Archive for the ‘Duluth City Council’ Category

Pavement and rain

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

I got a call Monday asking me if I could help our fellow Presbyterians at Westminster Prez over on Grand Ave next to Denfeld High School. When I was on the School Board the Church’s pastor opened up the church daily for Denfeld kids who were loitering around the neighborhood to give them an outlet that would keep them safe while playing basketball in the church gym.

Since the June flooding the City has posted the church building as off limits due to the massive internal flooding and destruction it suffered. Because of that the small congregation had to postpone a clean up until Sunday. They were still mopping up mud and water when I arrived at 11:30am yesterday. The not so faint odor of mud, mold and sewage was in the air when I descended to the basement. The walls had a water line at about five feet and almost nothing that was at that level could be rescued save a few mostly plastic tables and perhaps some folding chairs. That meant that fifty years worth of accumulated church stuff used for funerals weddings and inumerable youth and holiday celebrations had to be hauled up into a dumpster above ground. The church floors were heaved up from the water pressure. One looked like a whale had breached it being about two feet higher at the center of the room than by the room’s walls. The water rushing up from this volcano took a right turn and smashed down the plaster wall of another room across the hallway. It was impressive.

The clothes of the men who had gotten to the church early in the morning were pretty well slathered with mud. I was pretty prissy about handling things but you can be sure all my cloths went into the wash immediately upon my return home.

The City of Duluth has communicated to the church that it takes no responsibility for the church’s trashing. I think that may be more of a negotiating stance than actual reality. The City says that a culvert built years ago by private entities absolves them of responsibility. The City has been forcing homeowners to put in sump pumps for several years including my home. The City also approved the massive paving of new and expanded paved parking lots for the Red Plan expansion of Denfeld High School. I presume the city’s engineers had to have some familiarity with the hydrological implications for any building resting over the culvert. Anyone living in Duluth for the last decade has seen rainstorms pop manhole covers on streets below the hill pretty regularly. I found one in Chester Creek below the Ninth Street Bridge a few days ago when I took a hike along the stream bed.

All that pavement would have funneled water instantly under the church no matter who built the culvert. Westminster is owned not by the small local congregation but by the Presbyterian Church USA. It will have the national church’s attorney’s to deal with and they should be formidable. If the the City is dinged for the Church’s repair it will be yet one more unanticipated expense of the Red Plan. It will fall on the City’s tab not the School Districts but it will come out of the pockets of the same taxpayer’s who are already paying for the Red Plan .

The wrong horseshoe

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

I can’t really believe what I heard recently – that our new East High school only has one janitor. I had heard that rather than cut teachers to pay for the Red Plan the School Board had drastically cut custodial staff. For a couple years classrooms have only been swept two times a week. It was once a daily occurance and anyone who has been in a classroom after a day of having been visited by 150 kids can easily see the necessity.

But, of course, it hasn’t just been the support staff that has been cut.

When I served on the School Board we had managed to pare students to much smaller numbers per teacher. In the elementary grades it was a rare classroom that had more then 26 kids in it. And then the experts at JCI helped design new schools. They did so with our old enrollment and classroom numbers in mind. That meant classrooms with small numbers of kids like in the Pre-Red Plan days. That meant that in the brand spanking new Lester Park School they installed 28 lockers for children per classroom. classrooms that now contain an impossible 36 kids in them.

That’s what might have been expected when, out of faith in our Napoleonic new Superintendent, our School Board gambled $5 million a year for twenty years from its classroom budget on bonds to pay for brick and mortar.

I’ll bet Keith Dixon never read any history. If he had he might have found this story instructive.

So might City Councilman Jeff Anderson when Ordean residents came to the City Council to explain that the Red Plan had not taken into account the parking needs of a new school of 1600 students and asked for a serious investigation of zoning needs and traffic impacts.

Here’s the famous map showing the size of Napoleon’s army from the time 400,000 left for Russia until its 10,000 survivors returned.

Making a “good plan into a great plan.”

