The headline in this week's Anoka County Union: "City Adds 20 Acres of Open Space" is a continuing positive development in Andover, and a recognition that what voters approved in 2006 can be realized by thoughtful decision from the Open Space Advisory Commission and the City Council.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
Andover will be protecting another property from future development, which is an initiative voters signed off on in 2006.
The Andover City Council Tuesday night unanimously approved spending $320,000 to buy a 20.6-acre parcel east of Hanson Boulevard and north of 161st Avenue.
The property has been referred to as White Pine Wilderness and had been approved for urban housing development, according to a March 2010 new residential development map. It is immediately east of an already developed neighborhood.
http://abcnewspapers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13688&Itemid=26
Hope and Jeff Luedtke previously donated a parcel of property by the Rum River, and now Karen and Lawrence Emmerich have donated this property, which lies between homes developed at 161st and Crane and 161st and Wintergreen. I drive by this parcel all the time, and this will will be a fine preservation of land for use by our community and will be easily-accessible to the homeowners living betweeen Hanson and the rail line in that neighborhood. Thank you to our property owners for recognizing Andover's future.
And thank you to the decision-makers who moved ahead in securing this latest property.
Making land available for Andover's future is an important choice. As we continue to look at choices of what Andover looks like in 2020, 2030 and beyond, it will be a difficult balancing decision between the needs for housing developments, protecting Andover's traditional rural/farm community, and providing more Oopen Space choices. This decision must always remain a choice for our land owners. While these owners will continue to be paid well for their land, there may be an offset of potentially greater future benefits for the same land. This choice must remain voluntary, it can not be coerced. Someday, having Open Space may be at a premium, and those owners should never be put in a position of doing so for the community good at their own persaonal expense. Hopefully there will always be fair value and intrinsic gain associated with selling land to be protected as Andover Open Space.
If you want to know more about the Open Space Advisory Commission, please use this link:
http://www.ci.andover.mn.us/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B02DD7137-2F73-4D34-91C5-AAF9627F114A%7D&DE=%7B72D2803B-D486-4EE3-9EC7-D986AD242525%7D
The FAQ is informative:
http://files.andovermn.net/pdfs/Commissions/OSAC-FAQ.pdf
The Citizen's Guide to "Protecting Your Open Space" is informative - and an excellent starting point:
http://files.andovermn.net/pdfs/Planning/Open%20Space/ProtectingYourOpenSpace-Andover.pdf
This is an example of good, efficient government services that we receive in Andover. I appreciate what Mr. Bednarz, the City Planner, and his staff have done in preparing very accessible resources for this community. These are the types of services the City needs to commit to providing for Andover's future.
So at 54, I'm fulfilling one of those teenage dreams I had - to run for public office. The dreams including winning office and doing a good job of serving the public. I hope this has a happy ending. It will be very challenging. I had expected to run for office at a time it appeared the incumbents would not be in the race. But instead, I am one of eight candidates, and both incumbents chose to run again, as well. So it will be difficult for us newcomers to break through, but I am going to try and make a case to change the current makeup of the Council.
I read a comment at Facebook from a one-time acquaintance who stated that he fears our turn to Socialism. Well, at the City Council level, the issues and the dollars and the number of lives impacted by government intervention - or lack thereof - is at a much smaller scale than at the state and national levels. Liberals and Democrats are not politically strong in Andover, but voters in Andover certainly don't need to fear Socialism, nor do they need to fear Democrats serving on their Council. Government can do right - by the people and for the people - lest we shall perish by our own insensitivities to the needs of the general welfare of the citizenry, which government is there to serve and respond to.
I am a Democrat. I am a public employee, working for Hennepin County. Earlier in my life, I was a public employee as a school teacher, here in Anoka-Hennepin and elsewhere in Minnesota. I am the son of a woman who proudly - and magnificently - educated Minnesota students for 39 years, and was a public employee to the day she had a heart attack at age 62, on her last day with her students before retiring, and never saw one day of her retirement. I am the son of a long-time federal employee, a veteran of the Marine Corps and a 27-year US Postal employee. My wife works in Ramsey County. I believe in government - in good government. I believe in the service good government brings to its citizens.
Part of my thoughts as a candidate goes back to the basic necessity of government in our lives, no matter what the Peggy Scotts, Chris delaForests and Debbie Johnsons of this area may think. You get what you pay for. And frankly in Andover, that's pretty bare bones. We have really good employees in Andover, but with pay freezes, cuts in staffing - they're spread pretty thin. I'd like to see us pay Andover employees properly (restore those frozen pay steps), and re-fill some of those positions (do you know that if you go to City Hall over the lunch hour, that they have to juggle who covers the front desk, who's available to help you, and sometimes have to ask you to come by later, because the only person who can help, isn't available?), so we don't seem so small town. We're a good-sized bedroom community of 31,000+ for heavens-sakes.
And Andover feels incomplete. We need to partner to finish things - we still have poor roads north of Bunker in much of the city. There are no right-turn lanes off of many key roads - like Hanson, like Andover Blvd, like 181st, or like Crosstown. Can't we get the County to at least remark shoulders and post "Right Turn Lane" signs on these artery roads? Why is there still no Clocktower near City Hall? Isn't there supposed to be a restaurant over there, too? Why is there no MTC line into Andover, especially not along Bunker, or north up Hanson to City Hall? I'd like to see us reach partnerships with the agencies or businesses that can get some of these things finished.
Recently the City had to talk to some of its citizens about the City's inability to afford to go around collecting tree limbs and brush that had been gathered following one of our many storms this summer. I appreciated that some members are looking at partnerships on such things as shared wood chippers between communities, that could allow them all to be more responsive to the community's needs. Concerns over the city water supply, dealing with requests for height variances, quelling neighborly disputes that identify unknown acreage issues that play out against city rules or ordinances - these are the types of real, everyday, city-level concerns that I'm prepared to step in and encounter, and contribute to the resolution thereof.
Most of our parents didn't have the beautiful, large homes and acreage so many of us enjoy in Andover. Our property taxes are hardly out of line - in fact, my mortgage has gone down a bit each of the last three years - without a refinancing - because the property taxes choices have made it so. The Democratic candidate for Governor wants to shift some of that property tax burden away from the middle class to the wealthier Minnesotans. That may impact many Andover households if he's successful. But if he and the Legislature are successful in implementing this change, it is also the City's responsibility to begin to address the services, those employee functions, that City infrastructure, in the next four years, and let us progress forward, instead of finding ourselves idling in neutral. Let's work to complete Andover, and keep it the attractive vision of a community that drew many of us to move here the past 10-15 years.
