Does Pearson pass the test?

Politico reports, this link. Col. Kline must love them, since they have love for those loving the Col.

Pearson works with for-profit career colleges, too: Its marketing materials boast that its consultants can help them “stay one step ahead” of federal regulations.

Indeed, Pearson has its hand in so many education services that corporate executive Donald Kilburn confidently predicted on an earnings call last summer that the North American division would flourish even if states and school districts had to cut their budgets.

As long as sales reps can show that Pearson products get results, Kilburn said, “the money will find a way to come to us.”

But the POLITICO review found that public contracts and public subsidies — including at least $98.5 million in tax credits from six states — have flowed to Pearson even when the company can’t show its products and services are producing academic gains.

[link in original] And earlier in Politico's reporting

“Pearson has been the most creative and the most aggressive at [taking over] all those things we used to take as part of the public sector’s responsibility,” said Michael Apple, a professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pearson declined to answer specific questions about many of its contracts and business practices.

But several top executives said they always work toward deals that benefit not just the company but its public-sector partners — and above all, the millions of students who use Pearson products daily.

“The public trust,” Senior Vice President Shilpi Niyogi said, “is vital to everything we do.”

Stay ahead of the regulators, the sheriff, the Reaper, and the questioning; just sit on that stool and milk.

Opening image was Pearson's from here. Second image was not theirs.

_____________UPDATE_____________
Chamber music. It appears interesting that major opposition to standardized testing is organized nationwide effort of Chamber of Commerce outlets, e.g., here, here and here. Also, here. I can see some in the successful corporate world favoring connections as the old-fashioned way to get into the better schools, to graduate, and to get the better jobs along with their peers. After all, W was a Yale legacy case, wasn't he? One of those Chamber items links here.

There is irony in the Chamber questioning standardized testing at the same time ALEC wants to use it in attempted busting of the teachers union. You'd expect organized political forces with tentacles to be better able to be on the same page. Obviously, in this, trust the Chamber effort more than ALEC, indeed, trust prison populations more than ALEC, and you'll be close to spot on. ALEC is bad, very bad, for AMERICA.

Links possibly of interest; here, here and here. If you look at union busting, you have to wonder if the unions all get busted down in having a politica voice, who is it left calling the shots? And who would it be telling you that would be good, for AMERICA?

__________FURTHER UPDATE___________
Shifting from an opinion to a question series, Politico's review on Pearson, after all entitled, "No Profit Left Behind," reports

Its software grades student essays, tracks student behavior and diagnoses — and treats — attention deficit disorder. The company administers teacher licensing exams and coaches teachers once they’re in the classroom. It advises principals. It operates a network of three dozen online public schools. It co-owns the for-profit company that now administers the GED.

A top executive boasted in 2012 that Pearson is the largest custodian of student data anywhere.

In our times where we have seen troublesome NSA intrusion into our emails, and Google's selling our profile info per targeted advertisement aimed at us by advertisers paying money to Google; is it food for thought to consider a British firm holding status as "the largest custodian of student data anywhere," and as a profit-seeking private sector firm which might market data on your children, our nation's children collectively, as to who might by some criteria represent a likely loyal American and who might be problematic, in some way, perhaps more likely a criminal hence deserving before any crime is committed an elevated level of government attention? Or should we worry over foreign nations wanting to buy information on the nation's children as to whether they'd be inclined or disinclined to be boosters of one foreign nation or another?

Surely Pearson could explain, "Yes we said that about data custody, and it is true; but first of all we are responsible, as beyond reproach as Caesar's wife, and beyond that the information we collect and the AI programs we may use in data mining - drilling as we might into the database - are not of the type you'd need to worry over. Remember, the public trust is vital to everything we do."

Would you believe all that?

Should you categorically believe it -- From the firm that touts its testing effectiveness, with scant real evidence that any such effectiveness is real, especially if extrapolated as some want, to strongly influence retain-fire decisions over tenured teachers with years of classroom experience involving hundreds of different students over time, in a stable school district, in a stable town having stable school administrators? Isn't experience the best teacher, and what else might local control mean as a virtue? Also, might local control become too local, as with the report of voucher things happening in Louisiana, so that control by experienced statewide administration might better curb possible local excesses?

