Recently in thoughts about Met Council's negative impact upon Ramsey and the need for it to cut slack and allow Ramsey to dig out of the mess as seems best; here; I forgot to link back to an earlier related post; here.
We are less than a month away from the tenth-anniversary of proven bad ideas holding sway.
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Those bad ideas seem to have continuously held center stage, with the threat to our future being that no one at that bureaucracy seems willing to publicly admit the incredible clothes they fashioned and put on their emperor do not exist, with the truth being there's not even a fig-leaf's worth of cover for the naked failure in Ramsey of the prevailing "smart growth" mythology.
Indeed, "smart growth" has proven to be pretty dumb, for communities like Lake Elmo forced to embrace it, or like Ramsey, deluded into acceptance because of the fiscal plans of some individuals owning property and the bad decision making of other individuals at the levers of decision making and policy setting power in Ramsey.
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Belaboring the past is only done because it holds a strangle hold on the present and threatens to continue to do so into the future, as to the advisable density of shared-wall housing in the community. If flexibility appears, believe me, I will climb off the soapbox on that issue. And that promise holds even if the flexibility fails to improve the on-the-ground success of the Town Center experiment. Simply letting the present council try to rehabilitate things without imposing unhelpful barriers is all I would need to see, to shut up on the issue. The more I think about the present council, so far, the more I have to say whatever I disagree with or would do differently, they face hard choices and take best guess steps in a situation where that's what we should expect from them.
The planners do not have to grovel in ashes and sing dirges about sin or error; if only they silently cut slack for flexible things to at least be considered and tried, as possible changes aimed at trying to mop up the mess.
I'd have cut losses by leaving the thing to stand as it is sinking no new money into the pit in hopes of chasing already sunk capital, the gambler's bet doubling equivalent, but other choices have been made. Let's not throw any roadblocks into the way, at this point. That's all.