The City of Ramsey Planning Commission had a long public hearing on the Comp Plan draft, but the water issue got short shrift.
Met Council reads entrails of a chicken and says, "A million more people, by 2030," here, local community, is your quota.
It's always been Met Council overestimating, forcing communities to make themselves more vulnerable to developer greed, etc., i.e., the organization is developer driven and some have suggested it be limited to bus lines and waste disposal, with planning removed from its jurisdiction and that it save much money by firing all the planners.
Planners can invent numbers. Bureaucrats at Met Council can exert political force on communities - they, for now, have that legal power.
What Met Council cannot do is force bankers to lend now that subprime has had its big splat, with well publicized consequences including the bailout fiasco attaching to the bursting of the housing bubble.
The second and even more fundamental thing Met Council cannot do is dictate to nature. They cannot tell an aquifer to charge faster, to yield more water because the chicken entrails say a million. They'd like to be able to do that, certainly, but nature stands in their way. Bless nature.
All this is prelude to Strib news of November 4, 2008, here, about movements in the private sector of a former DNR head (Nature, again, getting assisted by DNR, an agency designed to befriend and help nature, regardless of what Pawlenty's presently appointed governing people might now do with/to DNR).
That person in the news who used to head DNR is Gene Merriam, a long-time Anoka County resident and former legislator, who now heads the Freshwater Society, and is instrumental along with its governing board in - well, helping and respecting Nature.
Met Council cooked up the one million number and has set past quotas without due attention to water, and with the aquifers, pesky Natural things, extending beyond the jurisdictional heavy hand of Met Council authority. Sherburne and Wright Counties, for example, are blessed with having in the past kept themselves free of that pack or sorry bureaucrats and developer-hangers-on, so far and with present intent to remain free of that horse collar.
Here's the big laugh. Since being so negligent as to not consider the binding limitations of natural resource availability in its headlong drive to micromanage development to serve the developers' fiscal needs and hopes, Met Council has now invented [they say "formulated"] a model for groundwater, and lo, they say, their model says there's no cause to worry, only to say a million new Minnesota souls, and be happy the loaves and fishes and such will be divisible to handle them all, don't take my word for it, take Met Council's.
The bull's been very busy in their pasture, that is certain.
In any event: The link again is here.
Please check it out. Read about Nature's advocates and friends, at the Freshwater Society.
______UPDATE_______
QCTV has rebroadcast the Planning Commission public hearing on the 2008 circulation draft of the Ramsey Comp. Plan. On the question of resource availability and its potential limiting nature, Planning Commission Chairman Mike Nixt said it best,
"If you don't have it you can't do it."