Another thought experiment -- What if it might just be Pearson selling targeted advertising as Google does, your child is dyslexic or on Ritalin for attention deficit disorder, with the family's computers curiously getting ads for differing pharmaceuticals for the same disorder, claiming greater benefit or lesser side effects. Or an ad touting a Pearson plan to provide online aid to assist dyslexic students to better achieve, one you can sign up for, for a fee. Would that be good or bad? Specific information which might aid a family decision process, isn't that good, or might it be viewed as intruding where school standardized testing was never meant to go?

It seems our US educational establishment arguably has gone overboard with a British private firm that collects and holds a vast body of arguably sensitive data about family members where a family might object.

What remedy might such a family have?

Voucherism run amok, and some think Jindal is presidential material.

This link. Reuters no less, and they most often try to be non-judgmental. If Biblical math is in the cards, how about Revelation numerology? Subtract all the other mentioned numbers, as mentioned, from 666, and what is the difference you are left with? Four Horsemen. Seven Seals. All that. Each in order.

And the great State of Lousiiana has its share of cost-benefit voucher concern, where cost-benefit reckoning also should be a part of standardized testing considerations:

Louisiana's bold bid to privatize schools
By Stephanie Simon - Fri Jun 1, 2012

To date, private schools have not had to give their students state standardized tests, so there's no straightforward way for parents to judge their performance. Starting next year, any student on a voucher will have to take the tests; each private school must report individual results to parents and aggregate results to the state.

The 47-page bill setting up the voucher program does not outline any consequences for private schools that get poor test scores. Instead, it requires the superintendent of schools to come up with an "accountability system" by Aug. 1. Once he does, the system cannot be altered except by legislative vote.

White would not say whether he is prepared to pull vouchers from private schools that do poorly on tests.

He pointed out that many kids applying for vouchers are now enrolled in dismal public schools where two-thirds of the students can't read or do math at grade level and half will drop out before they graduate high school. Given that track record, he argues it's worth sending a portion of the roughly $3.5 billion a year the state spends on education to private schools that may have developed different ways to reach kids.

[..] Officials have not estimated the price tag of these programs but expect the state will save money in the long run, because they believe the private sector can educate kids more cheaply than public schools.

Whether those savings will materialize is unclear.

By law, the value of each voucher can't exceed the sum the state would spend educating that child in public school -- on average, $8,800 a year. Small private schools often charge as little as $3,000 to $5,000 a year.

Yet at some private schools with low tuition, administrators contacted by Reuters said they would also ask the state to cover additional, unspecified fees, which would bring the cost to taxpayers close to the $8,800 cap. The law requires the state to cover both tuition and fees.

In the separate mini-voucher program due to launch in 2013, students across Louisiana, regardless of income, will be able to tap the state treasury to pay for classes that are offered by private vendors and not available in their regular public schools.

That picture is ugly. You want to say there is exaggeration in the report, but it does ring as being factual, even if editorially selective in what gets written about and what else might be left unsaid.

And do you want a tune? Sure, it is syrup, saccharin, and shallow, but Hollywood does choose what it gives us. They made money from it just as the test-seller cabal makes its big-time money now. What harm's a mix-in of some capitalist adventurism likely to cause in training the young to cope in today's world? Sure, sell tests. Impose them on children and perhaps get standardized interchangeable-parts labor force grown-ups from standardized testing imposed on variable young minds. Isn't that good? Who can argue against it?

To everything there is a season ... Or should I leave that direction alone?

Turn standardized testing around as a tool to beat up on the teachers union? Is it coalition building, disfavorable to standardized testing proponents, by opponents, to bring new blood into the anti-test movement? Squeeze the payroll, get more representative anti-test participation that way, a broader coalition?

Or is it just a change in taste and fashion? A fad to counter an earlier one?

