Category: Community Blog
Now that I've picked on poor Tim Behm, it's his opponent's turn in the hot seat. Again this is a full, unedited transcription with nasty notes by your City Beat.
The City Beat was feeling particularly wrathful the other week. Spending hours and hours paying close attention to every word spoken by people you don't necessarily agree with and writing them as faithfully as possible will do that to you. I'm talking about the interviews for City Council candidates, which I had to transcribe. And it was only two candidates for goodness' sake.
So I made hateful, mocking notes, promising myself that I'd take my revenge on the blog. But, being that I have to maintain some semblance of balance, I've chosen to be more diplomatic.
My friend Joe posted this story about government downsizing on Facebook. It must take an economic crisis of this magnitude to make it thinkable to consolidate counties and eliminate police departments, which is really just another way to consolidate services. I couldn't help but think that if these reforms aren't an opportunity North Dakota will miss because of our economy is doing so great.
But what if we did try some form of reform here?
Consolidating counties
The UAS Action Summit was last week and I didn't spend nearly enough time there as I would've liked. Coverage of the Thunderbirds and the air show -- It was on Saturday, but there were previews and such leading up to it. -- kind of got in the way.
The City Beat felt a bit let down on Saturday at the airshow, not because of the Thunderbirds' performance, but because the blasted weather kept the team from performing some of their most spectacular moves and because there were some punk kids behind me snarking about the performance. (Yeah, some of the moves didn't look that impressive because this is real life, not a movie or a video game. I feel like a grumpy old man.)
Here's a few interesting things that's been said about a proposed community garden at the corner of Minnesota Avenue and South Fourth Street in Grand Forks (Click here and go to pages 13 and 14 for the map):
The City Beat ran across this map the other day while perusing the Strange Maps blog. The guys who assembled this mapped the Google Maps directory for places where bars outnumber grocery stores and found that this was true in the Upper Midwest.
The City Beat got a breakdown of the taxable sales and purchases at the city level a little too late for my story the other day, but here it is courtesy of the state tax department:
State Tax Commissioner Cory Fong's office released the annual analysis of the sales tax base today and I was asked to take a look at it.
Rather than write off the press release, I thought I'd give it the usual treatment. I adjusted for inflation and calculated a total for the northeastern corner of the state, which I define as the 15 counties we cover.
Since Cory said something about 2007 being a normal year and 2008 being a weird year by way of explaining why 2009 is lower than 2008 but still higher than 2007, I looked at 2007 numbers, too.
- Let me take this opportunity to plug the ArtSee event 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday at the North Dakota Museum of Art on campus. It's pretty much what it says on the can: There's art and you see it. Also, there's free booze and appetizers. Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals is putting this shindig on with help from our usual awesome sponsors. The booze is from Happy Harry's -- there's a reason I shop there all the time! -- and the apps are from the museum cafe.
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