Northfield’s planning gets the Jay Leno treatment

jayleno-sshot
Susan Hvistendahl alerted me last night with this email:

Just saw Jay Leno holding up a headline from Northfield, Mn., which was “Northfield plans to plan strategic plan.”

I wondered if it was my blog post title from Feb: A plan to improve the planning for the Capital Improvement Plan.

Might those Planning Commissioner colleagues of mine, Ross and Tracy, know about this?

Anyone know where to find a videoclip of Monday’s show?

5pm update: The episode is currently available here. The segment is at the 11:50 mark. Here are two screencaptures (click to enlarge):

jayleno-northfield-plan2 jayleno-northfield-plan

It appears to be from a late 90s edition of the Northfield News.

7 Comments

  1. Gabriel Rholl said:

    I dug around and found a copy of the episode in a usenet group. I cut out the segment about Northfield, but I’m a little ambivalent towards posting it on YouTube (copyright and such.) If you send me an email, Griff, I’ll forward it to you. It’s 2.5 MB.

    And it doesn’t feature Locally Grown, but instead seems to be an older clipping from the Northfield News. It has several names on it that are from Northfield days of yore, like Mel George (President of St. Olaf until 1994).

    July 8, 2008
  2. Tracy Davis said:

    I seem to remember this headline as well. I wish I could find a copy. Maybe the library has one on microfiche, or perhaps the NNews might have it in their archive….

    July 8, 2008
  3. Tracy,

    What year do you think the headline was in? The Library or NHS will have a hard copy of it.

    July 8, 2008
  4. Tracy Davis said:

    Hayes, I wish I could narrow it down, but I can’t do it meaningfully. It would probably have been 1993-1999, but that’s a pretty broad range so I don’t know if that helps much. If anyone sees Dixon Bond around town, ask him. I’ll bet he’d even remember the month!

    July 8, 2008
  5. Griff Wigley said:

    The episode is currently available here. The segment is at the 11:50 mark. I’ve added two screen captures to the blog post above. It appears to be from a late 90s edition of the Northfield News.

    July 8, 2008
  6. kurt larson said:

    One of the names on the story is Mel George pres. of Olaf. I think that was about the mid 80’s to 93/94.
    Maybe that will narrow it down some.

    July 8, 2008
  7. Larry DeBoer said:

    The Northfield News headline was featured in a 1994 Jay Leno show skit that he used to highlight the nation’s rideculous and absurd events that would occcur in headlines accross the country. It was at the time when Northfielders were fed up with endless planning but no implementation. So, a group went forward with the NEW FINAL PLAN that would solve all of our past, failed attempts to move forward. I brought it up in our city’s feeble blog site at that time and suggested we could do better than being one of the nation’s laughing stocks on national network tv.

    I think Leno’s team of writers brought back this headline joke Monday night as a re-hash of the past humor. Too bad Northfield has never been able to create a plan that has enough substance to make a strategic differentiation for our town. Our reputation is far and wide – it would be nice if our reputation will bring us a new city administrator that is more than a network talk show clown.

    July 8, 2008

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