Education at the K-12 level is in flux. That should not diminish the need to remember that college and post-graduate education, (the forgotten dimension), if underfunded will be mortgaging innovation potentials within the nation's future. Higher ed. IS where the bright ideas in very large measure originate.

As with most things, either-or juxtaposition may be less appropriate than wanting to reach a sane balance. But those test selling profiteers, they sure do have a cash cow they do not want to run dry or underproduce. Always bear that in mind.

The Netanyahu speech. Was it as some think Republican leadership inviting him to tamper in our foreign policy, or as a lesser known possible motive, Republican leadership's will to tamper in Israeli election juggling?

We are in a two party bind, and they have multiple parties, with new ones formed regularly, in what are still early years in their nationhood, relative to ours.

While not pretending to have an answer to the headline's question - ask those who invited the gentleman - some links readers might find intersting,

"Shocker! Benjamin Netanyahu Uses Speech to Congress in Campaign Ad," online here, and who might really be shocked by a politician doing exactly that?

BBC giving a score-card, but with Lieberman barely mentioned despite his having had past power; here. How accurate is any of that BBC analysis? I have no way of knowing.

Haaretz, now behind a paywall but with enough lead paragraphs printed to show poll watching is not solely our national sport.

Commentary, here.

The Hill, headlined, "Dem: 'My fears have been realized' from Netanyahu speech." That item begins:

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said his suspicions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would use his address to Congress last week to bolster his own reelection campaign have come true.

The Israeli Likud Party, which Netanyahu leads, released a campaign advertisement Thursday that includes footage from Netanyahu's speech to Congress last week. Members of Congress are shown applauding as Netanyahu speaks at the House dais.

Cohen, who is Jewish, was among the more than 50 Democrats who skipped Netanyahu's speech. The Tennessee Democrat said he suspected Netanyahu would use the footage for campaign ads ahead of the Israeli elections next week, given that he had done so in the past.

“I had hoped this prediction might have had a chilling effect and caused the prime minister to reconsider before using Congress as a campaign backdrop. Instead, my fears have been realized," Cohen said in a statement.

Cohen noted that members of Congress are banned from using congressional proceedings for their own campaign ads, arguing a foreign leader should be held to the same standard.

JPost, here, pick a story.

The Independent.

USA Today, here.

If this post has any merit it would be to dispell any notion that "The Israelis" have a monolithic and unchanging face and policy set, without internal debate. Why expect them to be different?

Back to the headline, my vote is for the latter possibility, Republican nose-poking into Israel's internal election affairs. Something, mixing the two nations' politics, that fared poorly for Republican Romney, but then he had that 47% video dooming him before he reached out to Netanyahu.

The level of sheer stupidity involved in taking standardized testing to the extreme is apparent in one online item, and another aptly criticizes "Management by Pinheads." And we have them. In our legislature.

Exhibit A.

Exhibit B.

Explain to me what is the measure of an educated person. Winning a Nobel Prize? Few do. Making a Bill Gates/Warren Buffet fortune? Few do. Writing a Pynchon novel is something only Pynchon has done. Without having to take a multiple choice test about novel writing.

Scoring in the 99th percentile on the LSAT? Is that a measure of an educated person? It may help get you into a law school, but will you have the talent in pressing circumstances to fashion an acquital on, "If the glove don't fit, you've got to acquit?"

Of those legislators pushing for standardized testing, how many will publish their own SAT scores? 

Financial genius Nienow? Suppose he did score highly. That proves what? That the SBA and taxpayers should mop up his personal fiscal bad-judgment mess?

These are bozos leading a bozo parade, union busting being the actual aim, and some should know better.

Yes there truly are problems with winnowing talent as students move upstream, yes along the way the majority really do get left behind, but remember Medtronic was the result of a first class post-graduate medical school program at the Twin Cities campus, and the entrepreneurial sparks for succeeding generations do not come from children left behind, but from those not held back from where their capabilities and tenacity can allow them to reach.