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Loren Martell, still licking his wounds from losing to a clueless incumbent, offers his latest critique of the Red Plan and the Board that brought it into being. The $500 we personally gave Loren’s campaign was the best money I’ve ever donated in a political campaign…..except for the $100 donated to Obama. Sometimes the voters are better informed.

Spending half of the reserve down in a single year shows what the District will have to do to maintain its current classroom spending when they’ve spent the rest of the reserve down in a year or so.

That is an unsustainable level of deficit spending. Its obvious to me that the District has been covering up its insolvency for some time to protect the Board members and District from criticism in advance of the recent elections. Much larger cuts should have been made all along as it became apparent that there were no energy savings (thank you JCI) to be had and that the “efficiencies” in operational costs were a mirage.

I woke to an email which seems to have been riffing off my threat/promise to run for Congress. It refers to my post on City Councilor and Congressional Candidate Jeff Anderson:

I also do not believe you would be swayed by lobbyists.
This in regards to the red plan.

After attending several council meetings there seemed to be the impression that a few councilors had had coffee with some red plan supporters.
Probably not in itself a bad thing, but did they ever extend that consideration to LDV?
Cuneo used their popular phrase “make a good plan into a great plan” when granting them every variance that came before the council.

They also hid behind their decisions stating that they were two separate government bodies and so could not interfere in district business.

But now the city is taking the lead on the disposal of Central!

BTW Councilor Sharla Gardner is misinformed. She said Duluth was the third largest Minnesota city in a story in the DNT today. Rochester took our place a couple years ago but I don’t blame her for living in the past.

Suddenly the City is all over Central High School

Friday, November 18th, 2011

A bitter emailer comments on the City’s plans for the Duluth School District’s excess property:

The city stood quietly by when the school district was changing the face of Duluth forever with the rationalization that they were two separate entities and so could not intrude on each other, so why now is the city taking the lead to find a use for Central?

Did they perhaps have hopes for some commercial use of this property and so did nothing when citizens asked for their help?

Are they taking a page from the JCI/Dixon play book and holding community meetings so they can turn around and say “you had your chance for input”?

Something I couldn’t write when my blog was down

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

I couldn’t have said it better than this letter writer did in the DNT:

This letter is about the property tax issue. I had to replace my siding last year because I had rain water running down inside my walls. As a reward for being a diligent homeowner, the city raised my property value by $12,000.

Then the state eliminated the homestead tax credit.

The School Board has no concept of reality. After forcing its expensive Red Plan on us taxpayers, every election year, it seems, it has the audacity to keep asking for more money on top of the huge budget the district already has. I pay for other people’s children to attend the most modern, state-of-the-art schools while I live in a shack I can barely afford.

Now the city wants us to pay more in property taxes for libraries and parks. Sure, new park equipment and branch libraries would be nice. But they are luxuries, not necessities, and not worth the $2.6 million in property tax increases. The main library won’t be closed, so people who are looking for a job can still use those computers or the computers at Job Services.

I haven’t had a pay raise in three years, and my health-care and pension costs have increased. I don’t have a cell phone, Internet, cable TV or newspaper. I avoid doing anything that costs money. I realize I am blessed to still have a job and a home. That does not mean I can afford to take on more of the burden for those who don’t.

With all the foreclosures, there are fewer of us to shoulder the tax burden for the rest. We homeowners have to say enough is enough. Please vote “no” to any property tax increase.

Carmelle La Tour

Duluth

Virgil’s swing…

Saturday, September 3rd, 2011

…is not a miss. Only his Budgeteer column is missing from the DNT’s online site. That’s too bad.

He points out that the public employee union is pushing hard for City Council candidates. Once seated the councilors will determine how much union members are paid. At a time of diminishing Government services this is troubling.

Coincidentally I got a call a week ago from a surveyer not identifying himself asking me if I had decided upon any city council candidates. When I identified the one I Considering the source the suggestion might have cost both candidates votes from our household.

