Why I'm Running for Office - MetroNorth Chamber Leadership Fund Questions - Top Business Priorities for Andover - Improving the Business Climate

I've submitted answers to three questions I received from the MetroNorth Chamber Leadership Fund - a PAC that represents commerce and industry interests in Anoka County.  Their objective is to research and identify pro-business candidates in Anoka County each business cycle.  They are seeking candidates who will provide the greatest opportunities and success for the Anoka County business climate. For a select few, this PAC will award their endorsement in the political race in question.

Here are my replies to their three questions, sent to Michael Thorsland, September 7, 2010:


City of Andover Councilmember



• Please describe why you are running for office?

My wife and I moved to Andover, from Anoka, ten years ago. In Anoka, I’d been active, first in the Republican Party in the pre-Reagan years, then in the DFL, in the 1980s and 1990s. I was a member of the Anoka Charter Commission for several years, and I was an active member of the United Methodist Church of Anoka and member and chair of the Church Finance Committee throughout the 1990s. I was an active Education Association member during years teaching in southern Minnesota in the 1980s, and was a Vice President of the Jackson EA. Since coming to the Human Services Department of Hennepin County in 1990, I’ve become very active in AFSCME Local 34 – Hennepin County Social Services Unit. I served as Membership Secretary for five years, have edited/created the Local’s 12-16 page monthly newsletter since 2001, was elected Local 34 Vice President in 2005, have served on the negotiations committee for three rounds of bargaining, have led Meet & Confer with management for the past five years, and participate in a joint labor-management insurance committee looking at the County’s wellness and insurance initiatives that have contractual implications.


So, it is with a sense of duty, responsibility and purpose that I have found myself serving fellow employees, neighbors and my church family through the years. Isn’t that how members of the Chambers of Commerce would see themselves, as well – as stewards to their community with a sense of duty, responsibility and purpose to those they employ, those who are their neighbors, and those who are their own church family members or friends in civic organizations? Ten years is a long time without giving back to my community in Andover, so I run for office out of a sense of duty, responsibility and purpose.



Andover’s been well-represented for a decade by Julie Trude, and for many years more by Don Jacobson. There are six of us running who think it is time for a new voice to represent Andover – to embrace its future, not to dwell on its past.


I don’t run as the representative of any group or agency in the community. I run as a homeowner who will offer different perspectives and insights on how Andover needs to go forward. I bring the perspectives of someone who has awareness of large-county issues and concerns; I bring the perspective of a unionized workforce; I bring the perspective of a well-read, politically interested homeowner and settled resident of the community.

I will bring balance to the office, between the issues and concerns of fellow residents, of the greater community, and of the employees whose work performance and results are the heart of Andover’s continuing success – but these are also employees who’ve seen their numbers reduced in the name of efficiencies due to limitations of funding, who’ve seen their wages frozen, and furloughed hours mandated in an effort to balance the city budget without significant increases in revenue. I run as someone who appreciates good government and efficient government, but who does not begin at “doing more with less” as the answer to achieving good and efficient government.


• If elected, what would be your top priority as it relates to business in Andover?

The trite answer is to say “economic development.” But the more complex answer should be government/business community partnerships and civic planning.


• As Councilmember, please expand upon the previous and describe how you would improve the business climate in Andover.

Is there a business climate in Andover? What is the state of that community? Is it as it should be, or does it truly need improving?




I’d like to see a “summit” of Andover’s elected representatives and administrative leadership meeting with the leading contractors, realtors, business owners, and pastors to look at Andover’s future and to compare it with its neighbors.



What is Andover? What should we expect of the city? What is realistically possible in this city?




Andover has limited business opportunities. It has a considerable number of churches and is over-represented by pharmacies. It has two groceries, but because of stores located in neighboring Blaine and Coon Rapids, it lacks any major grocers such as Cub, Rainbow, or perhaps Byerly’s, despite being a city of over 31,000 residents. There are just five gas stations/convenience stores – none in the northwest part of the city. Except for McDonald’s and Subway, no major restaurant exists in the city – no Burger King, Culver’s or Wendy’s to rival two McDonald’s franchises; no Arby’s or Taco Bell or Kentucky Fried Chicken to rival Subway for the non-burger market; no major sit-down franchises such as a Perkins, an Applebee’s, a PJ Chang’s or a Broadway or Green Mill Pizza restaurant. Restaurants seldom last long in Andover – as we’ve seen Serendipity, Oodles, Figaro’s, Tasty Pizza and Quizno’s come and go through the years. Andover has many small businesses – insurance agents, animal hospitals, chiropractor offices, and hair salons – but I seldom see a coordinated plan, which seemingly has left holes in the city – not the least of which is the lack of restaurant choices in a principally spread-out bedroom/commuter community with lots of families, lots of hungry children. There is no laundromat in Andover. There is no “Super” store in Andover – there is no Super Target or Super Wal-Mart. There is no big-box retailer like a Menard’s, Home Depot or Lowe’s in Andover. Again, some of these are in neighboring communities, but will residents of northeast Andover always have to drive 15-25 minutes away to Riverdale or Northtown or to Highway 65 in Blaine to find these stores to shop at?




