- as always, click to enlarge and read -
The screenshots are from a saved item, the file date I have is July 17, 2003, so it might have been put online even earlier; at any rate it was very early in things before all failure and reality set in, and it was only about how so very, very great it would be having amenities.
So far, there is only one restaurant, Acapulco, and that only happened because there was a six-figure government subsidy given to close the deal.
And that subsidized restaurant opening happened well over a half-decade after Hunter was so enthused and ebullient, and most of all, certain.
Indeed, the 11 year-old daughter she mentioned in her statement probably has a driver's license now, and is able to drive to get other than Mexican meals. The youngster possibly even has her own Patriot Riders motorcycle these days.
So, where is Hunter now? Where's she working and who's her boss, given that the Anoka employer she had back in those days appears to have fallen victim to the same reality that Town Center faces. The market was overly hot and nobody but a handful of practical visionaries had the sense then to contemplate downside risk.
And they were labeled "negative thinkers" back in those not-so-long-ago times. I know. I was one, as was my friend and neighbor Terry Hendriksen, having the mayor apply that term after Hendriksen had spoken up against over-enthusiams while he was on council up to the end of 2002.
And he continued the warning afterwards.
For too many others, they were sucked in by the propaganda machine and Pied Pipering, and have themselves and the propagandists to blame for having "seen" the emperor so fabulously clothed.
Not me.
And not you, my reader, for you are not one to be gulled and hoodwinked easily. We both know that.
__________UPDATE___________
In checking the integrity of the link and the screenshot enlargements, I thought about the purpose being brazenly admitted on the image with the mayor's quote as being "to guide discussion," while the accompanying image was of honking geese; outlined against a piece of the big blue sky.
_____________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
There is more. The WayBack Web Archive Machine, this link, has the item imaged below, (and I am sorry they did not include archiving of the photos).
Annotation added. Steffen is on record about it being her dream, and how people can lay a dream on you if you let them and do not have a dream of your own.
With the failure, there has been a silence and perhaps a distancing, but the names and frames tell the tale, Steffen with top billing, Gamec, Norman and Feges, and those four supplemented with a lower-left sidebar column of role player participants nonetheless wanting to show up and be honored as part of the dream.
Of the highlighted four, blame Gamec the least. The others were instigators. He was a follower, and always maintained an ambiguity about things while the other three were headlong, damn-the-consequences promoters and plungers - back then, October, 2003.
Click to enlarge and read:
Billion dollar urban village. It says ---