First, fire all the planners. "The SAC is empty." A drama in three acts.

Well, Met Council will not fire all the planners. Crisis or not, that option is off the table. It is inconceivable to their entire Gestalt. It would shake their timbers and rattle their walls.

Crisis or not, however, they should do it.

Anyway, the three acts, below, are from this web link.

As always, click an image to enlarge and read. Why three Acts? Blogger has a bug where a long column of text gets compressed in storage to where you click but the text and resolution is unreadable - so it needs chopping up, and I tried to find rational demarcation points.

I do not pretend to be expert in reading bureaucratese, only bureaucrats are, but I think the drift is these guys were running something like a Ponzi scheme on SAC money, growing income in from SAC used to fund expansion and everything else and it was only possible because ever increasing SAC money could cover the cash outflows. Then the ever increasing SAC money ceased to ever increase and Chicken Little crisis mode ensued. Now they say SAC should only be used, and earmarked for, growth.

Well there are two options, and the article only dealt honestly with one.

That option, raising the monthly charges to support non-growth functioning.

The other Darth Vader dark side of the force option is of course, if there is a community, say Ramsey where I live, where new construction has dropped off but where there exists in-ground piping, and not every existing home is connected, SAC money can be extorted by forcing hookups regardless of whether any "not on my watch" assurances had been given by individual Met Council members. If that option is in the works deep in the secret bowels of the machine, it could be enough for one who gave "not on my watch assurances" to terminate it being her watch.

I don't say it was that way. I do not know. I am saying "could have been," and nobody invited me to any table where discussions were had. An outsider, looking in, making a range of plausible inferences based a lot on guesswork. In case - just in case - such movements might be at all at play, my thought is we need the strongest most honest and uncompromised representation at the County level, because that is perhaps a high enough level to challenge such mischief, and to not as a political reality, get "Lake Elmo'ed" by the big sumo.

My vote is to not risk putting a fox in charge of the Anoka County henhouse, that way, but every person has only one vote, to choose and use. I don't call the shots. I just think of all those minnions of planners, and Dylan, about "a lot of knives and forks on the table. Gotta eat something."