The connection between Canada Goose and immigration probably isn’t obvious. Stick with me for a few paragraphs and I’ll try to draw lines between my dots.
Canada Geese are pretty amazing birds. They are physically large with a 50-88 inch wingspan, weighing 7-24 pounds. They live 10 to 24 years. They create large families and mate, sometimes, for life. They aren’t found in every area of the country. When you see them in their natural habitat, it is hard not to admire them for both their beauty and their resilience. By the 1950s, they were driven to near extinction by the combination of over-hunting, chemical poisoning (DDT and other pesticides and industrial farming chemicals), and loss of habitat. The received a little federal protection about the time there were fewer than 50 birds left in the world. And they have bounced back. They, unlike many migrating birds, have adapted their migration to the eastern United States and as far as Siberia, eastern China, and Japan. If you can’t admire that kind of toughness, you probably hate everything and everybody.
If you live on the edges of their flight path, you may be among those of us who think a Canada Goose sighting was a rare and special thing. I nearly bought a house in eastern Colorado, almost exclusively because there was a small pond behind the house where Canada Geese nested during the summer. Moving from southern California to a place where wildlife co-existed with human population was such a shock that I was overwhelmed by the opportunity and put my money down to take advantage of the prospect. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the state of the Colorado economy of the moment, the seller turned down my offer in hope of finding a more motivated buyer. I still remember the backyard of that house and seeing a “v” of geese fly over and land a few yards away.
Today, I live in Minnesota and have a larger pond in my backyard that is usually populated with a dozen geese and a family or two every spring. In Minnesota, Canada Geese are not particularly appreciated. My wife and I love them and every year we look forward to their arrival in the spring and their families in the early summer. Many of our neighbors hate the droppings and the noise and actually fear being “wing-whipped” or "pecked" by the dreaded geese. To be honest, I am incapable of respecting anyone who is afraid of a bird. Chubby little city-boy Alfred Hitchcock references included, death by birds is not something a human should consider likely or particularly scary. But I’ve witnessed a few of our neighbors petitioning our city council to “protect” the neighborhood from the terror of Canada Geese and the city complies by hiring a local college professor and his gang of “naturalist” students to round up the geese, kill them or sell them to game “farms,” and, thereby, save the neighborhood from the goose threat.
Fear is a strange emotion. People will say any damn thing when they are afraid. Personally, I’d rather be wing-whipped to death by a million sparrows than to admit publicly that I’m afraid of a bird. But that’s just me. Likewise, I’d rather live under a bridge and eat grocery store castoffs than to admit that I can’t compete with third world immigrants for a job. When you give in to that kind of irrational fear, you are setting yourself up to be taken advantage by all sorts of con artists, fanatics, extremists, and every other Rush Limbaugh-type. You have to learn to control your panic if you want to live in civilized society.
On my way to work last week, I was heading west on I694 just past the new rats’ nest of freeway convolution when I passed a group of Canada Geese gathered on the edge of the freeway. The new freeway design has incorporated a collection of drainage ponds that attract waterfowl to the hazardous environment of a poorly designed fast moving freeway and we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of road kill as this design matures. The geese, one adult and several goslings, were all looking at the mangled body of an adult goose that had been recently hit as the geese crossed the freeway. They looked and acted exactly like a family of humans would look and act if they witnessed a parent being killed; they were shocked and stunned and appeared almost ready to go back into the traffic to assist the slaughtered parent.
One of the evolutionary tricks nature played on geese is that after eggs are laid, both parents loose their ability to fly for almost 30 days. This forces the parents to travel at the pace of their offspring until the goslings attach themselves to the parents and parental affection forces the parents to stick with their children until they are ready to care for themselves.
Nature has one sick sense of humor. Geese are not well-designed for walking, but walk they must until they can fly again. So, while we humans think the geese are just jamming up traffic out of stupidity, it’s really something more complicated.
Twelve hours later, I returned from work on the same path. The body in the road was much more mangled than it had been when I first saw it. There were feathers floating in the air almost like large flakes of snow. The whole family was still stuck on the edge of the freeway, all looking at that unrecognizable gory shape, all unable to believe life was over for that parent and the rest of the family would have to figure out how to get along without the dead parent.
