Bass Pro ‘shocked’ by new Proctor store claim
July 27, 2012 at 7:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
The revelation this week that Bass Pro Shop was the mystery “big-box retailer” looking to open a store along Interstate 35 in Proctor came as a surprise to the national sporting goods chain.
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If the News Tribune could figure out with one phone call that Bass Pro Shops has no plans to come to Proctor, couldn’t the city of Proctor have figured it out sometime over the past 6 months? Don’t you think the mayor or someone at some point would’ve given a call to the corporate office to check and make sure the business was actually interested in building here, instead of just going on the word of some guy who has financial interests in the site? Seriously, how stupid.
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Looks like someone was full of it. Who knows what the motives were. Maybe try to create hype so the developer gets a sweet deal. I guess we were all duped.
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I am absolutely shocked, nay, FLABBERGASTED, that a businessman would sink so low as to try to create interest in the property by deceit, for we all know that businessmen are the most honest, moral and ethical of all peoples on the earth, an overflowing cup filled with the very cream of human goodness. Or not.
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Did you say businessmen/women take lessons from POLITICIANS?
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They’re both the same kind of animal so I wouldn’t doubt it. They are both out to make money on the backs of everyone else.
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Having seen this before, I am not surprised. I have watched city officials work for months or years spending oodles of taxpayer dollars for supposed “developers”. They will extend utilities, build roads, clear and grade land, give tax breaks, grants and cash money to any huckster with a briefcase. The most common business model in the U.S. is to extract as much as you can out of the public, whether by contracts alone or taxpayer subsidies; whenever I hear “free market” and “jobs” I immediately want to start hiding my wallet, as I know someone is about to stick their enormous snout into the public trough. Look at the empty acreage alone in “business parks”. I watched one city prepare to spend over a hundred thousand on wetland credits alone for a supposed realtor/developer who had nothing more than a website offering “already developed prime locations”, when he was actually working that and other cities to prepare sites and extend utilities and had nothing else. Nothing. I discovered this with a simple half-hour internet search and a little skepticism. This is similar; they wanted the city to subsidize all the infrastructure so they could shop it around as an already prepared location. This is the oldest American tradition and any objective look at U.S. history shows this, with its best example as the great land giveaways to colonial speculators (which probably drove more of the revolutionary war than any demand for the concept of freedom) and to the railroad companies for extending railroads. The same is true now, whether extending utilities and roads for strip development or the giveaways for “mining development”.
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I have to agree that it sounds as the unidentified third party was hoping to develop this chunk of land at taxpayer expense, and then turn around and sell it to make a tidy little profit.
Excuse the pun, but it looks as though Proctor bought the scam hook, line and sinker. . .
Perhaps Proctor City Officials should thank Midway Township and Duluth for saving them from wasting taxpayer dollars on what could have easily become Proctor’s “tech Village”
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Wow! I told you so! The Proctor City Council, Proctor Mayor, and Seth Oliver are all liars.
The only reason you don’t reveal who is going to develop is that you don’t have anyone to develop!
Go eat crow Randall Flagg!!!
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Mr. Dark Knight, you called it!
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I would expect nothing less of Seth Oliver, also, when they were interviewing the Mayor the other day he kep refering to it as “Pro Bass”, not a real good sales approach.
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By applying the “pants on fire” theory and looking for traces of eggs on the faces of the involved parties, we should be able to determine the identity of this mysterious third party.
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Kind of surprised Randy hasn’t been on yet telling us all about that horrible galvanizing Midway Town board…. Maybe Dark and I saw something that no one else would look for.
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Art, this doesn’t change anything about the point that I’ve been making all along. UNDER CURRENT LAW, the landowner can request that Proctor annex his land. It doesn’t matter what his reason is, they don’t require any reason whatsoever. The law doesn’t say, “If you have a deal with a Big-Box store.” Proctor will still get the land and Midway will still be out the court costs. If you put aside the personal and look at the facts you might understand what I’ve been trying to say.
