December 19th City Council Meeting

The City Council will be discussing a few items of note at the December 19th meeting. We may be able to discuss a few settlement offers on the Eminent Domain taking, 2007 Budget and Tax Levy and the two new planned rail signal arms planned for Isanti Parkway and South Passage.

The city will hopefully have most if not all negotiated settlements to the disastrous takings of private land for the east 65 development. I voted against this last year and have felt strongly that any use of eminent domain to take private property rights would have to pass a very high bar of public necessity making it virtually impossible. The situation in this case did not come anywhere near that bar. I hope we can put this sad chapter behind us as a City and never go down that road again.

I have written and spoken quite a lot about the failures of this current budget and levy. I will be voting against the increase spending in the budget and the lack luster property tax reduction of just over 3%. I had proposed a 12% reduction with several needed spending cuts. I will work in 2007 to limit any excess spending and try to rein in extra cost.

Isanti Parkway will be receiving a crossing arm at the railroad tracks in 2008 and South Passage will be receiving its control arm in 2009. This is a long process because the majority of the money is from MnDot with smaller matching funds from the City. These control arms will help improve safety at these critical rail crossings.