This is aimed to supplement Ryan's thread comments, here, on an earlier Crabgrass post about Sakry reporting of the Mayor's proposed upheavel of top city administration; Ryan's last comment being:
Not sure I understand the real benefits from any posturing about taxes in this case? This isn't congress in Washington that we're talking about. And I doubt that we'll end up outraged at the lavish lifestyles our city council is going to lead as a result of their re-elections and/or good or poor decision making. This is all about deciding whether the COR is a good public investment or not and we all know where Ramsay, Wise, and McGlone stand and if the election works like it should these 3 will have a good idea of what the public feels about their decision making to date. Personally I don't think it matters who is in office. At the end of the day, the city has already gone past the tipping point on what direction they are heading with the COR. The public investment (infrastructure costs in the beginning from RTC, purchasing RTC land after implosion, paying Landform, Municipal Center, Northstar,etc.) as well as the creation of the new TIF district sealed that fate. If the citizens really care about this city they will start demanding a detailed accounting of COR spending and COR income. And they should start demanding an answer to the question of how the budgeting in the COR is impacting our current budget for core (not COR) city services because I haven't seen enough from this standpoint. And even more to the point the Landform agreement should get much more scrutiny at this point than it has. I've seen enough of the dog and pony shows explaining to us how difficult it has been to unwind the former development agreements (you should have known that prior to buying the land). And I've heard enough about deals Landform has closed when it's obvious the majority of these deals were inside jobs perpetuated by Deal and Look (semi-hearsay, can't say I know this first hand, just through talking with folks) or deals that do nothing to reimburse the public (I'm talking finances here, not talking about the intangibles of getting the VA). It's honestly put up or shut up time. Sell some land, close some deals, reimburse the public for the gambles you've made or get ready to face the music. But then again what music will that be worst case? Oh yeah thats right, taxing the public for gambles they didn't vote on in the first place. I honestly hope the COR ends up succesful in the end but I am beyond distraught over the means this city has used try to correct a mistake from the past. And I'm even more distraught over how desperate the council and hra might get with their decision making as they attack the budget issues in our cities future.
Ryan and others should submit letters to ABC Newspapers, Strib, or PiPress.
I italicized one sentence, because it is the only place where Ryan and I may disagree. "... past the tipping point ..." is what Ryan wrote, while I firmly believe we never should have new decisions driven by sunk costs. We should always be open to options such as dropping an approach, or sit-tight-wait-and-see as alternatives to feeling or claiming compelled to plunge ahead, headstrong, full bore, and precipitously.
SUNK COST PITFALLS: Great sunk cost can bias decisions substantively, and by a false sense of urgency, to collapse timeframe and "do something."
Tammy Sakry reported Jim Deal as saying a full Town Center build out might take twenty years. That level of patience is lacking on council.
Changes in direction can result from a focus on sunk costs. For example, present council majority thinking, (and consequent Landform activity), aims at development where the concept of "walkability" is abandoned as a key factor.
Current maps for Town Center have a peppering of retail boxes each with its own parking lot - auto-centric vs. concentrating on foot traffic. This is not different from other metro small-mall proposals. There is no uniqueness. Whether that is better or worse as an approach emphasizing "walkability" deserves debate, not indirect insinuation via map differences without discussion.
SUNK COST EXAMPLES: Lehman and MF Global were driven by sunk cost. Decision making was high-risk, and leveraged. The market took them down for imprudence and impudence.
Also, should we have stayed longer in Iraq or Vietnam, because of how much we'd invested, the sunk costs we'd suffered?
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) pioneered the mini-computer and became a billion-dollar company with Ken Olson its founder and CEO at all times. Olson was quoted to me as saying, "I will not obsolete the VAX," that being a sunk-cost cash cow in the mini computer market at the time with Olson believing, "The PC is a piece of junk." DEC no longer exists because sunk cost on the mini computer business model blinded him to the reality of the market. He did not let the trend be his friend.
THE HOLD AND SIT TIGHT OPTION: "The trend is your friend" is a phrase relied on where people are not so sure of themselves to believe they can buck trends of the market they are in, in our case town booming.
