Operation Sealion (4 May 2008)

We will be talking about the pending land-grab as Northfield seeks to obtain more lebensraum from the peaceful farming communities to the west. All of this will be a continuation of our last meeting, as we track the hot topic events here in Northfield. We may ask the hard questions, we may reach the hard conclusions, but we’ll not be deterred by the difficulties nor intimidated by the answers. Bring your maps, bring your thoughts and we’ll take a snapshot of the local thoughts. Let’s see what develops, at the next Politics and a Pint.

Well, we had an interesting talk, the image at the left is the white board where I kept notes. Click for a full size image.

The consensus was consistent with last week, when we concluded that the city is suffering from a serious lack of transparency in its dealings, perhaps not from malice, but more likely from just being overwhelmed by events. There seems to be a lot of time being spent following a process that is not well understood up front, and that therefore gives us a bad case of “what just happened?”

More details (as seen in the photo and supplemented by my notes:

    Pro (n=8)

    • Tax base. We are unashamedly in favor of more industrial and commercial because
      • they pay more than they consume in public services
      • housing uses more than it pays for, and needs the supplementing from the other sector(s).
    • Not a hostile takeover. Right now there are landowners (3) and developers (2) who are willing to be annexed.
      • the landowners may pay a slightly lower tax in the city as ag.
      • they will be just that much closer to being “shovel ready” (more later on that)
    • Why 530 acres? We heard that light industrial (in particular) is very much concerned that they be part of a good chunk of land so that noise, dust, trucks coming in and out won’t be a problem for housing nearby. The fact that 100+ acres might be undevelopable wetland is not a problem since even undeveloped wetlands help provide a buffer.
    • Excess housing. We may have overbuilt in the housing department (where are the figures on that question?)
    • Get control now. The city can better control what happens there if it is already in the city.

    Con (n=1)

    • Process. What happened here? Who was on first? We are still disappointed with the inability of staffs to keep the public informed on the state of the process. Where is the 30,000′ view?
      • There is no assurance that the city can maintain control.

        A key comment by Ray Cox was that rezoning the land has the implicit promise of support (sewer, power, fire). This means that annexing the land as ag is essentially free, but later rezoning is where the true accounting for strain on infrastructure becomes an issue.

      • Northfield is a bad place for Light Industrial? Well, there were comments that Northfield does not have:
        • a good source of blue collar workers.
          They cannot afford to live here.
        • a good IT infrastructure (for example)That is more easily fixed if an industry with deep pockets wants to come here, e.g., data storage facilities.
        • a high tech workforce. The education system in Northfield seems to not value the tech worker directly, so we do not grow them locally. This, coupled with (believe it or not) the lack of a good nightlife which makes it hard to entice them to move here, means that we have difficulty drawing in those workers.
      • Loss of ag land. Little thought was given to this, I guess we can always eat Brazilian soy beans. But realistically, without a good target for the proportions …
        commercial:industrial:housing:farming
        how can we tell if we even need the land?

Our conclusions:

  • the current planning commission may be the best we have had in years.
  • the current process needs clarity and transparency
  • the annexation should proceed (8 to 1 in a role-playing poll, not a straw poll)

References:

References:

    Legal details (in appropriately tiny font):

    What: Politics and a Pint
    Where: The Contented Cow
    When: Sunday, 4 May 2008, 6-7:30PM

Author: BruceWMorlan

Mathematician and writer-philosopher.