And yes, Bill Gates scored big time three sigma or so off the high end from the middle of the SAT bell curve, and yes, he scored big cash/power accumulation while he can demonstrate an exceptional SAT score, but that is irrelevant to preparing an entire population to think semi-analytically in order to be capable of productively participating in voting, holding a steady job, seeking and holding office, or getting a PhD in grad school at MIT.

And yes, there is dead wood in any bureaucracy, in Boeing, in Airbus, they are big enough that some will be in and over their heads. It is the same with teaching. But those parroting, "Give standardized tests, it's Nirvana," should note that neither Boeing nor Airbus do that, and they produce very safe airplanes which we value in large part because of the successful judgment of the engineers and cost accountants who know where to shave a buck, and where the risk of dogmatic buck-shaving is too high. Show me one good multiple choice test that uncovers Boeing-grade management and engineering judgment skills.

There isn't any.

Have you any idea why they don't manage the medical profession by standardized testing and success rates of medical procedures? Fire the doctors who lose patients, never mind that some come to hospitals with incurable conditions, and never mind that everybody dies sometime and most likely the majority die while under medical attention.

If that testing stupidity were suggested for the medical profession everyone would laugh, because they could see through it. Why dump it on the teachers then? The job is thankless enough. Yes, they have a cohesive union. But so do the cops, and the weasels are not ripping at their flesh.

Go figure that one out.

In closing, Diane Ravitch thinks, while too many in the legislature decline to. Posturing is easier, and after all, path of least resistance is how the waters of the earth flow.

______________UPDATE_____________
Arguably anecdotal reporting has value. But that possibility is apart from why bust a union, or get in the way of busting a union, when the facts are in such clear disrepair?

There exists no reliable data that standardized testing is effective for anything. My personal experience is that the SAT, the GSAT, general and for chemistry grad school purposes, and the LSAT scores were incredibly correlated with one another - ETS had exceptional internal test-to-test score consistency, but I could not see much link between test scores and academic or professional success. The senior lawyer where I worked was a better lawyer than I was, and his test scores had been mediocre. And the evil - training to the test - is both real and counterproductive to producing educated, inquisitive, analytical minds.

It is a bunch of hooey.

___________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Let us consider best evidence. People unquestionably brighter and more learned than your average legislator bent on union busting; people with no bias one way or the other on whether the teacher's union is too powerful and/or too Democratic for their liking, have gone on record, and if you read nothing else this month, read this. It debunks VAM.

Read it to know what VAM stands for, but that's revealed early in the brief seven pages, so read the entire thing. At p7 of seven pages, this is well noted

Research on VAMs has been fairly consistent that aspects of educational effectiveness that are measurable and within teacher control represent a small part of the total variation in student test scores or growth; most estimates in the literature attribute between 1% and 14% of the total variability to teachers. This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.

The VAM scores themselves have large standard errors, even when calculated using several years of data. These large standard errors make rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling. Combining VAMs across multiple years decreases the standard error of VAM scores. Multiple years of data, however, do not help problems caused when a model systematically undervalues teachers who work in specific contexts or with specific types of students, since that systematic undervaluation would be present in every year of data.

A VAM score may provide teachers and administrators with information on their students’ performance and identify areas where improvement is needed, but it does not provide information on how to improve the teaching. The models, however, may be used to evaluate effects of policies or teacher training programs by comparing the average VAM scores of teachers from different programs.

This is from statisticians, whose livelihoods and well-being are related to uses of statistics - in this context student scores in standardized testing - and they are noting how ill-clothed is the emperor of using student test scores in hire-fire teacher retention decision making. They caution against stupid use of their methodologies, which they caution, are not well used in conniving by those having an ax to grind against union collective bargaining outcomes. The assault on the unions is a centralized and orchestrated thing, and only true fools or con men, moving unthinkingly or with ill-motive, would go along with it.