Many metro towns were caught with dreams run aground. Officials in many places may be frustrated, impatient and uncertain.
But saying "I doorknocked my entire ward and what I heard is that people were tired of Ramsey being a laughingstock on Channel 5," is no justification for what's been done subsequent to the 2008 election, arguably to resuscitate a CORpse. Sitting tight, after having decided to buy the distressed land and waiting until the market cycled back to boom times, and then selling the block of land to an experienced private sector operator, to take development risks, was never even considered by the pell mell plunge into Landform's consulting arms.
Pure and simple. Using that "Channel 5 - doorknocking stuff" to argue to justify multi-million dollar gambling and impatience, is bogus. While there was cause for Channel 5 broadcasting, allowing it to drive new decisions is no assurance that there will be less and not more future ridicule and laughing.
GRANDSTANDING - ELECTIONEERING: Suggesting on short notice with no analysis to chop a head, (Kurt not being anyone's yes-man), comes across as something done with an eye to "fiscal conservative" posing for the election, or as a vendetta.
The cost-benefit balance on the rail stop will not be apparent by election time. Nor will there be anything but ground breaking on the Flaherty gamble. We will vote without evidence of what even short term outcomes might be.
James Norman in pushing an overly expensive city hall as an anchor/catalyst, did not have history as his teacher, early in the decade when he acted.
Not that he'd have paid attention.
But current decisions, having a history, are not made good in any absolute sense by comparing them to past bad decisions or using past decisions as an excuse.
It is false to suggest the town is forced by its past to burn money in today's market with no proof of any return worth the spending -- and with no evidence that build-out can be shortened by a massive money burn, now, for consultants. Nor will money burn assure us a better long-term outcome than patience would yield.
BOTTOM LINE - AND VOTING: Ryan's comments are sound. How we react and vote in the election will depend on who runs, what they say, and what we might anticipate from challengers vs. incumbents.
The higher turnout going with presidential election years can bring in voters not fully informed, down-ticket. Also, down ticket outcomes can be wrongly influenced by irrelevancies, e.g., a great number of highway signs yielding name recognition.
THE DILEMMA - CHALLENGERS BEING HEARD: There is a built-in bias -- those on council have QCTV to make their pitch during televised sessions near election day, and via "Council Updates."
The problem is particularly acute when League of Women Voters Candidate Forums can be side-stepped by one of two candidates. (LWV rules do not allow a single attending candidate to proceed alone.)
We should view harshly any incumbent (with a QCTV forum), who side-steps LWV-sponsored opportunities to appear and debate. For me that would cause me now to not vote for a candidate doing that (although in the past I ignored it, in the Look vs. Cook election for an at large Ramsey council seat - and- in that situation it was the challenger who ducked the LWV opportunity - Cook, the incumbent, attended and expressed frustration over being held silent during the LWV broadcast. Hind sight is always 20/20.)
____________UPDATE__________
I am supposing Wise, McGlone and the mayor, along with Lazan of Landform and Nelson, at best would say the strategy is to not go with the trend, but to be a trend-setter. To capture the leading edge of the wave for when the market rebounds, to not be caught trailing other pioneers. Aside from pioneers being the ones with arrows in their backs, that Gestalt is entirely incompatible with chintzy posturing as fiscal conservatives against undue risk, cost, and waste. Wise, McGlone and the mayor want to do big time gambles, together with a low-budget mentality for basic established traditional governmental duties, roads, parks, cops, firemen, and public works and city hall workforce.
Wanting egg in your beer and the foam at the bottom, is irrational folly.
They want traditional private sector things, land speculation, to be their toy, but traditional public sector government functions to be privatized to consultants. It's Alice in Wonderland, a mad hatter's Tea Party. Ass-backwards is another term for it.
_________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Along the lines of front-running the opposition, or attempting to and the wisdom of that, Strib's busy North Metro scribe, Paul Levy, today reports online:
Next stop on Northstar line: Development
Updated: January 16, 2012 - 9:48 PM
When Indianapolis developer David Flaherty proposed his housing project in Ramsey, he looked beyond the city's mostly vacant 400-acre development area and focused on the railroad tracks in the distance.
