County Commissioner Dan Erhart, who pushed hard and loudly for a decade to make Northstar a reality, has suddenly been silenced. Erhart, who also has spent five years championing the proposed Northern Lights Express (NLX) line from Minneapolis to Duluth, was recently stripped of his role as chairman of the Anoka County Regional Rail Authority and replaced by a fiscal conservative [...]
New County Board Chairwoman Rhonda Sivarajah replaced Erhart as chairman of the rail authority with new county Commissioner Matt Look.
"Removing Dan Erhart as chair of the rail authority makes us question our relationship with Anoka County," said Sherburne County Commissioner Felix Schmiesing.
Look has favored extending the $317 million Northstar line, but doesn't want Anoka County to pay a disproportionate share of an extension he says will benefit Sherburne and Stearns counties far more. He has said repeatedly that he wants a Northstar station in his hometown of Ramsey, something that would cost an estimated $12 million to $14 million.
In naming new committee chairs, Sivarajah said, she wanted to match the experience and expertise of the various Anoka County commissioners. She said, above all, she "valued transparency" and talked to several of the commissioners about their new roles.
"There's been no transparency," Erhart said. "She never talked to me."
Well, matching skill sets and experience is one way to put it, but Look's main livelihood has been making yard and highway signs for Republican politicians. As a "fiscal conservative" he was a major voice for City of Ramsey socializing the failed Ramsey Town Center by a combination of eight million in compromised tax and assessment liens along with paying seven million of hard, real cash out of City reserves, to bankers who had screwed up big time and had a foreclosure limbo facing them because nobody in the private sector would gamble on the sandbur acreage.
So it got socialized. Ramsey now owns its "Town Center." Socialized, fiscal conservative style, with the GOP salted Landform firm having a regular cash flow from Ramsey taxpayers in the process - that being but one further clear fiscal conservation step in local government action.
_________UPDATE_________
For "would you buy a used car from any of these folks" spin doctoring, then and now, see here and here. Not to belabor a point, but I'd prefer the risk of buying my used car from Denny Hecker, than from any of the lot of the spinmeisters. Not that others should feel the same way.
ABC Newspapers, Peter Bodley reporting parallel to the Levy report; here.