In the public high school in suburban St. Louis that I attended, the sophomore English fast track class was constructed around the notion of the epic in literature over the ages. We read the Iliad, Aeneid, and Paradise Lost, and a common thread was to consider the changing view of the hero, in literature. I cannot remember now whether we did Faust. In the junior year the theme was coming of age as to education in preparation for adult life. We read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Education of Henry Adams, and Look Homeward Angel. Two years of Latin were offered.

How do you wrap multiple-choice calipers around that kind of thought out process of having the brighter of students wrestle with things that at the time they were only partially equipped to comprehend. It avoided the boredom that TV then offered and offers still. There was some teaching to the test, but it was a limited thing, not something biased by employment security worry being mixed badly into the process of education.

So, again, the question too often swept under the rug, the square one question - what is the measure of a teacher's effectiveness? If you cannot cogently answer that in terms of where standardized testing can prove useful - aggregate evaluation of narrow things not key to becoming educated but which are easily measured by test-taking, variation in test results over an aggregate grouping, depending on socioeconomic variables mainly, AND you recognize these limitations for what they are; then the process is a limited part of things and not perverted for politically motivated aims and ends for which the statisticians themselves say it is inappropriate as a decision making tool.

How it is and you had best believe it, if you want educated children, on the whole, to take over in their adulthood and to not drive the nation into one disaster or another but to be even keeled and collectively able to do best.

In the context of the VAM debate, Ravitch has aptly written

As many education researchers have explained–including a joint statement by the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education– the VAM ratings of those who teach children with disabilities and English language learners will be low, because these children have greater learning challenges than their peers, as will the ratings of those who teach gifted students, because the latter group has already reached a ceiling. Those two groups, like the ASA agreed that test scores are affected by many factors besides the teacher, not only the family, but the school’s leadership, its resources, class size, curriculum, as well as the student’s motivation, attendance, and health. Yet the Obama administration and most of our states are holding teachers alone accountable for student test scores.

The ASA warns that the current heavy reliance on VAMs for high-stakes testing and their simplistic interpretation may have negative effects on the quality of education. There will surely be unintended consequences, such as a diminishment in the number of people willing to become teachers in an environment where “quality” is so crudely measured.

Ask yourself, would you as a recent college graduate be more or less willing to dedicate your adult life to something "where 'quality' is so crudely measured"?

Were you to say "more willing, absolutely," I would have to question how well educated you are. How fit for the purpose you would be.

The evidence is what it is, and teaches what it does, and the ASA knows more about its area of expertise and is less biased as to inferring political directions from such expertise, than is ALEC.

Know that, or be ignorant. Uneducated. Ill-educated.

___________FINAL UPDATE____________
It intrigues me how in the legislature and Congress seniority is such a factor, witness Richard Russell and Orin Hatch - Tip O'Neill and Mitch McConnell. Yet the legislature, with seniority arguably too rampant a determinant, arguably counterproductive but the way things are done, is where the attack on teacher seniority is in full swing.

There is a saying about do as I say, not as I do.

Clinton emails.

screen capture from http://bigstory.ap.org/ here.

Gerstein, reports at Politico, that a Klayman motion for a continuance of oral argument was denied, linking to the item, here. He seems to be writing the substative motion was denied also, which his linked item does not state. More from Klayman's confederates, here. (Note, small-c; I don't want Larry suing me.)

Gerstein reports of and links to news of an AP wire service lawsuit over the emails, see original item, here.

There is an election on the horizon, Jeb has his standardized testing cash cow he's been proselytizing as if it were some proven effective thing - with ALEC on his side. Hillary's likely thinking of the Tom Hanks film, "You've Got Mail."

Can't we do better, both sides?

___________UPDATE___________
Well, turn back time and you find another Bush or two onto a good thing.

Neil Bush, we all know him from his befriending lonesome women, was into cash-from-standardized-testing back during the No Child Left Behind presidential time frame; apparently no cash was intended to be left behind if available to buy into the testing tells all belief frame of mind.

They've both occupied the Oval Office, but are these the two most illustrious families we can now put forward, again, in 2016?

Set the bar higher, America, please.