Like Mr. Swing I have no use for Wisconsin Governor Walker’s heavy handedness. That doesn’t mean that public employee’s political power is not excessive. It is, and it will probably continue to cripple Duluth.

Happy Labor Day!

A City Council candidate against the Red Plan

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

And I almost didn’t read this:

All of us are going to be on welfare soon because of this Red Plan. You people who wanted this Red Plan: Open up your checkbooks and pay for it. You got took; now pay your dues.

Its too bad Mr. Newquist wasn’t on the Council a few years back.

As the Red Planners kept reminding us…

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

…our leaders were elected to make such decisions.

A short, sour and altogether honest assessment of some of our current City Fathers, several of whom are about to retire from the City Council:

It is quite interesting to read and hear our mayor and legislators complaining about threatened cuts to Local Government Aid, something they can’t vote on as its fate is in the hands of the Minnesota Legislature. Maybe now they have an idea how Duluthians felt when they were denied an opportunity to vote on the Red Plan — and the mayor and other elected leaders were silent.

Allen Willman
Duluth

From the Past

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

Sent to me by an email friend:

News Tribune

Feb. 23, 1971

* Members of the Duluth School Board were asked yesterday to support legislation to increase the state sales tax from 3 percent to 4 percent. The request came from Duluth Councilman Leo McDonnell, president of the League of Minnesota Municipalities, which is recommending the proposal.

* Duluth city and school officials agreed last night to delay construction of a pedestrian overpass on Central Entrance to serve the new Central High School. They decided more study is needed to determine whether it is the best solution.

This non plusses me too

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

In addition to Sunday liquor sales for Minnesota Senator Reinert will also introduce legislation to take the Aquarium monkey off the Duluth City Council’s back and put it on UMD’s back.

The Aquarium has soldiered along in part by competing against Duluth restaurants which host parties and receptions. It hasn’t exactly lived up to the initial hype as the world’s preeminent museum dedicated to telling the world about our Great Lakes. I think that getting UMD involved in the Aquarium is a good idea. I’m not sure that hiding the Aquarium’s shaky finances by transferring the responsibility for them to a state entity will improve the Aquarium. Maybe this transfer will help compensate Duluth for the loss of Local Governmental Aid.

I’ll bet that Roger’s former colleagues on the City Council would welcome this transfer if Roger should manage to accomplish it. It would be one less reminder of a City Council gamble that has yet to pay off.

Roger will apparently busy himself with minutia after unexpectedly finding himself in the State Senate’s minority after the DFL’s shellacking.

7 million (per year) short of a solution?

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

I don’t subscribe to the Star Trib but I received this bit of intelligence from that paper today in an email. Its a year old. Anyone who thinks our City’s municipal problems are a thing of the past ought to reconsider. I believe I read that the latest census will reveal that we have lost another 5,000 people since the 2000 Census. That will hike the tax burden on those of us remaining while the State prepares to dump Local Government Aid.

Between that and the Red Plan Duluth still has a few hard years ahead.

Here is an excerpt from Star Tribune, 1/2/2011, that isn’t available on-line. The story is about public pensions.

CHEAP TALK WON’T SOLVE CRISIS OF PENSIONS

First, elected officials from both parties often chose to hie the cost of these agreements from voters, often for decades. That’s how a $32 mill liability in Duluth in 1998 became more than $300 mil by 2009, raising the spectre of a potential bankruptcy filing.

Second, wages, pensions, and benefits are the result of collective bargaining. Ultimately, elected officials approved the contracts. Blame should be shared equally and any change will have to be negotiated mutually. Vilification is a standard negotiating tool, but not an effective opening gambit.

In Duluth, the city negotiated with the unions to end free retirement health care for anyone hired after 2007. It also negotiated the right to move all employees to a single health plan, and then did the same with retirees. Those changes have reduced the city’s projected shortfall from $350mil to $208 mil.

“It’s the difference betwee bankruptcy and solvency,” said Mayor Don Ness.

