Council refuses to rezone St. Croix Meadows for a school site
September 18, 2012 at 3:48 am in Hudson Star-Observer
The Hudson School District’s petition to rezone the vacant St. Croix Meadows dog track for use as a secondary school site was denied 5-1 by the City Council on Monday night. Continue Reading
Randy …..really the council refused…how about the council after a year came to a decision. Let’s start being unbiased in our reporting style.
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Where was the headline one year ago….” School district charges to referendum for 130 acres of commerical land not zoned for public use”. Where was the fascination then? Of course, that courageous decision took place in a closed session meeting and last night the council had to speak in broad daylight about the long-term implications of rezoning 130 ac of commercial property. As George W. Bush once said, the school district ‘misunderestimated’ this council.
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The city council did exactly what they should have done — follow their comprehensive plan, secure the financial health of the city and protect the city taxpayers. They gave well-considered statements of their positions at the meeting and did their jobs admirably. The “will of the people” may be to build a secondary school, but the city is under no obligation to let it happen at the dog track property. A new school will help with crowding no matter where it is built. If you are looking for someone to blame, try looking at the complete mismanagement of the situation by the school superintendent and school board members who just wasted a precious year on a project they should have known could not move forward. Their time and effort could have been spent, instead, on finding an actual workable solution to the space problems. School board member Mark Kaisersatt said it best when he admitted to the middle and high school principals: “We failed you.” Yes, Mr. Kaisersatt, you have failed. And this dog-track-to-school debacle was just one more in a long line of failures of the school board, going back to 2003, to solve the secondary space issues.
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Agreed Truman. Looked to me like the council wasn’t interested in playing the school district’s version of ‘Let’s Make a Deal’. The time for those discussions was about a year ago, and would have likely signaled to the school district that they best start looking for other property. It was one last attempt to make the council look unreasonable. Voters are smarter than that.
As for voting council members out of office, that is always a possibility. The assumption many make is that council members all want to be in their seats forever. You will need to find someone to take their place who will vote YES on all school and library issues (for Roy) AND be willing to put up with a multitude of other headaches they undoutedly encounter in other areas of the city. I doubt that many of the ‘build my child a school!’ folks would give that unselfishly of their time.
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So the real discussion should be about Bowen-Eggebraaten’s actions and future.
http://bit.ly/PwlRJt What role did she play in this failure?
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Mikhail, you reference a site that has this as a topic on it, “The video that incensed the rag heads in Libya and Egypt” Good call there….that’s not offensive to anyone.
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…and that’s called sarcasm…
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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Amber,
Your frustrations with how long the dog track has sat in a dissheveled manner should be directed at the property owner(s). It wasn’t until March of 2011 that the listing went live. All of these years the seller was unwilling to publicly put a price on the property and let it go. If you do research on them, they are multi-millionaires who had ample resources for maintenance. Hopefully, the school district will retract their offer now since re-zoning has been denied, and the listing will resume. Only then, can the broker begin to work with potential buyers again.
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8 mil to buy it …bargain
100 million to make it work…priceless
yep…sounds like the .gov alright….
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Maybe, just maybe, the school board and the administrator could’ve figured out how to build a school on the 110 acres that we (the taxpayers) already own?
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Or maybe they shouldn’t have bought the UU property at all? The school board admits it’s not suitable for a school.
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