This is Gilbert and Sullivan musical comedy. The Housing and Redevelopment Authority in and for the City of Ramsey, up to mischief.
They don't publish a time for meeting -- after this and that, scheduled time to be as you guess and estimate (click it to enlarge and read):
And, boy, is this meeting ever "special." (But then everything about spending money in this real estate market on pushing on the Town Center string is a little special.)
Staff "proposes" it. Staff is too much in cya mode to recommend it. Caveat emptor, staff notes, in less direct wording, "Based on discussion." Spending more citizens' money. Another wheelbarrow full, flowing out from the town fisc. It's easy for staff to say do it with someone else's money. Never forget that. You cannot really blame the person standing there expectantly with the wheelbarrow, expecting unconditional money. Wouldn't you?
It is another further investment because of sunk capital.
Take losses if you have to on what's been done. But don't make it worse. If you keep digging that hole deeper you can dig to China. Like the joke about we lose a little on every unit sold, but we make up for it in volume.
This "Authority" is nothing more than the seven council members who take off their red Council hats, and put on their orange Hosing and Redevelopment Authority hats, but it is the very same individuals spending city money. Same process. Don't take my word for it being the same perpetrators, the City website says so, here, and the City website even states the Hosing and Redevelopment Authority has a:
Mission
The primary purpose of the Housing and Redevelopment Authority is to undertake certain types of housing and redevelopment or renewal activities that will provide a balanced supply of housing for people of all income levels, ethnicity and physical abilities; eliminate barriers to construction of affordable housing units; add and preserve the existing supply of affordable housing; and provide mechanisms to prevent and remove blight in residential, industrial and commercial neighborhoods.
Tell me how you do housing "renewal," on a weed patch? Answer: you don't. You pretend.
You ignore the fact the housing adjacent to the giant weed patch part of Town Center, (the part the town unfortunately recently bought for millions), is less than five years old. Whatever "blight" exists is as when built, no more nor less "blighted" than that. Past mistakes in decision making is not "blight" which is the jurisdictional purpose - the mission - of this HRA, if you believe government at the local level acts as it should. As it's rules define things.
Instead it is spending Hosing and Redevelopment money not on what fits that nice touted mission statement, but on "marketing" Town Center. The word "marketing" is absent from the mission statement. It is not an HRA duty or function.
But, no joke. Really, that's precisely what the perps are up to.
Here are pages documenting details of the story (click to enlarge and read and weep):
Will the doing of that deed be televised, or is this another untelevised spending spree? Will this get a choo-choo stop from Danny? Will this make Town Center a Lazarus? Is this a step people of above average intelligence would really take, or a clear act of desparate unsure overly hopeful men? Is it one people of above average intelligence take with their own money instead of yours?
What do you think?
How do you like that last couple of pages? We want up to four grand to go to East Arm Pit, Iowa, to talk to somebody. Great idea. Absolutely great. I'd spend my four grand exactly the same way if it were my money. Wouldn't you?
Guys, stick to tarring roads. You handle that well. It is needed and is helpful. There's nothing wasteful in tarring roads, and the schedule's already in place. No marketing needed.
_______UPDATE________
I need to make one thing abundantly clear. When in the below post I say we might "cut some slack" I mean on substantive decisions. I can criticize there, but it's wholly different from calling a "special" meeting and making it a "special" HRA thing, and not a "special" council meeting, where the latter would routinely be televised and where the substance of the issue is general spending on a land project, not a housing issue; and when the faces at the table are the same either way. For that kind of apparent and unjustified procedural trickery, there's no room for slack. It is the kind of thing I disliked greatly when James Norman was city administrator. It is wrong. Dead wrong regardless of whoever it was who decided to go that route, or why. It smells of mendacity.