Attending this morning's Abigale Whelan - Branden Petersen town hall meeting at Anoka City Hall.

Most of the concerns from the audience, and the responses were as might be expected.

I had the opportunity to ask if either of the two knew of how much public money gets burned funding standardized testing, who provides [i.e. sells] the tests, and who is lobbying for standardized testing. And whether either knew of any reliable cost-benefit analysis of same.

Neither knew of any sound data on cost alone, not to mention cost-benefit. The who is lobbying part of the multi-part question strangely fell through the cracks.

However I got the strong impression that Whelan might be more amenable to recognizing legitimacy in the range of questioning.

If you are going to "fix" education and foster the advancement of "effective" teachers, in advancing such an agenda, you had best start at square one. What is effective [not cheapest newbies necessarily] and what is not, and what objective data [if any] exists on a measuring stick?

I got the impression Whelan understands not putting the cart before the horse, despite her wanting efficient and effective education, which, by the fact of universal public education being the practice, becomes less a balancing of individual anecdotal stuff than looking at statistical conglomeration across the collective practice. In looking for any real answer the perspective has to consider education, scaled up to where it actually is in size; and do not get too sidetracked by McFadden - SJ - Cristo Rey miniscule example-touting where admission to and remaining in the program has been strongly influenced by dedication levels of parents.

Just as a test-tube measure against Ebola might save a life, the main question is, does it scale, and what are down-side potential consequences.

How do you read such indirect things as which of the two might prove more sagacious in addressing education issues? Certainly one town hall meeting, replete with subjectivity, is but a part of the process. For now, it's all I have to go on.

Bottom line - we've been sold standardized testing, but have we been sold a bill of goods? With money on the table for those selling standardized testing as a good thing, do not expect them to be the ones looking to see if there is any downside. Take their assurances with a grain of salt. Possibly a ten pound salt lick might be better than only one grain.

RAMSEY - That old deja vu, are you feeling it too?

July/August 2006 Ramsey Resident
online: This link
click the image to enlarge and read

Deja vu. All over again. Last time they solicited interest. There was none. Perhaps they also did a study - or funded one, and now that it is getting into sandbur season ...

More later. Perhaps.

Do note the physical locale - 68 acres west of Armstrong Blvd., and north of Highway 10.

Ramsey Crossings.

A large retail "power center."

The last large power center was Shaq, (not counting Dwight Howard who's almost there).

And they both happened. No thinking, maybe, kind of, let's see, let's hope; Field of Dreams visioning - Build it and they will come.

Consultants gotta pay the rent, the landlord expects that; and at least it is not a Darren bring-back ...

_____________UPDATE_____________
Refer, please, to this March 10, 2015, city council televised meeting agenda page, and wait and view the replay video on QCTV once it is posted (if not there already, readers can check that out on their own).

Directions first, for how to get to the "Future Ramsey Business Park":

And, 44 mb of download to get the pdf packet with the attachments. Part of a 583 page agenda. Snow in March. Plenty. In there, individual flakes, click on any you like

Yes, there could be more. However, the last image was left larger than the others because it begins,

In accordance with the Comprehensive Plan, an 18-inch sanitary sewer was be extended westward in Bunker Lake Boulevard a distance of approximately 2,750 feet. This line will provide service to the study area, as well as future development that may occur on the south side of Bunker Lake Boulevard, and could be further extended in accordance with the Comprehensive Plan.


The image to the left (from the City’s 2012 Comprehensive Sanitary sewer Study) depicts 18-inch trunk sanitary sewer extended to west of Armstrong Boulevard through the study area.

Alert readers will detect a substitute image was inserted. Go, download that file, and weigh that "In accordance with the Comprehensive Plan," city staff and council are compelled to plan a field of dreams at Ben Dover's expense because it is part of Met Council Comprehensive Plan mischief.

Gotta lay that sewer/water, then when business park plans fail, as they in all likelihood will, build more housing so Met Council can sell flushes. It is a nice world we live in and enjoy.