Ness is perhaps more optimistic than he should be. The accountants say the city needs to put aside about $17mil a year to meet current and future obligations, but the city can only afford about $10mil. The outlook worsens if health care costs rise faster than current projections, or if the MN Supreme Court overturns lower-court rulings that allowed the city to shift retirees into one plan.

About that JCI Steam Plant arbitration

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Everything seemed to be working out between JCI and the City of Duluth over the Steam Plant last April.

Since then the City Council nixed a plan to sell the plant and I’m just about positive I heard within the last couple weeks the arbitration between JCI and the City fell through. I can’t find any reference to this on the web pages of the Trib or the local TV stations. If so, its just one more blot on the company that NE Minnesota will have to live with.

“…space doesn’t cost anything”

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

One benefit of my blog is that folks to take the trouble to look up my email send me interesting information. (You can find it by clicking the “Talk Back” link at the top of the list to your right) A couple years back a very interesting commentator on Brandon Stahl’s blog emailed me and we keep up an occasional correspondence. He just sent me this longish email and I found it very interesting. The quote I’ve used in the heading refers to a phony claim by politicians and bureaucrats that keeping videos of public meetings available on line would be expensive.

I was tempted to run for county board here because NO ONE apparently has filed against a 15-year incumbent. I would have no chance of getting more than 25%, if even that, so it’s throwing away a $50 bill on the filing fee.

Another county board astronaut who takes up space has no opposition either.

The issue here regarding the county board has been their self-appointed salary increases. Two big increases a few years ago. One was 20% then a few years later another 25%. Just last week they are planning a 2% increase. Ramsey County is a charter county (I’m on the charter commission) and the charter stipulates that any pay increases they give themselves have to be done before July 1, to let the voters have a “referendum” of their own in that fall’s elections by voting the rascals out.

They never do. All of them have been on the board for years and now their salaries are approaching $90,000 a year. Each of them gets an assistant, or chief of staff, whatever you want to call it at a salary in the $50k range and of course there’s all those benefits . . . (more…)

Stuff in the Trib today

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Rather than separate posts I’ll just make quick comments on several of the stories in today’s Trib.

I made the front page headlines and Roger Reinert only made the back pages. My name was singled out along with four other semi-controversial names as candidates who have filed. The others were Tim Little a city councilor who lost a pissing contest with the Trib, Jay Cole a wheeler dealer with no cards and Carinda Horton who the Chamber probably got fired from her KDAL talk show program when she got too vocal in criticizing the Red Plan on air. (Carinda’s husband, Tim, likes to get into public rows too outside the boxing ring where he is better equipped to throw punches)

The message I get from this is that those of us not properly anointed as serious by the Trib will have a little bigger credibility hill to climb. Trib reporter, John Myers mentioned (quite rightly) the fact that I’ve run for office many times before. Ah, but then there’s the counter balancing effect of experience.

Roger was sort of mentioned on the front page. At the top of the front page there was a little graphic of a train with little boxcars filled with passengers. One lonely little boxcar, however, stood empty. You have to go to page A9 to discover that it should have been occupied by Roger Reinert.

Roger has only lost one race for public office. I’ve lost quite a few more than that. (I hope you don’t mind my being coy and not announcing the number) On the other hand I think we have both won two elections. That evens things up a bit. I’ll take today’s paper as giving me a slight edge in day two of our contest.

The County Board approved a half million sale of tax forfeit land to the School District to build the new Wheeler Middle School. Some voices are calling for the District to save the $45 million on the school and simply keep New Central as the middle school.

This reminds me of something a Faribault Chamber official told me in defense of Dixon’s days in that city. (more…)

and these guys are hoping Google will save us

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Among the congratulations in my email in box this morning was a note from a former Duluthian who began reading my blog years ago to keep up with the news from his old home town. He writes:

I noticed that you filed for the Solon seat against Reinert in the primary. I’m trying to figure out where these people like Reinert and
Gauthier, et.al. come from out of nowhere to be The Big Cheese.