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Randall, in a previous post on another thread related to this same topic, you were very vocal in your criticism of Midway Twsp for “wasting” taxpayer money by appealing this annexation. Who was wasting money when Proctor agreed to pursue the annexation without doing their due diligence regarding the integrity of the Oliver’s. You are correct….THE LAW allows the Oliver’s to “ask” Proctor to annex this parcel. That doesn’t mean Proctor has to agree to do it….. I still say that the Oliver’s and Proctor are the ones now coming away looking very bad in this debacle, after Midway took a tremendous amount of PR heat from boards and public forums like this.
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Yes, IF this story is true it does make Oliver and Proctor look bad. I really don’t understand why Oliver would cook up a story when he didn’t have to. And if it wasn’t true and Proctor didn’t follow up on it that doesn’t make them look very smart either. But Midway is still spending money on a losing battle. You say “the landowner had the right but Proctor didn’t have to go along with it.” Why in the world wouldn’t they go along with it? Proctor is gaining a nice piece of propertly along the I-35 corridor to add to their tax base. It wouldn’t have cost them anything if Midway and Duluth didn’t challenge it. I would say they are coming out ahead regardless of how they look.
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So, Randall, if the guys who owns the Dry Dock Bar and Restaurant, and the guy who owns the Grandview Golf Course….2 commercial properties located in Midway Township…don’t like the taxes they have to pay to Midway, or don’t like the snowplowing that Midway provides, are you saying it is okay for them to go to Proctor and ask Proctor to annex them? What century do you live in?? the 12th?? What Oliver did appears to be an incredibly unethical, possibly deceitful move, but I don’t know the facts, so I will only speculate. What Proctor did was equally as unethical as a neighboring municipality. Todays’ governments, believe it or not, should be built on the spirit of development cooperation, not anarchistic bullying. Legal or not, it was a bad ignorant move.
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So, Randall, if the guys who owns the Dry Dock Bar and Restaurant, and the guy who owns the Grandview Golf Course….2 commercial properties located in Midway Township…don’t like the taxes they have to pay to Midway, or don’t like the snowplowing that Midway provides, are you saying it is okay for them to go to Proctor and ask Proctor to annex them?
No, this would not be okay because as far as I know those properties don’t abut the City of Proctor, which is a requirement of the law.
I think this whole debate illustrates a big part of what is wrong with our country today. There is an old saying that you don’t mix business and personal. Everyone from Congress down to local and city government want to make everything personal. You want to reduce the deficit? Sorry, we can’t let the Republicans win, we will look bad. You want to fund programs for the poor? Sorry, we can’t let the Democrats win, we will look bad. The result of this is that nothing gets done.
This entire situation was a BUSINESS decision by the landowner and everyone wants to make it personal. Oliver is “deceiving” everyone, Proctor is being “mean” to Midway, Midway will show Proctor by tying it up in litigation, etc. etc. etc.
Meanwhile, there is a landowner who wants to make his property more attractive to lure a buyer. He has every right to do that under the law.
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Randall….Shouldn’t the landowner be up front with everyone? You would think its another area 51 with all the secrecy surrounding this project. It would be great to develop the property…..but I’ve seen many projects where the taxpayers take a hit because everyone gets caught up in the hype. The developers try to turn public opinion twards government to get approval on a deal. The developers or industry makes a promise on jobs or the impact of development…..that never quite pan out.
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All good points John but I don’t know how relevant they are. Should he have been up front? Yes, perhaps he should have but it wouldn’t have changed anything. Proctor would have still said okay and Midway would have fought it. Proctor is still moving ahead with the annexation even with the latest developments. That’s the crazy thing about all of this, he never had to cook up a story and the end result would have been the same. That’s what makes me think there could be more to this story.
As far as taxpayer dollars I’m not sure I follow you there. When the annexation goes through I’m assuming that he will have to pay for the extension of the utilities just like the rest of us would.
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This might go down as one of the funniest “stories” of the year. You can’t make this stuff up.
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Maybe they’re really the mystery tenant at the new office building downtown.
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I heard they were replacing congdon’s hockey shack.
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Why would Bass Pro go through two developers to deal with Proctor/Midway? Does this mystery developer even exist?
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Also…who knows if this is Bass Pro just playing games to throw Cabela’s off. I mean they are both in competition…Cabela’s was talking about building in the Cloquet/Esko area. But that never materialized. It would be interesting to know the entire story.
