Meaning: Honesty Rocks!
Planners want every Minnesota town under Met Council jurisdiction to do "Comprehensive Plans." For developers to read and cherry pick opportunity, and once opportunity is recognized, to only move via TIF bribing, one town against the others to give the most to the developers. Developers are in it for the money. Planners are in it to gum up things. (Planners might disagree.)
Cottage Grove, Comp Plan, and Community Center planning document.
Cottage Grove fairly worded its referendum. It was defeated.
If you care to see how deceitful a ballot question can be; in comparison to the fairness shown by Cottage Grove; here, Advisory Question No. 3. (From among seven 2001 City of Ramsey ballot questions, four immediate, three "advisory.")
Do you want a Town Center with restaurants, shopping and other amenities along the Highway 10 Corridor?
Who would not want shops and restaurants; yet a significant percentage of voters could smell a rat. As in who was being set up to pay more taxes for what? A giant housing expansion was planned, Met Council loved it along the then-planned Northstar Commuter Rail route, with implied speculation that shops and restaurants would somehow subsequently spring up. Call it an intentional big lie, or -
Call it "The Ramsey Way." As the town was governed back then, better, since.
Bless the government of Cottage Grove for being fair to their citizens. That is how government should behave. Bless all those who, knowing the scope of the question, voted one way or the other.
Deceit breeds dissatisfaction and dissent. Honesty is the best policy. Ramsey Town Center from the start was driven by motives good and bad; via judgment, bad.
And Met Council still pushes TOD, standing for Transit Oriented Development.
In German "Tod" means death. Curiously, TOD was the acronym underlying Northstar planning. And where is it now . . .