[Mpls] Gardens;Library Funding;Polluted Site

[Jim Mork]

I think gardens can be about a lot of things: relief from urban aridity.  
Autonomy from corporate control of food streams.  Desire for more tasty 
food.  Cheap food?  Only in a shortage situation which is hardly what we 
have now.  Corporate food is CHEAP enough.  That's its major selling point. 
It just isn't good enough.  The fact that there are COMMUNITY gardens is 
simply that lots of people don't own land.  They can't practically have a 
garden lacking land.  By the community offering them a bit of soil, they can 
do what otherwise would be impossible.

Library Funding
When I visited the Citizen's Fair at the convention center, one of the 
discussions I had was about special taxing districts. I may be vague about 
it, but it is a way for a small part of the city to be taxed for a specific 
local need. So I'm wondering if that could be applied for library funding. 
If the service area of a local library didn't want hours cut, could it get 
designation as a special taxing district to restore funding for that 
library. Of course, this is a bit unfair in that the most likely areas to do 
this are where welloff people live.  So their kids would have full library 
service while the poor lose out again. But it may be more practical than 
trying to get rich people to pay to restore hours for a library across town.

Got a  request for a donation to Friends of MPL today.  Thought about it and 
then donated an amount equivalent to what shows up on my tax statement.  I 
guess they plan to restore services incrementally.

Ground Pollution
Is it  NEVER a practice when building housing on previously-used land to 
take a core sample of the land you're building on?  If not, sounds like it 
might have been a good idea here. In fact, before BUYING the land, determine 
what the underlying ground is like.  And may I assume there are no basements 
involved? Because once you dig for a basement, you know what you're dealing 
with.

Jim Mork
Cooper Neighborhood
Longfellow Community
Minneapolis, MN
We think. You'll like it here.
More fun than a barrel of Norwegians
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