This link.
On Feb. 10, and earlier, I posted about the Ramsey city council and it being positioned to mop up a situation they inherited from earlier decision making, specifically a sop to land speculators first and foremost, and to developers - the collective crabgrass on the lawn of quiet enjoyment of life.
Here, here, and here, for example, and earlier.
Well, GOP sorehead and opportunist thinking is hard to quell, and Abeler last cycle had a "conservative" set up to run against him because he voted to break the Pawlenty veto on transportation funding; with, now, reverberations of a repeat; again see, this link.
I recall the Eli Wallach bath scene in Good, Bad, and Ugly, "If your've going to shoot, shoot, don't talk."
That sort of fits the situation.
A lot of fuming and fussing, ending, I may run again ...
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I certainly have mixed feelings about the wisdom of another express train stop making, when others pile on for their locales, a milk run instead of an express.
But with the greatest Depression since the Great Depression, this one being the "Bush-Cheney-Coleman let Wall Street go unregulated and fund war adventure on borrowed cash Depression" - a pump priming effort to lessen suffering is sound, and if among 1.2 billion Minnesota dollars, there is a small cut for Ramsey having a choo-choo stop, I see no real harm.
The entire project at ten to fifteen million really is not costly by the measure of capital spending out of St. Paul, not to mention spending levels out of DC.
If the council guesses Ramsey Town Center mop-up might work with more spending, they deserve citizens cutting them some slack.
It's a judgment call, and they faced voters and won election.
Yet, I say that guardedly. Had they not scaled back the obscene original levels of cheap shared-wall housing that the earlier council with its personnel and situated land, etc., allowed and indeed blessed; I would not feel as charitable.
The earlier promise was shops and restaurants, and while that was years ago the newbies finally will have something to point to, Acapulco, to open May 5, the first and so far only restaurant promise delivered on.
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I watched the council meeting yesterday evening, or part of it because the Timberwolves on the other channel again were being blown out by another mediocre team, and the council spent innumerable minutes going back and forth, and back again, over purchased plans for a Town Center park including a dumb-as-dirt amphitheater.
But again, cut them slack, the "ready for buiding (but not quite)" purchased plans were from the other folks, it being the earlier cabal that hatched the amphitheater idea.
After saying that, and while I remain very skeptical about the train stop and amphitheater as having any likelihood of success in resuscitating the dead project and then saying let them try anyway; I get back to the opening - the GOP going after their own. RINO hunting, they call it.
Bless them if they do that, but with the GOP's opposition party proving itself so inept when it should be bold, almost suggesting what they've said they want is not sincere, the GOP could flourish this election cycle, and we would be better off if Abeler remains rather than seeing his own party whack him, to replace him with a Luddite.
It is not my party, they make their choices, I only give an outsider's opinion.
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Regarding Ramsey elections and not the Minnesota House seat Jim Abeler holds: Should anyone care to run this November by filing at city hall to do so, in July, for the Ward 1 (Elvig) seat, the Ward 3 (Dehen) seat, or the at large (Look) seat, the three openings this cycle, I would be encouraged by that as giving voters an option. Twice before the major part of the development mischief was done I ran to provide voters an option. With the big pipe up north and the market proving how stupid that was for the community to rush through because of individualized greed at the gun club and Hwy 5 at Trott Brook locales, the worse has happened, with growth not decently contained solely to parallel closely the Hwy 10 corridor. Growth has spread like a cancer in Ramsey, as evidenced by the most recent comprehensive plan fiasco (loved by the Hunt family for its potential to their landholdings but not that great in my view for anyone else), in light of all that; let others sit on council or seek to. I offered a choice when it mattered more and the brakes could have been applied, but the voters made other choices. So, while I will not run again I continue to urge others to consider the three seats if in the right ward, or wanting to seek the single at large seat. Diversity and choice are good.
I continue to believe that the current council erred badly in repealing wetland buffer protection, and that incumbents having a role in that should be challenged. Other choices they made, I disagree with as debatable. That step, I detest.
I will continue to criticize it.