This connection between geese and humans struck me particularly hard that evening. It was too easy to see myself in the surviving family. Usually, it’s easy to imagine geese, raccoons, bears, lions and tigers, and people who don’t speak the same language as being something lesser than ourselves. “Them and us” is a convenient perspective when we feel our resources are being taken by someone or something that we can simply run over with our cars, our police, our military, or our majority vote. The truth is that many of the animals on earth love their families. Nature designed us to care for our offspring, our mates, and to protect them with our lives. The connection between geese and humans is painfully close and, sometimes, unavoidably obvious.
May 31, 2009
May 11, 2009
A Golden Eagle in our Neighborhood
It's hard to tell from these pictures (no excuses, I took them), but for almost an hour we had a golden eagle perched in a tree on our lake this past Friday afternoon.
He seemed to be torn between lunching on the squirrels who taunted him and the geese swimming just below his tree branch. I was able to walk fairly close to him, but he became agitated and shrieked at me before I got near enough to find a clear spot for a good photo. So, we're stuck with what I managed to get between the leaves and branches from no less than 50 feet. Still, having a huge golden eagle spend an afternoon on our dinky, abused lake was a special moment.
He seemed to be torn between lunching on the squirrels who taunted him and the geese swimming just below his tree branch. I was able to walk fairly close to him, but he became agitated and shrieked at me before I got near enough to find a clear spot for a good photo. So, we're stuck with what I managed to get between the leaves and branches from no less than 50 feet. Still, having a huge golden eagle spend an afternoon on our dinky, abused lake was a special moment.
Apr 30, 2009
Spring Is on the Way
Finally, spring is on the way. You can tell because the lillies are popping up all over Savage Lake's western half. It won't be long before the lake will be covered with the DNR's precious invasive weed and all other signs of life in our lake are choked out.
Last year's bout with the Ramsey County Watershed District and the DNR bureaucrats left us with limited options for preserving our neighborhood lake. Although long-term residents on the lake pointed out evidence that the water levels "measured" by those bureaucracies had serious calculation errors, we ended up in our usual position of being told "this is all you are going to get" in no uncertain terms. This is why voters often call for regime changes. I'd be all for eliminating the DNR and renaming that disorganization "Hunting and Fishing Promotion." The state could use an EPA that actually, actively protected natural resources, but the DNR is not up to that task.
After a dry winter and, so far, a dry spring, the lake level is the lowest it has been at this time of the year since Elvy and I moved to our home in Little Canada in 1997. We have never experienced a spring with water levels so low that we have drag our canoe 15' from our boat rack to a shore so shallow that we have to wade another 10' through the mud to find enough water to float the canoe. Nothing even the all-powerful and infinitely-useless DNR can do could have done more damage to the lake than a drought. If we don't get a lot of rain, soon, this will be a terrible year for our lake.
I spent a good bit of time walking the lake this winter. Since it was frozen solid for almost 4 months, I had time to prowl all over the west side lakeshore. It is obvious that a lot of recent damage to the lake came from the freeway construction and the runoff from that widened and reshaped roadway.
On the northeast end, the drain (supposedly now capped) poured sediment at such a high rate that the outlet in the lake is all but completely filled. I have pictures of that outlet from early last spring that show more than 3/4 of the drain pipe was exposed and that the sediment "island" was only a few feet long. Now, the pipe is all but closed up and the island extends 25-30' from the pipe outlet.
At the southeast end of the lake, the downward slope of the freeway directs the runoff from the road directly into that end of the lake. We're not talking abopt a 20" drainpipe here. This is several hundred yards of highway and ditch system all aiming runoff into the west side of Savage Lake. Anyone foolish enough to claim that this isn 't an intentional attempt to turn our lake into a catch basin for highway runoff is too incompetent to employ in any serious engineering capacity. The freeway security fence has been repaird, I think, at that end of the lake. It was, apparently, destroyed during the freeway construction and it took almost a year before an effort was made to repair it.
Speaking of foolish excuses for engineers, the unemployable character who claimed to have done a noise survey justifying the lack of barriers or other noise protection for lake residents before the freeway expansion was started ought to be among those looking for work today. My own measurements during the winter found that the new freeway traffic upped my backyard noise level by as much as 8dBC (No, you acoustically uneducated moron. I did not use A-weighting for noise levels of 82-91dB unweighted. A-weighting is for low-level noise environments, typically 55dB unweighted and below. Only government stooges use A-weighting in high noise level environments.) At some point, Little Canada neighbors will have to face the fact that this freeway "improvement" has seriously degraded our home investments and selling prices will reflect that fact. The best we can hope for is $10/gallon gas.
