I crawled out of the basement after spending another five hours of data entry. I made a lot of corrections. Its a shame I didn’t have this complete data completed a year ago. Unfortunately by then Let Duluth Vote was losing steam, candidates I supported didn’t want my help, and I was tied up in the Courts.
I found a sick wife upstairs and pages and pages of copy paper all over the floor. I had engaged the print function from the basement to print out my updated data base. Unfortunately, I hadn’t opened up the cradle that would have caught the paper before thousands of pro vote supports names spilled onto my floor.
We went to an out patient clinic to have Claudia checked out and sent a text warning our grandchildren to stay away from us tonight lest they catch whatever their Grandmother has.
I’ve got a back log of posts to write but I’ll make this observation that I’ve been chewing on about what our School Board unleashed.
I’ve pointed out that the Red Plan is over three times more expensive than the huge building plan that voters turned down in 1989. The School Board has taken some attorneys advice that they could proceed without a vote because Duluth is a City of the First Class. That status was set up decades ago to give Duluth a better chance to get state aid. How ironic.
Duluth had 100,000 when it was first designated a First Class City. Minnesota had a population of about 2.5 million. We were about 4 percent of the State’s population and being first class let us get more money from the state.
Today we have about 85,000 people and Minnesota has doubled in population to about 5 million. That means that Duluth is now 1.7 percent of the state’s population.
Now that we have a much smaller share of Minnesota’s population it is Duluth that is carrying the state’s economy on its back. Instead of getting state funding for being a first class city that status has allowed contractors from all over Minnesota to draw from our local spending to build schools Duluth never got to vote on.
I would like to know how many local laborers are part of the Red Plan construction. One laborer I know told me that he was the only local laborer out of sixteen men working on one Ordean project. The old folks of Duluth are now paying a heavy price to keep a lot of outside contractors employed.
Its an honor to be a second class citizen in a first class city today.