$250,000 spent on the city council chambers, according to the DNT recently. My sources at PACT say they stopped spending money when it
got to the television booth. They stupidly did not put in a computer- based system like everyone else is doing. No more DVD recording at a
low bitrate of 1.5. The recording should go right to a hard drive…. the entire PACT channel(s) should be sent out via computers. Cripe,
talk about dumb. This is about the same as buying a brand new Cadillac but putting retread tires on it.

I follow the Duluth political news fairly closely – am always entertained, amused, or teed off.

Pre-emtive editorializing

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

There’s a reason I dedicated the previous post to the Editors of the Trib. Today, once again, the Trib’s editors are lobbying the City Council on behalf of the Red Plan. The School District’s “compromises” which are now Placing an elephant instead of a dinosaur on the tiny Ordean site have led some Ordean neighbors to complain about the now routine variances being granted or requested to shoe horn the building on the site.

“Not again” is the Trib’s call. Neighborhood complaints are “gripes.” It will be just a matter of time before the Trib withdraws its Primary endorsement of Tom Kasper and labels him a “NIMBY” like Mr. McGuire did in his Sunday letter to the editor. Why golly, the School Board made serious compromises to accommodate the fears of the neighborhood.

It won’t take much to assure that Duluth’s compliant City Councilors approves JCI’s (I mean the School Board’s) every wish. I’m pretty sure that the editorial was unnecessary but its always helpful for with finger-in-the-air politicians to know what direction the local paper’s hot air is blowing.

My report of his death was greatly exaggerated

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I jumped to a big and erroneous conclusion. The vague story about a dead body at Mr. Gradisher’s home sure sounded like a suicide to me. Nope, its just more bad news for him but the fatality was not his.

Sorry about that. All that eloquence of mine about the perils of public exposure was simply wasted. I should stick to the Red Plan.

Living – not spouting – platitudes

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

On Wednesday, August 19th, from 5:00 – 7:00 City Councilor Jim Stauber will be holding a fundraiser at Grandma’s Sports Garden.

I’m pretty disenchanted with newbie no nothings who only have platitudes to hide behind when tough decisions need to be made. It would be a shame if Jim wasn’t reelected.

Let’s make a deal

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Today’s Trib story about Mark Winson had a headline which claimed that the City’s former top administrator mad a deal that “cost the city millions.”

How much did it cost Duluth? Most readers will be drawn to his sentence:

“The contracts approved in 2004 appear to have added to the city’s unfunded health-care liability. In 2002, an audit conducted by a Minneapolis-based accounting firm put the unfunded health-care liability at$178.5 million. By January 2005 the liability was at $279 million. By 2006, the liability had swollen to $300 million.”

Because I’m grappling with the cost of the Red Plan, another $300 million liability, I have been very curious about the City government’s fiscal dilemma. I figured there was more to the story and Brandon Stahl, the story’s author, has an interesting blog which I consulted. Sure enough he has an entry giving a little backstory on this deal.

Buzz Blog

In it Brandon explains that he began covering City government about the time these negotiations were taking place and that he had not fully grasped everything that was going on. I certainly recall some frustration in 03 trying to make heads and tails of the City’s problems. The final line of Brandon’s blog post caught my attention:

“It seems to me that what he did (with approval by then mayor Bergson and the city council) was make a short-term sacrifice– giving employees plan 4 — for a long-term gain that eventually led to getting employees off of retiree health care.”

If the deal cost Duluth over $100 million as a “short term sacrifice” I wondered what the trade off was that might have made this sacrifice justifiable. I called Brandon to ask him if he knew whether any actuaries had calculated the benefit of making the sacrifice. If so, it could certainly go a long way to making Winson’s “deal” look good instead of stupid and would obligate Brandon to do a follow up story.

Brandon took my question seriously but suggested he might wait a couple days for Winson to “cool off” before pursuing it.

So, I called up Winson myself, first at City Hall. I was premature. Mark is still wrapping things up at Lake Superior State.
After I tracked him down Mark gave me a few minutes of his time. If he was exasperated with Brandon he didn’t betray it.