Go to City Hall. Ask, what businesses are interested in a Future Ramsey Business Park location, when/were it to happen? Ask them for a list. Do not expect a multi-page list. (Hint, be careful expecting a list of any kind whatsoever to such a simple request.)

Bolten & Menk have to pay the office rent. Ramsey has to plan sewer/water routing and it surely is better there along Highway 10 than down my street.

Losers in the likelihood that no business will be grown in the field of dreams and instead it will grow new townhomes? The owners of all those presently existing used town homes, when/if they want to sell.

Land speculation is not a proper city function, especially when a proper one, road maintenance, has been so problematic because of too many false priorities.

Land speculation is what the last vote for council demonstrated to be disfavored politics for City of Ramsey indulgence. So tell me, how does this new thing differ?

And where is the institutional memory, given the start of this post? An occasional Crabgrass reader who called all this nonsense to my attention noted one definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. That, or Governmental Amnesia. Moving on --

YOU CANNOT PUSH ON A ROPE. IF IT IS NOT MARKET DRIVEN, BUT PLANNER DRIVEN, IT IS SHROUDED IN DOOM.

That said, after you downloaded that 583 page extravaganza packet, and reviewed the Bolten & Menk stuff to your heart's desire (starting at p295 of 583 pages), then jump to p331 of 583 pages, and wow, another consultant weighs in, at Ben Dover's expense. Read it. Even though there's not much there but paid-for puffery. For a real hoot, cost sharing. Starting p.340 of 583 pages.

The City, Hageman Holdings, LLC and Pearson Properties of Ramsey, LLC shall equally share the cost of the Work with each party paying one-third, pursuant to the terms of this Agreement.

So, who picked Bolten & Menk? Three men in a tub?

And, in prudence, really, your town is not on the hook because of the reimbursement provision. Right?

The Owners shall reimburse the City for their respective one-third shares in a single, lump sum payment at the earlier of:

i. January 01, 2020.

ii. Within one week of closing on the sale of any parcel of the respective Owner’s land, or portion thereof, located within the Future Business Park area. Owners shall provide the City with notice of all pending land sales within the Future Business Park area. The notice shall be provided upon execution of a purchase agreement and shall include the closing date.

iii. The Owner submits an application for preliminary plat approval concerning land within the Future Business Park area.

There's more and more after that, if you care to study a new definition of "build it and they shall come" stupid. It is all there. In the flakes of the snow.

___________FURTHER UPDATE______________
Bolton & Menk, for money, will most likely produce a report saying it's all hunky dory and here's the detail as to infrastructure needs and projected cost.

So, who do you suppose will pay at least front money for that infrastructure? Pay that projected, or greater cost? See last image, above. When Peterson developed his cornfield up north on Highway 5 by Trott Brook, he fronted big time cash. Six million. The lion's share. Will those two LLC entities do the same? Which side of that question would you bet on, Ramsey public money, or private entrepreneurship? If it were posted in Vegas, how do you suppose they'd set the odds? And the engine behind sewer/water, Met Council, I did not read of their paying one single, solitary cent of the cost. But then in all those snow fall snowflakes, I might have missed something. Please, alert readers, post a comment telling me where in the 583 pages it says what Met Council's payment share in things will be. What part of the up-front risk will they be assuming? Isn't the rule that risk and rewards go together, as bedrock Capitalism 101. You don't socialize the risk. What's the best current definition of "private enterprise?"

___________FURTHER UPDATE______________
Why, again, was Bunker extended west of Armstrong and Puma Street paved in the first place?

Perhaps give Bolton & Menk a consulting contract to do a cost-benefit or wants-vs-needs retro-analysis of that governmental decision-making hummer.

Oh, right. Legacy Christians gave promises. That's it. Based on a promise, public money got spent north of where needed for the Armstrong interchange.

Then those folks went lukewarm on the promise.

The point? Dumping more money because of already sunk cash is not a compelling argument. Yet that seems to in part be the play. As with Town Center. Fund it to the hilt, and hope a lot, and puff the magic of it all.