"We want to build high-density housing where you'll be able to walk from your apartment unit to the rail station," Flaherty said. "This whole project was dependent on Ramsey getting a Northstar commuter rail station."
From potato fields in Big Lake to empty lots in Ramsey once linked with defaulted loans and bank fraud, cities along the Northstar commuter line see their rail stations as key selling points to lure new development.
Although the two-year-old, 41-mile Northstar line has struggled to meet ridership projections, city and business officials see signs a commuter line can flourish someday, even during high unemployment.
[...] "Northstar put Big Lake on the map," said Katie Larsen, senior city planner.
With 10,000 residents, Big Lake is the least populated of cities with Northstar stations. But with 300 available acres and a role as a hub for bus riders who come 30 miles from St. Cloud to hop the Northstar to Minneapolis, Big Lake leaders envision a developer's dream.
"People driving through Big Lake a few years ago saw potato fields," said former City Council Member Chuck Heitz. "Developers saw a potential gold mine."
[...] "The difference between commuter and light rail is there isn't going to be anything happening around the station during the day," Larsen said.
"The train isn't going to be the driving force for retail development," she said. "It's an amenity."
Larsen said she believes that passengers will one day get off at the Big Lake station, buy a newspaper, head to a coffee shop or other stores and mill around. But city officials were convinced they would need "at least 100 new rooftops" before retail develops, probably in 10 years, Larsen said.
A 33-unit townhouse development is underway. Big Lake will soon have a 20-unit assisted-living complex, and a 72-unit apartment complex recently received City Council approval, Larsen said. "Are these developments directly related to Northstar?" she asked. "I believe so."
[...] Big Lake saw the biggest ridership among the six stations: 97,699 rides from January to November 2011. Elk River was next with nearly 92,500.
Big Lake officials feel the down economy even helped them, because they were able to go slowly in forming a development strategy.
"If not for that, we wouldn't have had a plan in place by the time the train rolled out of our station in 2009," Larsen said.
By contrast, Ramsey's more aggressive approach -- seeking funding for projects years before being guaranteed a rail station -- did not pay off. [...] It was a tremendous blow to the $1.3 billion Ramsey Town Center project. Other troubles included mismanagement, a defaulted loan and a federal investigation that resulted in a fraud conviction and prison term for one Forest Lake banker.
The development area, renamed "COR of Ramsey," is starting to rebound with last year's additions of a Veterans Affairs clinic, the Falls Cafe and an Allina Health Clinic.
[...]
As always the excerpt captures a part of the larger report, again here, for full detail.
The report neglects, Flaherty is being greatly subsidized. It neglects, the Flaherty gamble is a gamble.
It neglects that land speculation has never been a legitimate municipal function. While I am not a hunter, my understand is you sit, you wait, and if a deer comes to you they you shoot and tag your success. You do not hire a drum beater to go among a wolfpack, (a developers trade convention), to shout, "Here, deer, deer, deer."
It is counterproductive to do that and it exposes your being an amateur at what you are attempting.
Curiously, Levy who usually is quite thorough, has neglected to report what of all that Big Lake stuff has reached ground breaking or contract signing, and what is up in the air hopes and dreams.
Finally, Levy reports what others said but in reporting does not editorialize toward the question of whether Flaherty is wise building allegedly upscale housing directly adjacent to the busiest freight line in Minnesota, with regular train traffic night and day, train after train. If all the pipe dreams happen as hoped, vs as Ramsey Town Center exposed realities and risk, then things are easy and life is problem-free. Ask yourself, has your life been easy or problem-free? So, what do you expect?
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One afterthought - Lazan and the mayor are not giving statements these days? Or is that not to Levy in ways that reached into his reporting?
Ulrich, not Nelson, is being quoted about things on which Nelson spends 70% of her time, specializing.
Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting. Political fallout of a failed council coup?
We await seeing how budget cutting will be proposed by staff, and ultimately voted on by council.