Ramsey, Anoka County, Minnesota, is experiencing something we associate with crabgrass.
Growth.
Ill-regulated disturbing weed-like growth. Some say we need more rooftops to have a bigger tax base but you start with those rooftops and there's a tax when you have put people under them, but once you do that you find those folks strangely unwilling to pay taxes without - get the audacity of this - without expecting something helping them for their money.
The mantra is we want more for ourselves so we kickstart things with more new rooftops, built where the green-acres low taxed raw land stood, for that magical promised nirvana, collecting magic taxes without having to provide any services in return.
And then the thing gets bollexed up by these uppidy new occupants who come along and dash the plan with the notion that for some previously unforeseen reason, they do not want to be shorn sheep.
"But the developers all promised and the city councilmembers all promised you would enjoy getting a bit more air in the hot summers and would not mind the shears at all." Not so, they reply, a bit of huff to the voice.
The developers have gotten their money, and are like a deer that's heard gunfire - and the city officials are saying, "The plan's only half done. You have to spend money to make money. The remainder of the rooftops are in the works."
Fine, if they would spend their own money, or someone's money who would be making money, but somehow the process always degenerates to general funds getting spent, bond debt being incurred, and land owners, speculators, builders, architects, and the Met Council making something from it.
General funds are tax income to a city, pooled into larger and larger pools annually, as sure as rain falling down and not up they grow larger. Yet, somehow the equation always works that you pay tax and you get promises and the money goes to crabgrass.
It is your money, if you pay taxes in Ramsey. And it will by your troublesome nest of crabgrass, on the lawn of your disappearing and soon to be gone calm Ramsey rural-like lifestyle.
If you do not fight a haphazard infiltration, the whole lawn will be crabgrass.
