Here's the screenshot. And, Randy, what are you thinking? How can any voter take you seriously now? Glen Beck? Fox News? At least you define yourself so voters can make an intelligent choice. We can thank you for that.
Randy, did they remove your brain, pickle it, and then put it back? That Facebook question, "Wrong Randy Backous," well it looks like the right Backous, but the wrong man for the job.
For anyone who cares, Bob Sibilski seems to me to be the calmest and most sensibly oriented of the "at large" wannabe pack. I have spoken by phone to both him and Gary Greb, and while I distinctly prefer Sibilski I think Greb, a GOP thinker unlike me, would handle the job in a fine fashion. Ramsey would not go wrong with either.
Sibilski is particularly interesting. He treasures the rural wetland heritage, and got cross-wise of the "let's make an example and show who's boss" mentality and hubris that's arguably permeated the new council too much and too soon, recently, without being earned by sagacity of actions.
Sibilski's dismissal from the environmental policy advisory board prompted Joe McDilda, a gentleman in every aspect, to resign as head of the operation. In fairness, it was not a purge. Michael Max remains as EPB chair and is excellent, and I know Kathleen Riley-Daniels, a relatively new appointee, to be a quality person.
Indeed, if either or both of those two were to run for council it would be a clear and certain upgrade if either were elected. I am unsure but they might both be in Ward 2. Riley-Daniels could be Ward 3, and Max possibly Ward 1, but however it is, I can imagine a council with Ralph Brauer, Michael Max, and Kathleen Riley-Daniels on it, and it shows what we have is far from what we could have.
Strommen, Connolly, Hendriksen and Zimmerman were each first rate but have retired or lost elections, and, whatever my disagreements with him on politics and processes, clearly Matt Look was an upgrade from Todd Cook.
However the will to keep spending outrageously on Town Center continues, as if more and more money could transmute failure into something different. That is a present council mistake that Look has had the sense to bail out on now, seeking a new stepping stone county seat, before his chickens come home to roost next to Natalie's.
__________UPDATE_____________
I voted for Look and considered him useful in the minority on the prior council, but expensive junketing to Vegas trade shows was not at all what I was led to expect of him.
Fiscal "sentinel" status as a proffered image and all that, and blowing a big wad of cash, (not in Vegas at least), nearly seven million for the failed weed patch remnant sale situation, he was a leader in that and it is something of a fiscal outrage.
Natalie urged earlier councils to spend headlong with no attention to risk but that at least was in a boom time.
These people are spending profligately on a socilized development situation in competition with private enterprise developments elsewhere, in a distressed market with no signs of immediate recovery, calling themselves "conservative" while spending like crazy and having friendships overlap with consultancies and the massive spending. It is just more money wasted as best as I can see unless you treasure poster sized renderings of visions and revisions, which is all I have seen returned by Landform in exchange for over a hundred and seventy five thousand sunk there since last summer and still counting; i.e., with the fisc of Ramsey being drained to the tune of $15,000 a month, each month, every month, as regular as clockwork.
- and I don't even find the pastel poster renderings to be all that impressive. Feges quality, in my view.
All that and still, too, no choo-choo stop.
It's the equivalent of this year's Timberwolves thinking themselves the Lakers. The talent is just not there.
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Too much Glen Beck and not enough reality, perhaps. Perhaps not. Will there be some major turnaround between now and the August primary?
Think of it this way, even to get the one restaurant in RTC over the near decade of its promotion, Acapulco, (which is better than Wendy's but not top scale), they are reported to have given a subsidy.
And now we see published a claim that businesses "looking for a handout" are disfavored.
Huh?
Isn't that what's called meeting yourself coming the other way? Something politicians try to avoid.
We have to read the papers and the HRA paper trail, folks. The soap opera saga is there. Visions and revisions. Spending and more spending.
_______FURTHER UPDATE________
Another interesting thing, Sibilski has a real patent to his credit, Honeywell involved, here. It's not some silly and obvious septic tank thing where someone named Chester at the patent office was asleep at the switch and let a bad one through. As a competent practicing mechanical engineer, it seems to suggest Sibilski is the smartest of the batch, and the most accomplished of the five seeking the at-large seat.