Finally, from walking around the lake this winter, it struck me that we have two problems on the two halves of the lake and we've been treating them as if they were a single problem with a single solution. On the east side of the lake, poorly considered planning and development has resulted in a water level limit that prevents the current limited drainage system from being raised to a level that returns the lake to a historic height. On the west side, no such limitations exist. All of our homes are 20' or more above the lake level and even basements are considerably above any resonable water table issues. So, the one thing we haven't been considering is changing the inlet height that feeds the east side of the lake from the west; the pipe that passes under the freeway. That inlet could easily be redesigned to raise the west side lake levels by several feet without putting the east side housing in jeopardy. Something to consider, since we seem to have come to an impass on fixing the Watershed's drain design flaws at the east lake.
I don't have much information about the status of the lake on the east side of the freeway. If any residents would like to add information about that hemi-lake's condition, I'd be happy to post it here.
Last year's bout with the Ramsey County Watershed District and the DNR bureaucrats left us with limited options for preserving our neighborhood lake. Although long-term residents on the lake pointed out evidence that the water levels "measured" by those bureaucracies had serious calculation errors, we ended up in our usual position of being told "this is all you are going to get" in no uncertain terms. This is why voters often call for regime changes. I'd be all for eliminating the DNR and renaming that disorganization "Hunting and Fishing Promotion." The state could use an EPA that actually, actively protected natural resources, but the DNR is not up to that task.
After a dry winter and, so far, a dry spring, the lake level is the lowest it has been at this time of the year since Elvy and I moved to our home in Little Canada in 1997. We have never experienced a spring with water levels so low that we have drag our canoe 15' from our boat rack to a shore so shallow that we have to wade another 10' through the mud to find enough water to float the canoe. Nothing even the all-powerful and infinitely-useless DNR can do could have done more damage to the lake than a drought. If we don't get a lot of rain, soon, this will be a terrible year for our lake.
I spent a good bit of time walking the lake this winter. Since it was frozen solid for almost 4 months, I had time to prowl all over the west side lakeshore. It is obvious that a lot of recent damage to the lake came from the freeway construction and the runoff from that widened and reshaped roadway.
On the northeast end, the drain (supposedly now capped) poured sediment at such a high rate that the outlet in the lake is all but completely filled. I have pictures of that outlet from early last spring that show more than 3/4 of the drain pipe was exposed and that the sediment "island" was only a few feet long. Now, the pipe is all but closed up and the island extends 25-30' from the pipe outlet.
At the southeast end of the lake, the downward slope of the freeway directs the runoff from the road directly into that end of the lake. We're not talking abopt a 20" drainpipe here. This is several hundred yards of highway and ditch system all aiming runoff into the west side of Savage Lake. Anyone foolish enough to claim that this isn 't an intentional attempt to turn our lake into a catch basin for highway runoff is too incompetent to employ in any serious engineering capacity. The freeway security fence has been repaird, I think, at that end of the lake. It was, apparently, destroyed during the freeway construction and it took almost a year before an effort was made to repair it.
Speaking of foolish excuses for engineers, the unemployable character who claimed to have done a noise survey justifying the lack of barriers or other noise protection for lake residents before the freeway expansion was started ought to be among those looking for work today. My own measurements during the winter found that the new freeway traffic upped my backyard noise level by as much as 8dBC (No, you acoustically uneducated moron. I did not use A-weighting for noise levels of 82-91dB unweighted. A-weighting is for low-level noise environments, typically 55dB unweighted and below. Only government stooges use A-weighting in high noise level environments.) At some point, Little Canada neighbors will have to face the fact that this freeway "improvement" has seriously degraded our home investments and selling prices will reflect that fact. The best we can hope for is $10/gallon gas.
Finally, from walking around the lake this winter, it struck me that we have two problems on the two halves of the lake and we've been treating them as if they were a single problem with a single solution. On the east side of the lake, poorly considered planning and development has resulted in a water level limit that prevents the current limited drainage system from being raised to a level that returns the lake to a historic height. On the west side, no such limitations exist. All of our homes are 20' or more above the lake level and even basements are considerably above any resonable water table issues. So, the one thing we haven't been considering is changing the inlet height that feeds the east side of the lake from the west; the pipe that passes under the freeway. That inlet could easily be redesigned to raise the west side lake levels by several feet without putting the east side housing in jeopardy. Something to consider, since we seem to have come to an impass on fixing the Watershed's drain design flaws at the east lake.
