[Winona Online Democracy]
Intersting little fit of anger against our Mayor and City Council members, personally I think they have done a fine job of advancing Winona and the surrounding community into the 21st century. Winona is a bustling and growing community that, steered in the right direction, will continue to be the gem on the river that it truly is. Your dissatisfaction with the direction this community has been going in the past 10 years is, in my opinion, unfounded. I am however, very dissapointed that we, as a community, continue to completely ignore the discretionary income that floats through our no-wake zone every day. We have absolutely NO restaurants/bars on the waterfront to attract these boaters into our beautiful town, the fact that a pizza chain sits in the only waterfront restaurant is an absolute black eye on our community and is something we should be ashamed of. I strongly encourage our city council members to please spend an afternoon in Stillwater, Lake City,
Wabasha..there is constant activity, restaurants are full, people are strolling and shopping...where are they coming from? they are stepping off of there boats and exploring the beautiful river towns..they are spending $$$$. Our two marinas are woefully inadequete and are sorely mismanaged. Also,great thinking on extending the lease on Dicks marine...God forbid we have a developer come in there and add more slips, put a restaurant hotel in there and generate some tourism dollars for this town, instead we gave them another 15 yrs to do nothing but increase the slip fees and add nothing to the property...did ANYBODY else get an opportunity to bid on the management of the marina? no...and I dont know how that happens here,WE the citizens of Winona own that marina, we need to improve it and it isnt being done, instead we sentenced ourselves to another 15yrs of wasteful use of one of our communites more valuable resources.
If the Council wants to really leave
a legacy for Winona, they need to come up with a development plan for the waterfront that would include expansion of marinas, retail/restaurant development on the waterfront, some residential/retail mix on the waterfront (imagine some nice condos on the river with docks spaces and such...wouldnt that be a nice addition to the Winona riverfront?). We have a top notch art museum being built for us( Thank you Mr. Kierlin, you are truly an asset to our community), lets build something around it and embrace the waterfront as more than just a place to go for the pizza buffet, lets make it what fills up the downtown with tourists spending $$ and having fun. I encourage any and all of you to spend one day in any of several river towns to the north and south of us..we are overlooking some major dollars and it is a shame that we are being so ignorant of this.
c.e. woodford
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