Monday, September 12, 2011

The citizen response to the sidebar poll questions on the Flaherty Fiasco has been consistent, clear and overwhelming.

Down by the tracks, the busiest BNSF tracks in the State of Minnesota, where no sane person would want to live right next to the right-of-way, Flaherty would build a mega-landlord's palace, and comes on occasion from Indiana where he lives to tout his rental housing proposal to a pliant Ramsey city council.

In judgment of that proposal and the entire situation city officials are inflicting on our town, the poll results are indisputable.

Overwhelming, have a referendum.

Overwhelming, that Flaherty Fiasco will catalyze nothing, nada, zippo, zilch.

Overwhelming, nobody would really want to live there.

That last one fits with the Met. Council planners not moving in droves to their model urban villages, their plan for the rest of us. Likewise, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do Ramsey council, except for Tossey who is a project opponent, all live in detached single family housing. None, including Tossey, live too close to those noisy, noisy, noisy train tracks, although Tossey, one of the project opponents, lives closest.

Go figure.

Can you say, "CRAMDOWN"?

Can you say, "BIG TIME DUMB"?

And Tossey opposes the thing not because of its inherent stupidity and likeliness of costly failure, but because he sanely believes the town should let Flaherty take his risks if he puts the money up between his firm and his private sector banker. AGAIN: The citizen response to the sidebar poll questions is consistent, clear, and overwhelming.

____________UPDATE___________
With Flaherty-Collins fobbing around stuff in Edina, Ramsey, and Orland Park, should we coin a new term, "promoter polygamy"?

___________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Does any reader know how badly burned US Bank ended up in that Flaherty 210 Trade tower fiasco in North Carolina? And, the secondary lender there, the equivalent to the risk Ramsey proposes to assume, what happened to the secondary lender? Cronk, working with Landform owes City of Ramsey a fiduciary duty to disclose such relevant, material information. So Ryan Cronk, what's the story?