It was December 2010, and the East Bethel City Council had just approved a controversial plan to build two plants in the largely undeveloped city that doesn’t even have a grocery store. City leaders saw an opportunity to be the “next big burb.”Idiots.
The project wouldn’t serve any of East Bethel’s existing 11,000 residents; it was built for the future, for the growth it would spur and handle.
Three years later, the plants are up and running, but the growth that was expected to bankroll the project hasn’t materialized. Only three businesses are connected.
Residents are absorbing a 15 percent jump in their 2014 city property taxes to meet the first round of payments on $18 million in bonds sold for the project. City leaders — who have all turned over since the project was approved — are desperately trying to keep the project from sinking East Bethel.
Ramsey had Landform, James Norman's dream of grandure, building of the Norman Castle, the last muni well DNR let our town punch, and talk of river water and a multimillion dollar treatment plant. For targeted growth beyond when the wells will run insufficient at full capacity, sucking up the aquifer water all the private single-family wells in town rely upon for steady supply.
Idiots.
Matt Look and purchase of Nedegaard's Folly for way too high a price, making Landform spending -money for nothing - possible.
All chasing growth as if a virtue the private market stood ready to bestow, needing only a tiny goose to reach boundless cost-free tax base expansion - yielding posterity prosperity.
And then some!
Idiocy, how-can-we-lose idiocy. By and for idiots.
A new $300,000 annual Northstar tax, per having a trainstop nobody uses, fingerprints all over it of Look and friends (all the while professing a dislike for taxes and waste). With that as a resume/track record, he left Ramsey to seek a County Board bigger paycheck, and what manner of people voted for him?
Go ahead. Guess.
Hint, the word begins idio...
_____________
Note: some content revision above, cleaning up because input was by a portable tablet - no substantial change.