Viewpoint: Charter movement reflects engaged citizens
February 10, 2012 at 2:00 am in South Washington County Bulletin
Embracing more citizen involvement in city government may not be the end of the world and in fact, may be an enlightening and rewarding experience for all. Continue Reading
I don’t disagree with you that you have the right to see the city documents, but what I don’t understand is why you want to see them. Are you thinking the city is doing something fraudulent? If so, wouldn’t you want to get law enforcement involved? Just trying to understand your goal for reviewing all of the documents.
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All forms of government spending should be transparent and available to any citizen that simply wants to know what the government is spending their tax dollars on. Is that notion an abnormal concept? It isn’t a liberal or conservative concept, it’s simply common sense. This will be interesting to see how this charter issue pans out.
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Any time any form of government makes getting documents difficult it raises suspicion. If the city made it easier, then there would be less suspicion of our city.
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I find it very interesting that Mr. Moe and Mr. Lehrke are so quick to ask for transparency of the city and yet want to rush the verification of signatures of their petition. I know of at least one person whom was lied to about what the petition stood for, and she knew better so she didn’t sign it. I wonder what the other people were told to get them to sign it.
How did the city ever run for so many years without every check being reviewed by citizens.
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with all due respect Annie, couldn’t your friend read? The lead paragraph on the petition looks like it says what it’s supposed to as far as explaining what it’s all about.
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She was told the city was going to close the Park & Ride, which she knows isn’t true because the city isn’t in charge of the Park & Ride. And I’d bet most people didn’t read it before they signed it. I know it doesn’t matter because the commission is going to happen. I just wonder how honest the people were when they collected the signatures.
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according to past articles they (whoever “they” are) preferred to have the train station (red rock) for Cottage Grove at the Langdon site and they mentioned having the Park & Ride there also.
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That’s not how it was presented to her, and the city doesn’t make those decisions. The park and ride location has nothing to do with the charter commission. My point is that I’m wondering how many other topics were misrepresented to inspire people to sign the petition. As I said earlier, the process is going forward so it’s a moot point.
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Not taking sides here, but the city budget and expenditures are public information and are very easy to find and also to make a request for copies (which comes with a small copying fee). The information is also easy to understand. What has made it difficult is the misinformation and some people saying the city is lying about their numbers. This comes down to the new government building and the fact that it was a bidding process, which means the numbers weren’t going to be transparent because they were moving – which happens during a bidding process. The city set an amount for a ceiling and publicized it (which I don’t agree with), and stuck to that as being the ceiling for costs. After that, there were numbers flying all over the place, but the expenditure estimates were all on record, were discussed openly, etc. I have no problem with this charter process, but it should be for the right reasons and not just because a group is angry that things didn’t go their way. If this is a democratic process, then we will know in November how the larger population of CG really feels about what happened with the public safety building. In the meantime though, the Bulletin has fallen down in their reporting by not giving examples of the other cities that are run through a charter instead of federal, state and county statute. How have these cities operated? How have they fared through the recession? Are any of them even close to the size of CG? To me, those are constructive questions that will inform instead of this he said/she said public bickering crap.
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