This has nothing in particular to do with Maplewood or City Council, but everything to do in general with being a human being in the 21st Century. I think it's the most touching and thought-provoking work of art I've encountered in a while. Enjoy, and thanks to LC for sending me the link.
Read more about this video and its creators (including the 17-year-old vocalist from Minneapolis), if you're curious, on MinnPost.com.
Reached Friday evening, Hjelle said that the judge was misinformed and that he had recused himself from the votes.
"This judge was simply lied to ... I'm sorry that a judge was stupid enough to believe (Le). But I guarantee you no one will hold (Le) accountable (for alleged perjury), because that's how things work around here," he said.
The motion and vote he's talking about, at the 4/24/06 city council meeting:
Edit: The 3/6/08 Pioneer Press followed up with an article entitled, "Council member wrong on vote facts," correcting the record on Mr. Hjelle's assertion.
[This is an e-mail I sent yesterday to a mailing list of commissioners, activists, and other interested citizens. Councilmember Hjelle had previously sent a message laden with inaccuracies to this list, and several of the recipients had forwarded it to me. I thought it would be good to post my message here as well, for anyone interested to see.]
Folks,
Apparently some false information is being spread around by Councilmember Hjelle.
Among other tall tales, Mr. Hjelle wrote, “The sad reality is that our new council majority has no interest in addressing the concerns of the Moratorium and the area impacted by the COPAR development. That is why the issue is efectively [sic] dead, and why the moratorium is being allowed to simply end.”
The moratorium is ending because the city council lacks legal authority to extend it further. I brought this up at the January 28th council meeting, specifically because I was concerned about development occurring between the expiration of the moratorium and the adoption of any action based on the study findings.
In case anyone needs proof, I went back to the DVD of this meeting, excerpted the relevant portion of the discussion, and put it on YouTube:
You can see me ask, and Mr. Ahl and Mr. Kantrud answer quite clearly that we have extended the moratorium as far as the law allows. You can also see on the video that Mr. Hjelle was present to receive the same information. You'd have to ask him why he would lie to you all about this.
In terms of my interest in addressing the concerns of the moratorium area, I hope it's obvious that Mr. Hjelle does not speak for me and fails to accurately depict my views.
As I learned about the issues in the moratorium study area, I became interested in ways to preserve ecologically sensitive land there, and I came to appreciate how highly valued the land is in the eyes of the members of the original open space task force as well as south leg neighbors. I also am aware of the issues of property rights, ongoing litigation, and the complexities of land use planning. Finally, I worry that the solution some favor – of keeping 2-acre minimum lots – is no solution at all for the long term, even if it is something the city could maintain. Do we really want all those septic systems uphill from Fish Creek?
The only way to really preserve the ecological value of the land around Fish Creek is public ownership. This is not something the city could pay for out of petty cash, especially with the financial situation we've inherited. The original open space referendum money, of course, was long ago spent on other land. This means that the city would have to issue bonds. A referendum would be required and a majority of voters would have to support the borrowing.
I am asking city staff for information on the process by which such a referendum could be accomplished. In the meantime, interested folks can get a start by reading a section of the Handbook for Minnesota Cities, Chapter 24: Debt and Borrowing (look at “Voter Approval” on pages 7-8 of this document).
If certain members of the council are interested in actually doing something for Fish Creek, rather than just trying to exploit it as a political wedge as they did last year, then we might get the votes in the council necessary to authorize a bond question on the ballot.
Then it's up to the citizens. The League of Minnesota Cities warns, “City officials should be careful not to endorse or campaign in favor of the bond election. Any published materials should be confined to factual statements about the project to be financed. Campaigning should be left to citizen’s groups.” (This comes from an Attorney General's opinion.) Fortunately, we may already have such a citizen's group in the form of the Fish Creek Initiative.
While bonding to buy more open space may be a tough sell with the electorate, especially in this economic downturn, we do live in a community that puts a very high value on our environment, our parks, and our neighborhood preserves. A ballot question would give citizens and activists who want to protect Fish Creek and its environs the chance to take their case directly to the voters, to persuade them that this is an investment that is worth making for Maplewood's future.
This past Monday, the theater in the Maplewood Community Center was overflowing with citizens who turned out for this special meeting of the city council, to express both support and concerns about the proposed Planned Unit Development on the site of St. Paul's Monastery.