I don't have much information about the status of the lake on the east side of the freeway. If any residents would like to add information about that hemi-lake's condition, I'd be happy to post it here.
Feb 27, 2009
Jan 15, 2009
The DNR's Proposed APM rules
Thanks to our Representative Bev Scalze, I received the most recent rules for the DNR's APM permits.
-------------------------
Judge Luis recommended that the DNR's proposed APM rules be adopted, with the changes proposed by the DNR in its response to public comments. The judge also suggested some additional minor wording changes, which the DNR is considering.
The changes proposed by DNR in its response to public comments include:
1) Eliminate the provision preventing commercial aquatic pesticide applicators from applying pesticides to public waters under an APM permit for violation of APM rules;
2) Provide for the full appeal process to occur before an APM permit is revoked;
3) Eliminate the phrase "but not limited to" in several places;
4) Clarify that more than 100 shoreline feet of submersed aquatic plant control may be allowed adjacent to commercial campgrounds;
5) Specify public participation requirements for lake vegetation management plans on the grandfather lakes (notice or news release in a local newspaper, public meeting, and a 30-day comment period);
6) Clarify ambiguous language for landowner approval requirements for APM permits so it does not appear that landowners need approval from their next-door neighbors before controlling aquatic plants; and
7) Retain current penalty language in rule, which specifies that violations of APM rules are misdemeanors.
You can review a pdf file of the Judges report at the web page below under "Rulemaking documents."
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/input/rules/apm/index.html
You can also review the rule making record including the ALJ's report at the Office of Administrative Hearings web page by clicking on the link below.
http://www.oah.state.mn.us/cases/200019885-AqPlantMgmt/index.html
Steve Enger
MN DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155-4025
651-259-5092
e-mail: steve.enger@dnr.state.mn.us
-------------------------
Judge Luis recommended that the DNR's proposed APM rules be adopted, with the changes proposed by the DNR in its response to public comments. The judge also suggested some additional minor wording changes, which the DNR is considering.
The changes proposed by DNR in its response to public comments include:
1) Eliminate the provision preventing commercial aquatic pesticide applicators from applying pesticides to public waters under an APM permit for violation of APM rules;
2) Provide for the full appeal process to occur before an APM permit is revoked;
3) Eliminate the phrase "but not limited to" in several places;
4) Clarify that more than 100 shoreline feet of submersed aquatic plant control may be allowed adjacent to commercial campgrounds;
5) Specify public participation requirements for lake vegetation management plans on the grandfather lakes (notice or news release in a local newspaper, public meeting, and a 30-day comment period);
6) Clarify ambiguous language for landowner approval requirements for APM permits so it does not appear that landowners need approval from their next-door neighbors before controlling aquatic plants; and
7) Retain current penalty language in rule, which specifies that violations of APM rules are misdemeanors.
You can review a pdf file of the Judges report at the web page below under "Rulemaking documents."
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/input/rules/apm/index.html
You can also review the rule making record including the ALJ's report at the Office of Administrative Hearings web page by clicking on the link below.
http://www.oah.state.mn.us/cases/200019885-AqPlantMgmt/index.html
Steve Enger
MN DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155-4025
651-259-5092
e-mail: steve.enger@dnr.state.mn.us
Jan 12, 2009
10-20-2008 Lake Shore Owner's Meeting
This is somewhat old news, but since my notes ended up on a computer that I rarely use these days, I'm late in posting it.
10-20-2008 Meeting
Officials Present:
Bill Dircks – Public Works Superintendent
Cliff Aichinger – Watershed District
Neil Vanderbosch – DNR
Lee Elfering – City Engineer
City Council Members
10-20-2008 Meeting
Officials Present:
Bill Dircks – Public Works Superintendent
Cliff Aichinger – Watershed District
Neil Vanderbosch – DNR
Lee Elfering – City Engineer
City Council Members
Information
Early on, it was declared that the DNR and Watershed District have decided that the current oversized, improperly positioned lake drain is an immobile object. The DNR is claiming the oversight in preventing the lake from being raised to previous levels. The Watershed District has decided that their latest attempt at correcting their original mistake will be their last attempt. The city is confused and isn’t sure who to believe.
