Start with the photo, above. It shows a stylized malignant melonoma skin cancer, underneath which is a lie about Northstar. A banner attached to an expensive light pole along a stretch of sandbur fields lit by the million-dollar lighting.
A close-up:
Let's hope its a lie, since, cost-wise, the excessively unneeded signs are a drop in the bucket compared to putting fourteen million of tax money into something a mere proven handful of current bus-riding people will use. The stop. In Ramsey. Woo-woo.
If done, the entire existing tax base of Ramsey's automobile commuters will end up paying dearly for the planned crystal palace commuter-rail stop, for years. Actually - for years, and years, and years - and then more years.
It will grow on taxpayers like a real malignant melanoma, stylized per the signs you're paying to have put up around you, a brain-fart of an idea, by Darrel and cohorts.
Do we need a commuter rail stop in Ramsey, at fourteen million cost, for 150-250 persons a day, round trip, max?
Believe, however, it's coming. They say, so you pay. The riders do not pay, will not pay nearly enough to justify the fourteen million more-or-less estimated cold cash cost.
My idea, if it's built, put a commuter rail fee on parking ramp stalls, require an all day permit purchase by the rail commuters, and have a traffic patrol marking tires and writing tickets on the ramp where no permit's been purchased and the culprit parks overtime. Make the fee sufficient so that the venture is self-sufficient, that the ridership pays for the riding benefit the ridership receives. Or they drive to Elk River or Anoka, as now, and board there, as now, working fine, now.
The meter maid parking enforcement effort would be all indoor work since the top floor (exposed to the weather) NEVER has been or will be full; unless the trend continues as the latest fiasco, building yet more unwanted unneeded shared wall housing and this time without having any builder-provided parking.
The tax base - the existing residents of Ramsey wanting only restaurants, instead will subsidize some opportunistic venture from which, for all I know, Landform is extracting a fee while at the same time, we know this, it is extracting a humongo monthly fee from Ramsey, and for what? To give our local parking ramp stalls to strangers?
Go figure.
It is called "Republican Fiscal Conservatism," but screw-the-existing-homeowner-taxpayers seems a more appropriate "branding" of what's been and being done.
It is yet more of putting whipped cream atop the moribund Ramsey Town Center CORpse, as if adding a new sign added where an old sign is would change anything, so that we can have two signs memorializing a colossal brain fart of a collective bunch of people who, simply put, should have known better (or as with some, had a chance to get money off the land, and knew enough but only enough, that way).
I am a social liberal and I have not been hiding the beliefs, but I surely am more a fiscal conservative over wasting local taxpayer money chasing stupidity, than the current crop of Ramsey's elected "leaders."
Knee deep in the Big Muddy, and the damned fools say push on.
"Sergeant, don't be a nervous nellie."
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All of a sudden, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The sergeant said, "Turn around men,
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the Captain dead and gone.
A good Pete Seeger song, but the sensible turn-around is yet to happen - in Ramsey. More will be wasted before it happens.
I suppose so-called, self-called, fiscal conservatives, Republican genre, don't like Pete Seeger as a liberal, no matter that what he sung sounds - basically - conservative and unpretentious.
Big Muddy Melanoma double-badging next, at the unneeded light at Sunwood and Ramsey Blvd., to rub our noses in it while it is - paid for - by us.
Will the older sign of the two, as a symbol of "failure," be removed so that only the new sign, the emperor's new clothing looking too much like a stylized rendering of a deadly menanoma skin cancer, will be all that's eventually there at the corner, across the street from the Allina clinic?
Closing close-ups next, as close as I want to be to that forlorn big-time error, i.e, photographed from across the street where the sandburs are absent.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and ...