This post is about two things: gambling, and the upcoming Ramsey city council consideration of the 2008 Comprehensive Plan, targeting planning for Met Council, out to 2030.
If you wonder how the two mix, housing development is gambling.
Private market gambling, where the profits, if any, are jealously kept among the landowners, speculators-promoters-developers, and their lenders. Those camps never have any notion of socializing their profits.
But profits are maximized wherever such interests can socialize their costs - the upfront risk costs of their gamble - upon taxpayers.
And that kind of socialism is just plain wrong. Municipal governments are not in existence to gamble with taxpayer money. It was done at Ramsey Town Center, upfront risk taken by the City to build infrastructure for what turned out, certainly so far, to be a fully failed gamble.
And the money's in the ground, the assessments are in place, but the bank consortium has a foreclosure posture in place while they collectively decline to foreclose because no buyer exists to take over that gamble. The banks don't want to bid what they are owed, because they recognize a bad gamble when they see one and do not want ownership where assessments exceed the value of the remainder of that Town Center land.
I suppose this post also is about learning curve. Will City officials of dear Ramsey have a flat learning curve as some might expect from past behavior, or an upward sloping one as I hope they will show.
With that prelude, the 2008 Comprehensive Plan is next for review. This is not a post about the plan, nor will my remarks at citizen input at the Nov. 25 Council meeting be about anything already on the agenda at the recent Planning Commission public hearing.
My remarks at the Council meeting will be about - what else - gambling.
About what situational implementation realities will be, presuming the Comprehensive Plan draft for circulation among neighboring municipalities will approved exactly as now written by the currently sitting council - the council that will take on three new members this January to become the decision making body when implementation details arise later.
During the recent election cycle there was very much talk about taxation wisdom, taxes being for essential services without any anticipated rate hike, for example, and it was a popular line of discussion with voters.
Talk is talk, while action will be action. Walking the talk.
Ramsey in the draft plan under consideration at the Nov. 25 meeting has a document putting more housing into the plan than Met Council quota setting demands. Strange as that may be, and curious as the circumstances of the decision making leading to that situation may prove to be, it is what was approved by Planning Commission for forwarding, after Planning Commission had their obligatory public hearing so that citizen input at the televised Council session will not be permitted about things discussed at the public hearing.
Implementation in years after the plan's passage, not the plan itself and what it said, was the hearing topic. Cautioning thoughts about implementation following adoption of a plan are ripe matters for citizen input, apart from past public hearing matters.
Such related things can be a citizens input topic, and should be.
Specifically a good cautionary topic would be not gambling with public money to take over risk costs of those seeking private gambling profit in the context of their possible future land deveopoment gambles --- not improperly socialzing costs that should be internalized to a group land deal gamblers.
Quite specifically, one extended family having much property along and adjacent to Highway 5 north of Trott Brook has prevailed in seeing that the Plan draft says they can exploit their holdings in ways they wish, and there is arguable justice in that under the general rubric of such loosely used terms as "property rights."
However, IT IS NOT A PROPERTY RIGHT TO USE TAXPAYER MONEY UP FRONT IN A LAND DEAL GAMBLE.
Ramsey recent history supports this, and offers ways and means to protect the taxpayers.
Ramsey recent history is that John Peterson, wanting to leapfrog dense housing development about the town into MUSA pockets favorable to him, i.e., in ways where he saw a profit in promoting allowance of such a gamble via entering into an exemplary and presumably wholly lawful contract with Ramsey allowing his trunk sewer and water services extension to his controlled properties. By contract, he fronted the risk costs, the gambling costs, and in exchange had contractual recoupment opportunity built into the arrangement, should others connect to the extended services he financed.
That "Paterson precedent" should be the way of Ramsey's future. IT SHOULD BE THE GOVERNING AND ONLY GOVERNING PARADIGM FOR RAMSEY'S FUTURE IN IMPLEMENTING WHATEVER GROWTH THINKING RAMSEY PUTS INTO THE COMP. PLAN DOCUMENT PASSED BY COUNCIL, REVIEWED BY NEIGHBORING MUNICIPALITIES, AND SUBMITTED TO AND APPROVED BY MET COUNCIL.
