I found that using some steel wool works well, but deteriorates quickly. I like the chicken wire idea though. Ron Leurquin Nokomis East
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joseph Barisonzi Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 2:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Mpls] Squirrels and Bulbs List, As bulb planting season approaches, I am wondering what successes have people had keeping these fierce Minneapolis squirrels from eating their bulbs? Since I don't have a sufficient supply of coyote urine -- does putting chicken wire over the bulbs, under the dirt and mulch, work? Minneapolis-specific solutions would be much appreciated. Thank you (grin) Joseph Barisonzi Willard-Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: paul weir [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:02 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Mpls] granite paving stones There are many of you on this List who, I'm sure, have seen construction crews removing granite paving stones from roadbeds around the city and wondered how the city disposes of them. A lot of you have also thought you could put some of these stones to good use if only you knew how to obtain them. I've had the same thought, and over the last year I've taken some pains to discover how it's done. The short answer is that the city has no policy covering the distribution of stones and bricks retrieved from its roadbeds. None. Construction crews simply leave them in piles, and people go in after the crews have left the site and fetch them any way they can. However, this has not always been the case. As I know now, the city's practice for many years was to carry away the stones in dump trucks and reserve them in various storage areas, where they've remained to this day. At the City of Minneapolis Columbia Heights Water Treatment Plant alone, tens of thousands of them are piled in great stacks and heaps, overgrown with weeds, unnumbered, and, for the most part, forgotten. How they've become unforgotten is an interesting story. I'm the coordinator for a community garden in south Minneapolis and as such am always scrounging for free building materials to use in our garden projects. Last summer when Chicago Avenue was being torn up during June and July, I was curious to know how I could lay my hands on a sufficient number of stones to enable our gardening organization to build a path through the garden. I calculated we might need as many as several hundred, depending on the type of path we decided on. The obvious person to talk to about this was our city councilman, Dean Zimmerman, whom I called. Dean immediately put me in touch with a staff professional attached to the Public Works Dept., who invited me to meet him at the Columbia Heights plant (mentioned above) to examine the stones' suitability for our purposes. He was extremely helpful and would probably have permitted me right then and there to take the stones we needed, if only I had had a way to transport them. He even offered to have a city employee use a front-end loader to load them onto a truck -- if I could arrange to get a truck. I assured him I could. Alas, that was where things began to go wrong. Naturally, he was duty bound to ask the loader driver's supervisor for permission to have the stones loaded, and this in turn required the permission of a bureaucrat from Public Works' central administration. This gentleman's reaction was instantaneous and negative. "We have no policy...we have no precedent...city residents have no standing...and just why do you want these stones, anyway?" In answer to the last question, I said I felt that the city had a valuable asset in the stones. Moreover, since they were valuable, and since the city had not thought to make use of them for decades past, they ought now to be made available to the public for use in public spaces such as parks and community gardens. The response was once again swift and unambiguous. No, it was out of the question, it simply could not be done, there was no governing policy. I ventured to suggest that developers had been availing themselves of the stones for years with the city's tacit approval, but this was met with a shrug. Who could say? No records were kept of such things. The gentleman added that Dean Zimmerman had spoken to the Director of Public Works about the need for a policy, and she in turn had charged her staff to develop one. As the designated point man, he himself would be "rolling out" the policy shortly, perhaps in a few weeks, surely no more than a month, and would keep me apprised. That was in August, 2004. In February of 2005, I called the gentleman at his office in Public Works and asked how the policy was coming along. He was working on it, he said, and he'd be presenting it to the city council for their approval in a couple of days. He'd make sure to let me know when this happened. Time passed. In May, I happened to run into RT Rybak in the downtown Barnes & Noble coffee shop and described to him the conversations I'd been having with Public Works. RT said he found it a "fascinating and important issue" and invited me to send him an e-mail. I did. Not having received a reply for another month, I stopped in to his office and was told by one of his assistants that I'd probably sent the e-mail to an incorrect address. Send it again, please. I did so. Three days later, I got a reply saying my e-mail was really interesting, and that he (RT) had an idea: There's this man over in Public Works who has been charged with developing a policy covering this very problem. Why don't we find out what he thinks? I wrote back reminding him (in case he'd forgotten) that this was the same gentleman I'd been talking to for months, without avail. No reply. Then on June 18 at a luncheon at Maria's Cafe, I spotted RT in the serving line. What had he been able to find out about the paving stone policy? Well, nothing, he said. But if you'll send me an e-mail, I'll look into it. As I sat glumly eating my lunch, Peter McLaughlin came by. It suddenly occurred to me that Lake Street was now being torn up (as well as Chicago Avenue), and that Lake Street is a county road, not city-owned. Grabbing Peter by the sleeve, I asked whether the county has a policy governing the distribution of salvaged paving stones. He replied that the county allows the contractor to dispose of them. Did I have a particular reason for wanting to know? I told him about our garden project and inquired about the possibility of getting stones from the Lake Street roadbed. He reached into his pocket, handed me his card...and asked me to write him an e-mail. Which I did, but only after several weeks of wondering whether I was really up to dealing with the county bureaucracy. This was on August 5, fully fourteen months after I had first talked to the city about pavers. Two days later, I got an e-mail back from Peter giving me two numbers to call. I called the first, and struck gold. The Lake Street project foreman said his company would be happy to help us. He invited me to come down to the intersection of 12th and Lake where he promised to have a pile of select stones ready to be picked up. He said he would provide similar piles until we had accumulated our target number. A week later, we had amassed all the stones we're going to need to create a garden path. There's a coda to this story. Several weeks later, I called the gentleman at Public Works and asked him how the distribution policy was coming along. Very well indeed, he said, obviously not remembering me or the fact that we had had exactly the same conversation in February. We're getting ready to roll out the new policy, but first we have to run it by our lawyers to make sure there are no legal impediments, a complex process, as you can imagine, and then we'll review their findings, and depending on that, we'll recommend it to the city council for discussion. How long would that would take, I wondered. Can't say, but we'll do our best to move it right along. Are we talking months, I asked. More than likely, he said. And what will the policy contain? Oh, we'll be examining all the options, perhaps selling the stones to the highest bidder, perhaps making provision for other uses, but rest assured we'll make sure we distribute them in such a way as to maximize the public good. Thank you, I said and hung up. Paul Weir Midtown Phillips REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
