Cities are struggling with budget cuts. School districts are dealing with declining enrollment. Anoka County officials grapple with ways to satisfy added demands with a staff extended like rarely before.
Now, these groups may have found a life preserver to escape the economic quagmire -- one another.
After nearly a year of informal discussions, representatives of Anoka County's cities, school districts and county government met last week to embrace a "Cooperation and Collaboration Project" unlike any they've ever attempted. The idea is to pool resources and come up with as many win-win solutions as possible, making sure all the contributors benefit.
Share and streamline
The hope is that the various boards will complement one another, rather than duplicating services and ideas that waste dwindling resources, said Rhonda Sivarajah, chairwoman of the Anoka County Board.
"We need to work more efficiently, share equipment, streamline in a way that will benefit the customer," Sivarajah said.
Strib, also Paul Levy writing Jan. 29, reports on the disappearing townships, as they turn to becoming cities amid talk of possible annexation-based expansionism of neigiboring "entities." Turf takeover. Turf defense. This link.
It seems Levy has separately written of a yin - yang dimension set.
I will believe unprecedented cooperation and collaboration is real and not BS, when I see what appears from satellite space to be a game trail in the image above, [with accompanying map below showing context]; the "game trail" being related to "game" situations on both sides of the Anoka - Ramsey city line at a location in the contiguous industrialized belt between Thruston Blvd, (in Anoka), and Sunfish Lake Blvd., (in Ramsey), where for reasons not entirely clear to me, dating from before I moved to Minnesota I expect, there is no contiguous road linkage between those two Boulevards in that industrial belt, across the city line. My understanding is that the main opposition to such a linkage died earlier this decade, yet the link is still absent; with the cooperation and collaboration still deficient. My understanding is that building the first transcontinental railroad with driving the golden spike and all, was politically less difficult than this cross border cooperation-collaboration question. Folks are as they are, or were.