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And you wonder why some if us took Midway Townships side in thus matter, since they were never directly contacted. Well there you go.
Annexation by deceit. Congrats.
What a world we live in today where a mans word or handshake means nothing. And then we blame it all on scuzzy lawyers…..forgetting that if we acted with any honor to begin with, we wouldn’t even need them.
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By the logic used in this annexation, perhaps Duluth should annex all of Proctor to save them from themselves.
Then plow under that good ole boys town.
Honestly why not? What would the casualties be? A giant trailer park, a couple of redneck bars, and nightly fights between 5 guys a with a total of ten teeth.
There are some nice people in Proctor, but Proctor itself is a disgrace.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Actually, the Trailer Park is in Duluth Nate Dog. I’ve lived in Proctor for 9 years and met some of the nicest people I’ve ever been around. Great families and great kids. And they have all of their teeth too. I think you’ve got plenty of problems to worry about in Duluth before you start throwing stones at Proctor.
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OK, let’s see here…someone is leveraging a hollow storyline, and it involves at least one developer we know about. DNT, I challenge you to perform a little journalistic investigative follow-up here and make that guy Oliver tell the entire story. He and his firm have some cards to play – this potentially involved public policy/money – DNT you could put together a Pulitzer-worthy series if someone had the ambition to do so.
What say ye? Lots of folks like me would love to know the entire storyline here…
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I hope the DNT does follow up on this story. It’s as if they called the developers bluff and he didn’t have any cards to play. If you read between the lines in the article today…hard to believe Bass Pro didn’t have anything to do with this. On the other hand… I would be naming names if I were Oliver. If I had that much egg on my face I would be talking.
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Whooops!
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I think the Proctor City Council, Proctor Mayor, and Seth Oliver owe an apology to Midway Township. Also, the whole reason this annexation was made was the fact that Oliver had a developer set up, and that he needed Proctor for the commercial infrastructure. Now that we all know it was a lie and a hoax, the annexation should be void and the land should be returned to Midway Township.
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That’s not true Dark. He could ask Proctor to annex his land even if he wanted to put a Kool-Aid stand on it. The law doesn’t require him to give any reason. Maybe he was trying to dupe Proctor into going along with it, who knows? There could be more this story than any of us know.
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There was obviously much more to the story than you knew. I’ll be sure to take what you say with a grain of salt.
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Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black? You’ve been spewing your ridiculous left-wing opinions on this site for years Dark. None of which have ever been based in fact I might add.
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LOL! Jeff, you’ve obviously not been paying attention. Either you haven’t been reading what I’ve wrote, or you don’t know the difference from right and left. I don’t think anyone on this forum would call me “left”. I’ll take what you say with a grain of salt, too.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_politics
Here you go, Jeff. I know…it can be confusing.
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You’ve been advocating for weeks that the Governnment should be able to control what a private property owner does with his land. Sounds pretty liberal to me. I bet if you had your way the Government would own all of the land, eh? They tried that in the USSR and it didn’t work, but maybe you could move there and try to get it going again.
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Ahhh Jeff. It’s pretty obvious you have absolutely no knowledge of this situation or my opinions. This has nothing to do with government vs individuals, but city government vs township government. But I think I’ll have the same problem explaining the difference as I had explaining the difference between left and right wing politics. Good luck learning the ways of the world!
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Dark, I have knowledge of your opinions, and although not extreme in any political viewpoint – they usually don’t make much sense.
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Good to see you sticking your nose in where it is unwanted, Josiah. Glad you are able to argue about something on this forum.
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“Dark, I have knowledge of your opinions, and although not extreme in any political viewpoint – they usually don’t make much sense.”
LOL, couldn’t have said it better myself.
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Trying to claim the trailer park is in Duluth not Proctor, is like trying to claim the Casino is on the Fon du Lac reservation and not in Duluth.
Factually accurate, but everyone knows the real truth.
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What’s your point Nathan? Duluth has several trailer parks, Proctor has none. And that’s a fact. A factually accurate fact in fact.
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My question is: What does the location of the Zenith Terrace Mobile Home Park have to do with the topic at hand?
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