Complicating matters is that there are no significant highways in Andover, just arterial Boulevards like Bunker, Round Lake, Crosstown and Hanson. This presents community limits. The community is limited by competing and contrasting concerns: rural, exurban and suburban commuter residences each forge different values and competing needs. What is the city’s housing plan? How will it incorporate open spaces? Where do businesses build – and thrive? What businesses will thrive in Andover, which will not, and which are integral to Andover’s future, such that we’ll want to provide assistance to retain that company and help it become successful?




The City Hall/Community Center area represents a community core away from the major economic and business area along Bunker Lake Blvd. But there are only three-partially filled business strips in the vicinity. It has a major sense of incompleteness. The developers of Clocktower Commons have never delivered a clocktower – nor a restaurant, that I believe was planned for the site years ago. A large, unfilled field is recently furrowed across the road from City Hall.


Hanson Blvd. is in poor shape – especially north of Crosstown as it leaves City Hall. Crosstown itself is in poor condition leaving north and east from City Hall. Andover Blvd, 157th, 181st – all are streets regularly driven, but getting greatly worn. Many of these streets are not safe for the resident commuters – even adding marked right-turn lanes can add to the safety of these streets.




Making access easier, and providing commuter efficiencies is terribly lacking in Andover for anyone driving south out of Andover on either Hanson or Round Lake Boulevards – or on 7th Avenue in the morning. Andover should explore adding expanded Coon Rapids and Anoka MTC routes into Andover for morning and evening rush hours – perhaps along Bunker Lake Blvd. or north up Hanson to City Hall and the Community Center.


Andover is a city of over 30,000 residents, but it hasn’t got a full-service Post Office. We have a large Carrier Annex near City Hall, but to buy stamps, send packages, etc, one has to use a postal station inside the local Super America store – or drive to Anoka, Coon Rapids or Blaine – or go to little Bethel or to St. Francis to get full service.



Despite the efforts to build the Station Parkway and Jay Street Station North areas as business centers, Andover lacks both a business center and a business identity. Smaller, but older cities like Anoka, Bethel and St. Francis have Main Street identities. Other cities – admittedly along highways – such as Cambridge, Elk River and Forest Lake – have more highly-developed business cores than Andover.



So what is Andover’s identity? Drive through Andover with a fresh pair of eyes this week. What do you see? Go up Round Lake Blvd. to 161st, head east to Hanson Blvd, then drive south past City Hall down to Bunker Lake Blvd. Finally head west back to Round Lake Blvd.


With little exception, this is where you’ll find Andover’s businesses located. Compare that drive to driving through Anoka on Main St. or driving through Coon Rapids on Coon Rapids Blvd., and Andover is not as old and decayed. Compare it to Hanson and Foley Blvds. in Coon Rapids, or driving along Highway 65 in Blaine south of 105th, and it’s probably pretty comparable. Compare it to driving around Riverdale in Coon Rapids, or to the Village or the Baltimore St. area off Highway 65 in Blaine from the Sports Complex north, and Andover doesn’t compare with that vibrancy.



So, I think we must first decide – what is Andover’s identity and what should it be going forward? Is it to be a bedroom commuter community with just enough hodge-podge of businesses and amenities to take care of basic needs of its residents? Or is Andover a rural, exurban community that focuses on the pursuits, pleasures and economic tidings of living on the edge of suburbia, with the spacious lots and traditional farm properties to do much of whatever one desires?



Can Andover attract a future Riverdale-like center of commerce? Should it? But if not, how do we better organize and reconcile the interests of its residents with the hodge-podge of business choices that awaits?




There is much that remains to develop Andover’s economy, and to improve its business climate. There’s much for both sides to do. I don’t see us becoming the next Riverdale or Elk River, frankly, but I do see us moving forward to make Andover more complete – to fill-in or finish off some of the gaps that still exist. I think we will be unique – and not obsolete 15, 20 years into the future – but we do need to successfully provide enough amenities and consumer choices here at home for Andover’s residents to be happy and take pride in our city.

And, Why Am I Running for City Council?

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.