{"id":2688,"date":"2009-10-26T08:17:23","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T13:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=2688"},"modified":"2009-10-26T08:18:17","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T13:18:17","slug":"im-not-a-chick-but-youre-a-nimby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=2688","title":{"rendered":"I’m not a chick but you’re a NIMBY!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nancy Nilsen begins her defensive column <\/a>in today’s Trib by saying she’s not a “chick.” That’s what Mike Jaros called the four school board members running for reelection in his own column a short time ago. <\/p>\n

It was the only thing in Mike’s column that raised my eyebrows. He’d used that line with me a month earlier and I got a kick out of it. Still, what’s said in a private conversation is usually a lot more bold than what’s put in print under your own name and circulated to thousands of readers.<\/p>\n

I can assure Mike that he will suffer some slings and arrows for his candor but his turn of phrase will only make Mike more popular with the folks who count – the voters. The more Nancy and others complain about it the more most voters will smile to themselves and think to themselves, “I wish I’d said that.”<\/p>\n

Mike can afford to be candid because he’s no longer has to worry about offending voters. For Mike the phrase “Dixon Chicks” is a fairly gentle way to express the contempt he feels for the process that brought us the Red Plan. The phrase is much more a comment on the surrender of the school board’s common sense to a charismatic Superintendent far more than it is a comment on their gender. <\/p>\n

The moral high ground which Nancy attempts to scale crumbles when she dismisses Tom Kasper as a “NIMBY.” Name-calling is name-calling.<\/p>\n

But is Tom a NIMBY? Tom and a great many of his neighbors began lobbying the Board to look for alternatives a year ago when they began to realized what the Red Plan had in store for their neighborhood. Later they had misgivings about the educational consequences of cramming 1600 people into a postage stamp and then the safety and environmental consequences. They discovered the limitations of the much lauded JCI planning sessions that, unlike a referendum, involved not much more than 5% of the Duluth population. It was the process of negotiating with a School Board that wore blinders and wielded a truncheon that led to Tom’s filing as a candidate.<\/p>\n

The juggernaut that has shouldered Tom and his neighbors aside has been fueled by the prospect a fast buck made at the expense of our children’s safety, a neighborhood quality of life and the educational quality of the Duluth Schools. If that’s what a NIMBY is we need a lot more of them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nancy Nilsen begins her defensive column in today’s Trib by saying she’s not a “chick.” That’s what Mike Jaros called the four school board…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-red-plan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}