No prizes involved, but you can take credit under your name or anonymously. Comments are welcomed from anyone in Ramsey or anywhere else in the State of Minnesota, who can tell me:
Where is the Port of Ramsey?
This is no joke.
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Dead seriously, where do the residents of Ramsey, Anoka County, Minnesota, have a port?
Any port, anywhere in the city.
A mere boat launch will not qualify, but a port - some public dock where some barge or other floating device or vessel longer than 22 feet could tie up and load or remove 50 pounds of cargo.
I will go that low, for a definition of a port. Something on the water, even that tiny.
So, where does the City of Ramsey have a port?
Is it the multimillion dollar bus-stop, Palace of Government, and Gamec Memorial Parking Ramp, or whatever they've named it , Steffen Fetchitt From-Stores-While-U-Park, I do not know the formal name given that parking ramp along the tracks; but, hey, it's not on the water, so it's not a port.
At best it's a glorified bus-stop. Not a port by anyone's normal, sensible definition of the term.
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Certainly that taxpayer-funded mega-complex would qualify as a Pork Authority, it is deep, full-to-the-top pork-barrel, all the way and any way you slice it pork; but press the question sometime at the brief citizens' section of a council meeting, "Do we have a Port in Ramsey, to justify any thought of a Port Authority," and see what convoluted answer or obfuscation you get.
With the Palace-Parking-Ramp (and bus-stop appendix) in mind, some rhetorically twisted folks might reply from the council table, "Yo, fool, we are building a bus-stop, we need a Port Authority for the bus-stop, so the council will have the power going along with the bus-stop to bond our resident-taxpayers of this fair city deeper into public debt than otherwise; and we need that power, because - we have a bus-stop. Further, folks over on the hilltop at St. Paul, the Legislature, they should let us, absent any formal Ramsey resolution or ordinance on the record (in advance of the 2006 elections), send a stealth lobbyist in to push for legislation allowing Ramsey to kite up the amount of public debt we councilmembers can later hang onto our beloved citizenry."
Or something substantially saying that, less directly, less succinct.
Most folks in Ramsey probably do not even know our steath lobbyist exists, this formally declared and identified lobbyist for the City of Ramsey who in the dead winter of 2005, signed on to carry water up the hill for Ramsey, apparently without anyone not under the right civic rock knowing it was happening.
Two water towers, and a lobbyist.
Wow. Growth is great, isn't it?
Two water towers, a lobbyist, and hundreds, up to thousands of new single family and shared-wall housing units on the ground and in the works in Ramsey, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of Tinklenberg-and-talk about Highway 10 at some indefinite point in the future being scaled to finally fit the growth in traffic, and further talk about a "Dayton Bridge" -- again, indefinite as to timing but sounding real promising, as general inexact talk.
Traffic multiplies and talk keeps pace. Paving doesn't.
Try driving rush hour, on talk.
Talk is a very slow and crowded roadway, if it's talk alone and no new lanes or paving.
Traffic incrementally worsens with each new Ramsey town home or detached single family home on the ground, sold, and occupied.
And someone, or a cabal with stealth apparently, is afoot with no council resolution or ordinance of authorization I could find, seeking to raise Ramsey's debt limit via legislation from St. Paul.
And I read nothing about it in Ramsey Resident either.
A Port Authority? Huh? Who, how, when did that incredibly bad idea grow legs to the Legislature?
My bet - it is a developing story.