I asked him if there were any actuarys involved in evaluating the tradeoff for reducing the number of health insurance plans from 124 to just a few. No there weren’t but Mark said he did a little calculating on the back of napkins – that’s not quite how he put it – to assure himself Duluth would be better off.

He reminded me that at the time new accounting standards were being forced on all local governments under something called GASBY. It would take up too much space to explain this but check the link for more info. Basically, these were sensible new accounting standards that required government to calculate their future financial obligations or debts. We were wrestling with this on the Duluth School Board at the same time.

The City had negotiated itself into a considerable hole over health insurance and Winson had to navigate the City out of the hole. Whether or not it made sense to incurr additional future debts by simplifying the insurance won’t be known for some years but Winson is confident that it will be an improvement. We are going from an era of “defined benefits” (that can rocket up) to “defined contributions” which puts a serious leash on the future expenses. The City’s new hires will no longer be flying on this rocket.

Winson made two other points which he would be in a better position to know than I would. First, the insistance that the City’s other unions could force AFSCME (Duluth City Government’s main union) to surrender some of their health care benefits was not politically possible even if it would have been desirable. Second, That even if all the employees had retired under another health insurance plan instead of Plan 4, there would still have been a cost. Say that this cost is $100 million whereas the City’s ideal cost under a different hypothetical plan would have been $80 million. Considering this the cost to the city wouldn’t have been the $100 million that the story suggests but the difference between the two plans or – $20 million. I’m a lousy mathemetician and no actuary but I can imagine that what the City eventually got as I’ve described it was a big plus rather than a minus.

The historian in me is glad that the once wet-behind-the-ears Brandon Stahl is getting a do-over on his coverage of the health care crises of 2003. (Much as I hope the Trib’s education reporter gets a chance to reevaluate her coverage of the Red Plan’s early stirrings) Now I hope there is a follow-up story so that the Trib’s dwindling but loyal readership gets a clearer idea about whether the Winson deal of 2003 was a net loss or a net gain.

Doty misses the point

Monday, September 15th, 2008

In his recent column Ralph Doty makes some interesting and valuable comments about the Duluth Area’s property taxes. I have good reason for irritation with Doty on an old score but I appreciate anyone who can wade through the murk to point out useful information.

I found this observation particularly interesting.

“City councilor Todd Fedora recently told a radio audience that tax receipts from Duluth’s property tax levy were $13.5 million in 2007. But — here’s the rub — the city’s total health costs for current and retired employees was $17.4 million.

If the city wasn’t’t taking in a lot of money from its sales tax, it would have been bankrupt a long time ago.”

But on one score Doty is completely wrong.

“While the city of Duluth struggles with its deficit and the school district continues to cut important services to students, St. Louis County blithely goes about the business of funding projects and services the city can only dream about — and increasing property taxes every year to pay the bills.

Anger over city property taxes seems to be misplaced: The county’s share of a property tax dollar is 63 cents, while the city gets 22 cents and the school district receives even less at 11 cents.”

While Doty is right to point out the size of property taxes imposed by St. Louis County he too easily dismisses the tax increases of the School Board. Yes, the Schools consume far less property tax but the School District has a bigger budget than the City of Duluth. The schools property taxes are low because the State has made it a point to keep them low because of the relative importance of public education and its determination not to give poor kids and poor communities inferior K-12 schools. The State legislature didn’t anticipate that School Districts like Duluth would use the state’s school tax relief as cover to gouge taxpayers. If every school district in the state did what Duluth was doing the state would intervene in a heartbeat to prevent the state from going into bankruptcy.

When the District’s rates went down it made the schools share of the total property taxes look much more reasonable relative to the City or County. But to reinterate, The school district’s budget is bigger than the cities. Furthermore, the Red Plan will double the School’s property taxes in a few years while the County is increasing its tax rate by 5%. That’s nothing compared to last years school property tax increase of 56%.

Dismissing this monstrous increase by comparing the School District with the City and County is a lousy way to justify the Red Plan.