I offered a couple of lines of thought, both rooted in my perspective as a businessman. First, I wanted to focus attention on the fact that we were talking about the Benedictine sisters' private land. The proposed development is in harmony both with existing zoning and with the city's comprehensive land use plan. Thus, it seems to me that the hurdle is set very high, in terms of the public interest that must be served in order to outweigh the private landowners' property rights. Second, I wanted to speak to the importance of affordable housing as a public good, in helping working families better their own situation and become more secure and self-sufficient, which benefits all of us as taxpayers and fellow citizens. When non-profit organizations are stepping forward to provide this affordable housing in our community, it's an opportunity we should not miss.
Because one of the five members of the city council was absent from the meeting on account of illness, the vote was tabled until tomorrow night's regular council meeting.
At the December 11th, 2006, city council meeting, I spoke twice. I didn't go to the meeting with any plan to talk — these comments were just provoked by events at the meeting. The clip below, my first trip to the podium, took place during visitor presentations.
The first visitor to speak that evening had been an attorney, warning that the council's planned action, to fire his client (a highly respected, 20+ year veteran of the police force) simply by eliminating his position in the 2007 budget, ran afoul of state law and civil service protections. When he offered to respond to any questions from the council (since the budget was up for a vote this evening), the mayor told him, "We don't have exchange of dialogue at visitor presentations."
This was a rule I had never heard before. In fact, I had witnessed dialogue in the visitor presentations at many previous council meetings. I even had notes on my laptop from some of those meetings, recording who the dialogue was with and what it was about.
Obviously, this attorney raised uncomfortable issues and the council majority didn't want to talk with him. So Mayor Logrie pulled a new rule out of thin air and used it to send him away, or she dredged up a previously ignored rule and decided to enforce it just then because it suited her.
There are two things that really bugged me about this.
First, creating or enforcing rules in this kind of arbitrary manner offends my notion of the rule of law and a basic respect for process. We have enshrined in our Constitution (Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3) that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed." You don't make up rules after the fact, and you don't make up rules to single out and punish a specific individual. And you shouldn't enforce rules only on the people you don't like.
Second, this was completely unnecessary! The mayor could have said, "We choose not to respond to you." Simple! Instead, she conjured a hitherto unknown rule, as though to persuade the audience that she's as much a victim of circumstances as this attorney and his client.
This incident may seem trivial. Unfortunately, it illustrates a pattern we have seen repeatedly with this council majority — making up, selectively enforcing, or misinterpreting rules so that they can feign helplessness while enacting their agenda. They also have a related talent for ignoring rules, like those civil service laws, when the constraints don't suit their purposes.
Anyhow, I decided to call attention to the novelty of this rule, and suggest that if it is indeed a rule they should formalize it and apply it to everyone.
Then I discussed a completely different topic — a very misleading salary "study" that the city manager had published in the November city newsletter. He felt compelled to publish the salaries of half of the members of a newly formed city employee bargaining unit, the Maplewood Confidential and Supervisory Association. The speaker before me had waved a copy of this article, while expressing outrage at the salaries and apparently huge increases demanded by this new union. I believe the city manager was trying to elicit citizen outrage like this, to use against the city employees who had recently asserted their right to organize.
There were all kinds of things wrong with this deceptive work of propaganda (note, if you look at the fine print, that the table compares salary alone in 2006 to salary plus benefits in 2007, for example). I wanted to focus on one simple and amusing observation — that its big claim is basically that half of this group of employees had above-average salaries. How surprising is that?
Posted by John Nephew at 2/18/2007 06:55:00 PM |Permalink
Friday, February 16, 2007
Dec. 18th Visitor Presentation
As I suggested a couple days ago, Maplewood needs a seasoned, professional city manager, who can effectively manage the city and implement the council's directives. Launching a search for such an individual needs to be the first priority of a new council.
For most of 2006, the council's stated intention was to undertake such a search. However, the council majority decided instead to make the interim manager permanent (on a 3-1 vote with one member on a planned absence). On December 18th, I went to the city council visitor presentations with prepared remarks, to ask them to restart the search process. Here is a video of my presentation.
(If you have problems playing this as it downloads, I recommend clicking on the Pause button and letting the whole video load before you click Play again.)
