. Like neighborhood schools and neighborhood libraries, neighborhood parks become part of and support the community fabric. There was a park within 6 blocks of every residence in the city, so that all children and families would have easy access to them -- not just the families with soccer moms willing and able to act as limousine services to such inaccessible places as the Ft. Snelling soccer fields now leased by the Park Board.
Until the early 1980s, the Park Board grew its own plants and trees at its own greenhouses and nursery, providing yet another pair of locations for a large number of city youth to have good experiences and gainful summer employment.
So, do you want billboards on park benches, Dairy Queen signs over concessions, and other privatization and commercialization of our parks? Or do you want the community- and neighborhood-oriented parks that our predecessors left us?
Will you sit idly by and let continue the personal enrichment schemes of a bunch of guys from Southwest High (Bob Fine, Scott Nieman, Sherm Malkerson, Joe Brady, and Jon Gurban) and their more recent associates (Tony Scallon, Brian Rice, Walt Dziedzic, Marie Hauser, Jon Olson, Carol Kummer and who knows who else)? Or will you demand that our property tax dollars be properly spent for the betterment of the entire city?
Chris Johnson Fulton http://www.mplsparkwatch.org/
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