“Nobody called me,” Neil Vanderbosch said in reply to a citizen’s request that the state review its position on water lilies. He seemed to believe the policy that if government is unresponsive, government has no responsibility. I know that I wrote, emailed, and called the DNR several times in 2002 asking for assistance with the artificially low lake height. I’m not even close to the only local citizen who called the DNR, Watershed District, city officials, state legislators, and anyone else who might have been able to help if anyone else had given a damn.
Vanderbosch continued his comedy act by saying, “We can’t go on individual lakes. We’d never get anything done,” regarding the DNR’s ability to review our lake’s situation. I’ve only been in Minnesota for a dozen years, but I’ve not yet seen any evidence that the DNR gets anything done outside of inflating their bureaucracy and attending meetings in resort areas (particularly during winter months). I guess it’s true that if the DNR bothered with monitoring individual lakes and rivers, it would be more difficult for them to attend junkets in Hawaii.
The one piece of information I obtained from questioning Vanderbosh is that the Division of Waters should be in charge of monitoring water quality. Now, I need to figure out who is in charge of the Division of Waters.
Proposed Actions
Dredging the “wetlands” (at the corner of Jackson and Demont) and other drainage issues
This “wetlands” was designed to route water from Demont to Savage Lake, trapping sediment before reaching the lake. The wetlands hadn’t been cleaned “since the mid-80s.” Elfering has recommended not removing sediment from the other lake sediment inlets. Elfering is pushing rain water gardens and strongly argued against drain traps due to the maintenance costs and effort required. If the gardens are built, they will try to get started on them during the winter.
One drawback to the gardens is that they will prevent some water from getting to the lake. Another drawback is that they won’t take back any of the existing damage to the lake.
Preventing water from reaching the lake
The city is planning on switching to all salt winter street treatment to reduce the sediment from the streets. Bill Dircks said the city is planning on sweeping more often and earlier in the spring and through the summer. He is recommending a vacuum or regenerative air sweeper to remove both the small and large particulate material. The City is planning on purchasing a regenerative air sweeper at a cost of $50,000 more than a traditional sweeper. Pre-wetting the salt should reduce the need for quantity (30% less salt) and increase the effectiveness. Other salt delivery systems are also being considered.
Ye Old Water Level Controversy
The water level, supposedly, is currently at 895.4’ above sea level. The DNR lists the lake height at 898’. Mayor Blessner requested that the DNR’s numbers be revised to match the Watershed District’s number. This is newspeak at its finest. If the current claim to being the “right height” doesn’t match the old data, we’ll just revise the old data and hope nobody notices. In the meantime, the lake continues to fill with sediment and the level continues to drop.
Resolutions
The city resolved to have the city engineer look further into having the state highway department pay for dredging the sediment that was dumped into the lake near the freeway.
The city offered to pay the DNR fees and the chemical costs for spraying the water lillies next spring. Thomas Day and John Bibeau volunteered to be responsible for spraying the lake according to the DNR specifications.
Dec 11, 2008
Taxes and Bureaucrats
Every time I’ve had an “experience” with a Minnesota state bureaucrat, I’ve wondered what makes westerners so much more interested in democracy than easterners. By that statement I mean, most western states put a bit in state government’s mouth with their referendum system. Eastern states, apparently populated by less involved semi-citizens, are big believers in non-participant “representative government.”
The older I get and the more powerful communications technology becomes, the less faith, or interest, I have in representative government. It was a rational system when it took a new President or Senator two months to ride a horse to Washington to take office, but it’s absolutely primitive today. Every major function of government, including budgeting, could be voted on, electronically, by citizens and the bureaucracy would be left with only the task of serving the public good. If they fail at their task; that department’s funding would reflect that failure in the next budget. With our current system, failure appears to be justification for more funding.
Now, to the local point at hand.
I received my 2009 Proposed Property Tax statement. The Ramsey County website indicated on the bill (www.co.ramsey.mn.us/prr) explained that “Ramsey County property appraisers will be available for individual market value consultations in adjacent rooms beginning at 5:30 p.m.” Along with hundreds of other Ramsey County taxpayers, I attended this meeting and took a number for my “individual market value consultation.”
After waiting for two hours, I was led to a desk where a “consultant” told me, “You understand that there is nothing I can do to lower your property tax evaluation here?”
