Let's Tell the Met Council What We Think
The unelected behemoth Met Council wants to know what we think. They have created a kind of comments site to make suggestions for Met Council initiatives and vote on your fellow citizens’ ideas. I think we should accommodate them. Let me explain a little more. From Minnpost:
“Only a couple weeks ago, the Council established a website, a kind of Wiki, if you will, where you can answer the question "What does the Twin Cities Region Need to Thrive?"
The purpose of this exercise says Met Council Chair Susan Haigh, is "to work together as one region to build 21st century regional infrastructure to produce robust local communities, support job growth, and connect people to their workplaces, schools, activities, and the places they call home. To do that, we need participation from as many residents as possible.”
That isn’t the real reason of course. The Met Council wouldn’t give two wooden nickels for the opinion of the average Minnesota metro resident. This is a sham process called “visioning” which is really just giving people a place to pretend they are making a difference. What they really want to do is this:
“In a 2001 study of a "visioning" process (in meetings, not online) in Lexington, Ky., Eugene McCann found that while the initial collection of ideas was an open process, the winnowing and refining were done in secret. The final recommendations, he wrote, "produced a vision of the future largely paralleled to standard economic development models" already endorsed by "local elites."
After all the public comments and buzz, they can then sell their own progressive schemes with the argument the public wanted it. They got feedback and everybody wants the Met Council to tell them how to live. At least, that will be how they use this nonsense.
I went to the website and looked around and the suggestions are the usual ones leftists come up with. One is to eliminate as much local government as possible. Those pesky democratic institutions are getting in the way. Someone also wants to stop “urban sprawl” with this:
“We must reign in the sprawl that is costing our region billions of dollars. Implement a Portland-style urban growth boundary and enforce it by refusing to fund sewer and transportation (sic) investment beyond it. While this may result in "leapfrog" development somewhere beyond the boundary, the cost of a longer commute would tend to attenuate the problem. This idea would need some support from MnDOT to limit freeway growth near the boundary.”
I decided to give them a conservative perspective with this:
“It's absurd for us to continue building light rail lines that require enormous cash outlays to develop and yearly subsidies to keep them running. There is zero growth occurring on the lines built, they run deficits every year, and they aren't helping transit get any better in the region. This 19th Century technology should not be the basis for our transportation system. It's a huge drain on budgets that will only prove to eventually bankrupt us as an economic power. It doesn't matter how many trains there are in Europe, it doesn't change the fact our topography and socio-economic culture is vastly different than those failed models. We need to throw this idea out with our copies of Das Kapital.” I titled it “Unsustainable Choo Choo Trains.” No doubt a progressive somewhere is screaming like a banshee.
Go to the site and give them your perspective. We cannot let the progressive/socialist activists have free rein over this. And, we can have a little fun in the process. Maybe even raise Susan Haigh’s blood pressure a little. Just a little.