The Friday Memo, written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and various department directors, managers, and supervisors, summarizes many of the staff activities for the week. The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of Joel Walinski’s web page. Friday’s memo can be found on the memo page for the week.
Some items of interest in this week’s memo include:
- Information on a quote for an electronic document management system for the City. According to the City Clerk, “Professionals spend 5-15 % of their time reading information but up to 50% looking for it.” I’m assuming the professionals referred to are public employees, because in the private sector if it took 50% of people’s time finding already existing information, they’d be fired.
- Another item perhaps of interest: There are rumblings that another restaurant will be locating in the space held by Sweet Lou’s Waffle Bar.
- The memo also contains various street and budget updates which didn’t catch my interest when I read the memo, but are probably more important than the above.
No City Council meeting this Monday. You can view all City meetings on the City calendar.
[...] mentioned in her blog post of last week’s Friday Memo that there "… are rumblings that another restaurant will be locating in the space held by [...]
If you look at page 2 of the Friday memo, you will see an EDA report which says that the board voted to give Norman Butler a 20K loan for his new enterprise, Butler’s Steak and Ale, which has resuscitated a closing space.
What the memo does NOT report is that the loan was only voted in the affirmative after the first vote failed on the original motion, which was on an unsecured loan, albeit with Mr. Butler’s extensive financial records provided.
At this meeting, one of the EDA members initiated a conversation against this uncollateralized loan, although the Board had just a few weeks ago voted for an uncollateralized loan for a software company, Declarix, in the amount of 50K., obviously 2 and 1/2 the times of the Butler request; No problem there with no personal guarantee.
The EDA has given other uncollateralized loans in the past, and all of a sudden, after a new program which takes a more working capital approach is formalized, after having already been done WITHOUT a formalized program in place, there’s a problem with the concept.
Non-factual reporting, or at least telling only the part of the story you choose to, seems to be in vogue these days.