MET COUNCIL DOES NOT AND NEVER HAS TAKEN THE POSTURE OF HAVING THE POWER TO SET TAXING AND SPENDING IMPLEMENTATION DETAIL IN MUNICIPALITIES. IT HAS NOT HELD OUT ANY INTENT THAT WAY AS ITS CONCERN, NOR IS IT WITHIN ITS POWER, IN ANY PART, UNDER ITS JURISDICTIONAL GRANT FROM THE STATE PER THE LAND PLANNING ACT.
DETAIL OF GROWTH MANAGEMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION, TAXING, AND SPENDING, ARE ALL LEFT ALONE BY LAW, UNDER THE LAND PLANNING ACT AND OTHERWISE, AS FULLY LOCAL FUNCTIONAL DECISION MAKING PREROGATIVES.
What that means, if respected by the city Council and cITY administration on the ground, as a future reality is: The next extension of services north across Trott Brook should be supervised and overseen by city engineering and their contracted representatives as to quality of construction and code compliance, but staff time and consultant billing, and all construction costs and risks must be borne along with the profit potential the gamblers seek, by the gambler consortium - including landowners, promoters, speculators, and bankers.
The housing and other markets are presently uncertain, while the plan having a 2030 perspective presumes markets again in that time frame will cycle, but cycle timing always is - what else - a gamble.
Water availability has already been noted as a quite limiting uncertainty upon those wanting to gamble for profit in the City of Ramsey housing market (see ending update, here where the substance of that post was about the profligacy and unsoundness of planning for an amount of housing in excess of Met Council's imposed quota).
THE THREE KEY REALITIES FACING RAMSEY: Given that a plan with more housing in it than natural resource availability might allow has a likelihood of Council approval in its present unrestrained draft format, there will be three resulting realities: [1] Ramsey housing growth will be a free-for-all first-come-first-served competition among the land deal gambler groups, each with its differing property anchor-site; [2] Total allowed growth per plan might exceed actually possible growth due to water concerns where neither Met Council nor City of Ramsey officials can dictate to nature; and [3] The only fiscal constraint to exceptional amounts of growth in Ramsey will be that subprime's gone and its lingering death-rattle repercussions will mean that City of Ramsey and Met Council cannot make lenders lend to all buyers, and the market, not planning, will govern.
Those three factors mean that the free-for-all will involve attempted effort to socialize high-risk, not low-risk gambling costs, onto taxpayers.
The chances of failure of ventures north of Trott Brook along Highway 5 will be high. And if there are profits, they will be private, not public, but private to the gamblers.
Hence, it is only common sense to deny any and all attempted socializing of up-front gambling costs in that part of Ramsey onto already overburdened Ramsey taxpayers.
In doing that, forestalling socialization of cost and risk onto taxpayers, and instead pursuing the Peterson paradigm, there will be implementation details city administrators and legal counsel will have to wrestle with, such as hierarchical recoupment - Peterson has his contractual rights, John Doe the next to extend will have additional rights against Joe Schmoe, further down the line, until recoupment payments, if there are any, are sufficient to cash out the earlier gamblers in the chain such as Peterson, standing first in line.
But that is a matter of free and unimpaired contract, and given that such contract was lawful when done to benefit John Peterson, it will not be unlawful to move that way of managing things to protect taxpayers into dealings with persons besides John Peterson. In that sense, the animals on Animal Farm are equal.
It is a long post, but in summary, with three factors meaning land deals in Ramsey in the future will be high risk, and in light of a history at Town Center where taxpayers were stung in upfront cost and burden shifting of risks and costs of the gamble, as well as having the Peterson precedent to guide our future, succeeding Council and administrative decision makers can be wise in showing a learning curve instead of repeating past error, and the gambling costs of high-risk land dealings can be consistently internalized as a matter of City policy to the gamblers and not socialized onto the backs of Ramsey taxpayers.
It really is a simple concept. Not rocket science. Not at all. It is:
Be fair to everyone, internalize risks and costs, don't externalize them as a generally sound policy - and specifically in housing growth gambles internalize the up-front gambling risk instead of externalizing or socializing it.
That all falls within local prerogative - i.e., beyond any dictatorial or "supportive" reach of Met Council.