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Sunday, March 19, 2023

How many Met Council planners does it take to change a light bulb?

Strib reports on the Council. 

Different ideas about how to choose members of the governing Council.

Staff not mentioned.

Planners plan, be it setting growth quotas for various towns, rejecting and sending back Comp Plans for visions and revisions, or routing a major transit project. If highly competent, no problem. If inept, cost overruns, second--guessing, discontent with the entire process/system.

Go figure.

Things always seem to get horsed up, stupidly.

Dithering over how to elect Council members, without reform of practices seems to be like debate forever over a stadium name without consideration of the quality of the team that plays there day in, day out.

So planers graduate from college, and get jobs because Met Council planners require Comp Plans, so each town hires planners, and as a collective, growth twenty years into the future gets "planned." 

Ramsey Town Center. Link. Second Link. A planned development. A Ramsey City Councilmember from the planning stage told me of the City Administrator telling the City Council time and again of Met Council bouncing the Comp Plan back each time over a this-or-that. In retrospect, was the right thing to blame the Met Council planners for nit picking job security activity, or was the City Administrator playing the City Council to push the thing as he and the land developer wanted it, regardless of how the elected Council thought.

That gives a flavor of my view of "planning." It is hard to identify in the process who the real fuck-ups are, so many hands, a hierarchical chain of communication through a single choke point, in that instance, the City Administrator talking to Met Council staff, talking to the City Council, so that the City Council never got direct input from Met Council. Always that intermediation, always that possibility.

The first above link - early timeline:

1998: Idea of a “Town Center” first surfaces in Ramsey and is rejected.

2000: The plan is resurrected in hopes of luring a commuter rail station.

2001: Bruce Nedegaard begins buying land and forms Ramsey Town Center, LLC.

Nedegaard is dead and hence in no position to defend his actions. He took the risk, and the land owners took the money, in exchange for a dream and a song.

And the planners plan. And half or more of the Ramsey Town Center land is unbuilt, still, 2023. And out of shame and somebody's cracker-jack idea, they renamed the thing, "rebranding" the consultant said, while the town paid over a million dollars in consulting fees because of a lack of patience during the 2006 and onward real estate down turn. Inexperienced, get us a consultant to push on a rope, in hope that something good will happen. The plot of land the McDonalds was said to be set up for remains vacant today. 

Other locales, other stories, no doubt. The law of averages suggests not every such planned project failed, or was strung out decades to still be finished today and onward.

Planners plan. Knives and forks on the table, gotta eat, gotta plan. Keep on planning. Plan like you know what you're doing.

LAKE ELMO: There was litigation. There is today. [UPDATE: Link for "executive summary" of the litigation result.]

Does that mean the planners were right? Or does it mean Developers are Crabgrass, water with any chance of money and it quickly takes over the lawn.

Last, in closing; the light bulb. A question you cannot answer, beyond how many have you got, since a light bulb change has to be thoroughly planned. Everybody knows that.