As if there was something sound in all that past, invested planning. All at a cost.

It seems upkeep of existing roads for existing resident-voter-taxpayer people is a wedge-it-in-somehow thing, while planning growth for profit seeking landed interests is somebody's Nirvana. Put another way, how many times must Humpty Dumpty fall before it is time for an omelet and moving on to soundly address more legitimate government aims then welfare for land speculation?

___________FURTHER UPDATE___________
What does this (p338 of 583 pages) say to you:

Conclusion

As the City of Ramsey knows, the cost of developing a business park can be significant and there are never any guarantees of a return on the investment. There are many factors to consider before investing in land and  infrastructure to attract industrial and commercial development.  However, there is an old saying in economic development: “You must have a site that is ready for development to be in the game".

Having a site that is ready to go or is "shovel ready" separates communities into winners and losers at the start of the site location process.  When the community is prepared with a site that is ready to accept development, the odds improve significantly that the community will receive a visit from a potential prospect.  In todays world, the competition is keen for economic development due to its impact on tax base, job creation and related income.  Communities with sites that are prepared are the ones who will achieve success.

For starters, a manure pile is "shovel ready," but aside from that, to me, the learned consultants take two paragaphs to say, "Build it and they shall come. Maybe."

What does any of that have to do with legitimate government provision of public goods, those that the private sector is not prepared to fund because there is no profit potential to it? Is fronting money for speculators hoping to profit anybody's notion of a public good? Aside from the speculator interests fanning the flames? Is it a public good to you, where you live, to have sewer and water brought to Hagedorn Hageman and Pearson properties? If so, please explain it in a comment.

FURTHER UPDATE: Secretary of State corporate filing records for the two LLCs, Pearson's and Hageman's respectively, are online here and here. Pearson is the Ramsey old-timer, his LLC being incorporated in 2004 with corporate headquarters at his Ramsey family farm property. Hageman is the outsider, at a St. Michael address, and apparently somehow came into title during the Legacy Christian Academy promise-then-splat times; (if not sooner). His LLC mentioned in agenda documents was first filed 2010.

Another big hoot. p345 of 583 pages, several paragraphs, including:

The City's vision statement reads, "Achieve economic vitality with strategic infrastructure investments through market-driven growth." This vision supports the City's exploration of bringing infrastructure improvements to this property in order to facilitate economic growth.

[italics in original]

What sort of 1984 double-speak is that? Speaking of a market driven goal, while this stuff is pushing on a rope tax money spending with no market driving it. Pearson and Hageman hopes may be a partial driving factor, but that's not buyer market, it is speculator market. And where's the frigging market, if there is no buyer present to accompany the wannabe profit-making seller hopefuls?

That page surely should have been left out, because as it stands it insults the intelligence of any citizen ferreting it out and reading it. It must be somebody's idea of a joke.

Next:

Know your EDA, you pay for it -- p352 of 583 pages:

click image to enlarge and see numbers

An ostensible two million dollar inventory of lands. Looking more to be a land orphanage. A drop site for those on the way out the door, out of town.

p367 of 563 pages: What "FUTURE EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES" is that image talking about. Is there some kind of misrepresentation of fact, or only an ambiguous representation of future possibility? Didn't the Legacy folks take a hike? Is it set to be one of John Kline's for profit student-debt mills? What? Expanding the tech college, even if non-contiguous, at least that might make some sense. But what is CBRE saying and what is their basis for saying it? Present zoning? Another wish-for, hope-for, but with no presently identifiable likely land occupant, for that purpose?

Cap it there. It appears the following agenda pages relate to land that the real estate agent is marketing, and the reasonable proposal that if a fish bites, you don't want it to spit the hook while waiting to be able to reel it in (aka the blanket pre-sale authorization of council by ordinance to bless such sales as CBRE might negotiate, while honoring Charter language. Something hanging together and making sense. Unlike Business Park spending which seems little more than anticipatory sky-dream waste and subsidy at this point.)