Of course, I or the other 300-500 citizens waiting for a consultation understood no such thing, but he proudly pointed to the small print on the statement that said, “The period to discuss possible changes has passed and changes can no longer be made to your property valuation. It is included here for your information only.” The people who write this crap for the county must take an English as A Foreign Language writing course before they are allowed to print gibberish on official paper.
If the title of the form is “2009 Proposed Property Tax (their italics and bold print, not mine), you’d think that changes, in fact, can be made. I’d love to know what noun the “it” in “It is included” refers to.
I was told by one bureaucrat that it was a relatively simple matter to protest the county’s appraisal, which should reflect current market values including duress sales (fast approaching the majority of sales in the current market). The “consultant” to whom I was assigned, however, told me that the 2009 property evaluation was based on the 2007 market value and could not be revised to reflect the real market. I was warned that any attempt to take this issue to Minnesota Tax Court would require a several hundred dollar private appraisal, and would be contested by the county.
I am going to accept that challenge and cause exactly as much trouble for that department as possible. Hell, I might even hire a lawyer just to wrangle my property evaluation down to a realistic value. I’d rather spend the money on a private lawyer than these arrogant county deadbeats.
Here are some references for your personal fight:
The Pioneer Press, that uber-conservative property value booster that it is, recently stuffed a report back in the Business section explaining that Twin Cities property values are down "19 percent from the median of $216,500 [to $175,000] during the same month last year." The article tried to invent a stabilizing trend by claiming that "traditional" listings were only down 2 percent from the previous year, but asking price and selling price are growing more distant every day we drift further down this several-year recession path and toward a national depression.
From my experience tonight, I can tell you several places where I'd make massive cuts in the state and county budget.
The older I get and the more powerful communications technology becomes, the less faith, or interest, I have in representative government. It was a rational system when it took a new President or Senator two months to ride a horse to Washington to take office, but it’s absolutely primitive today. Every major function of government, including budgeting, could be voted on, electronically, by citizens and the bureaucracy would be left with only the task of serving the public good. If they fail at their task; that department’s funding would reflect that failure in the next budget. With our current system, failure appears to be justification for more funding.
Now, to the local point at hand.
I received my 2009 Proposed Property Tax statement. The Ramsey County website indicated on the bill (www.co.ramsey.mn.us/prr) explained that “Ramsey County property appraisers will be available for individual market value consultations in adjacent rooms beginning at 5:30 p.m.” Along with hundreds of other Ramsey County taxpayers, I attended this meeting and took a number for my “individual market value consultation.”
After waiting for two hours, I was led to a desk where a “consultant” told me, “You understand that there is nothing I can do to lower your property tax evaluation here?”
Of course, I or the other 300-500 citizens waiting for a consultation understood no such thing, but he proudly pointed to the small print on the statement that said, “The period to discuss possible changes has passed and changes can no longer be made to your property valuation. It is included here for your information only.” The people who write this crap for the county must take an English as A Foreign Language writing course before they are allowed to print gibberish on official paper.
If the title of the form is “2009 Proposed Property Tax (their italics and bold print, not mine), you’d think that changes, in fact, can be made. I’d love to know what noun the “it” in “It is included” refers to.
I was told by one bureaucrat that it was a relatively simple matter to protest the county’s appraisal, which should reflect current market values including duress sales (fast approaching the majority of sales in the current market). The “consultant” to whom I was assigned, however, told me that the 2009 property evaluation was based on the 2007 market value and could not be revised to reflect the real market. I was warned that any attempt to take this issue to Minnesota Tax Court would require a several hundred dollar private appraisal, and would be contested by the county.
I am going to accept that challenge and cause exactly as much trouble for that department as possible. Hell, I might even hire a lawyer just to wrangle my property evaluation down to a realistic value. I’d rather spend the money on a private lawyer than these arrogant county deadbeats.
Here are some references for your personal fight:
- http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/prr/TNT.htm
- http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/prr/assessor/index.htm
- email: AskPropertyTaxandRecords@co.ramsey.mn.us
The Pioneer Press, that uber-conservative property value booster that it is, recently stuffed a report back in the Business section explaining that Twin Cities property values are down "19 percent from the median of $216,500 [to $175,000] during the same month last year." The article tried to invent a stabilizing trend by claiming that "traditional" listings were only down 2 percent from the previous year, but asking price and selling price are growing more distant every day we drift further down this several-year recession path and toward a national depression.
From my experience tonight, I can tell you several places where I'd make massive cuts in the state and county budget.
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