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Chanting “Save our town, or we’re going down",” students from Prairie Creek Community School held a “Northfield First” rally on Bridge Square yesterday. See the album of ten photos, the full-screen slideshow, or this slideshow… and following that, a 25-second video, and a 5-minute video. (continued) Continue reading Photo album and videos: PCCS students rally for Northfield First (shop local) While composing the blog post for this week’s podcast, I tried to link to the City of Northfield’s 2008 Comprehensive Plan on the City’s website. AAARRRGGGHHH! (Save yourself the frustration. Here’s the link to the City of Northfield’s 2008 Comprehensive Plan.) Watch this video/screencast of my frustrations. (I’m linking to the screencast vs. embedding the code because the it needs to be viewed in a larger size than fits here.)
I’ve turned off comments on this post. Continue discussion on the blog post: What needs to be changed with the City of Northfield’s web site? Update 2/21: All the problems noted in the above screencast have been fixed, with the exception of the first search result.
Continue reading Video: Blue Grass & Old Time Jam session at the Contented Cow
 Dr. Charles Reznikoff In this 8-minute video, Dr. Charles “Charlie” Reznikoff, addiction medicine specialist, answered my questions after talking to an audience of about 24 people on the subject of heroin addiction during a public presentation at the Northfield Hospital on Monday night. Continue reading Video: Northfield Hospital specialist talks about heroin addiction
I surprised Mayor Mary Rossing in her store Present Perfect this morning with my video camera. I mostly asked her questions that had to do with Monday night’s City Council meeting, which you can read a bit about here. We touched upon her changes in meeting procedure, her tactics on facilitating meetings and her outlook on information exchange in Northfield and on the financial health of the city’s businesses. Continue reading New Northfield Mayor Mary Rossing talks about her first day On Saturday mornings, the Goodbye Blue Monday (GBM) is like that popular St. Louis restaurant made famous by Yogi Berra. Here’s proof from last week. Click play to watch. 20 seconds.
Greenvale Township meeting on 12/16 from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo Brian O’Connell, Northfield community development director, and Joel Walinski, interim city administrator, discussed the remaining details of a proposed annexation agreement with Greenvale Township‘s three supervisors for more than an hour on Tuesday night. In the accompanying video, O’Connell and Walinski are on the left side of the table. Township supervisors Robert Winter, Bernard Budin and Chairman Richard Moore are on the right (Moore is the furthest in the background). The woman at the end of the table is Edith Nelson, the township’s secretary. The annexation agreement, among other things, indicates how much Northfield would reimburse Greenvale for the property taxes the township will lose when 530 acres of undeveloped farmland goes onto the city’s tax rolls. Northfield is annexing the land to attract industrial developers. The discussion led to two clarifications in the draft of the agreement. Walinski said he will release a copy of the final draft of the annexation agreement in his memo on Friday. The first clarification, which is shown in the video, addresses Greenvale’s request to prohibit Northfield from annexing any more of the township’s land for a period of five years following the current annexation deal. O’Connell and Walinski said, in order to keep with the goals of Northfield’s comprehensive plan, they would not prohibit annexation across the next five years, but agreed to a restriction that Greenvale landowners who petition the city for annexation within that period must get written consent from the owners of every neighboring property. The next clarification had to do with how Northfield will calculate its tax reimbursement payment to Greenvale. The proposed payment plan would reimburse Greenvale in the amount of about $3,854 a year for five years. That figure is the amount of money Greenvale currently collects in taxes on the property. According to the agreement, the reimbursement amount would change year-to-year as the property tax rate changes. In the sixth year, Northfield would pay a “balloon payment” that would equal 20 more years of annual payments. In all, Northfield would pay Greenvale about $96,362, using today’s property tax rate figure. At Tuesday’s meeting, O’Connell and Walinski said the city would calculate the balloon payment by using a tax rate figure equal to the average of tax rates in the previous five years. At the end of the meeting, the Northfield and Greenvale representatives agreed to allow their respective lawyers to look at the final draft of the agreement before signing the document. Three Greenvale residents attending the meeting said they were not completely satisfied with the way their supervisors negotiated the annexation agreement. The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 19 in the Township Hall on Guam Avenue. Aron Feingold, Matt Hart, Myles Radtke, Courtney Madowitz and Nick Rue are students in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College. They produced this 7-minute video titled Carleton Conservatives.
Chelsea Ronsse, Lauren Knoche and Nikoleta Rukaj are students in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College. They produced this 4-minute video titled A New Kind of Charter School. (It’s about ARTech – the Northfield School of Arts and Technology.)
Vivyan Tran, Sung Hyo Kim, Logan Nash and Mackenzie Zimmer are students in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College. They produced this 6-minute video titled Representative Journalism: The New Community Reporter.
Sam Benshoof, Briana Cain, Ryeon Corsi and Esther Pak are students in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College. They produced this 6-minute video titled Hard times on Division Street. Dan Sugarman, Allyson Herbst, Evan Haine-Roberts, Anne O’Gara and Vincent Poturica are students in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College. They produced this 10-minute video titled Home Grown: Eating Local in Northfield.
The Representative Journalism Project founded in Northfield, Minn. could see more nationwide support after project collaborators Bonnie Obremski and Bill Densmore facilitated a discussion about the initiative last week at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo. The noontime “Lunchstorm” session was a part of a three-day conference centered around another experimental project called Information Valet, which Densmore is working on at the university. The video below is an edited version of the hour-long talk during which media professionals from around the nation and students from the university’s top-ranked journalism school grilled Obremski and Densmore about RepJ’s progress and future plans. One of the only unanswered questions was how the RepJ project would gain financial support from community members who are willing to invest in the next generation of community journalism. However, the founders of the Banyan Project and Kachingle.com made some interesting suggestions. Tom Stites of the Banyan Project suggested a co-op style funding method, or to simply “put out the tip jar” to see what would happen. Kachingle, founder Cynthia Typaldos explained, would be a way for Web site owners everywhere to easily solicit funds from fans. In essence, “Kachinglers” sign up to donate $5 per month toward the sites they would like to support most. To distribute some of the $5 to a site, the Kachingler pushes the Kachingle button installed on the site. Typaldos would like to launch Kachingle in January. In the video, the questions asked appear in type at the bottom of the screen while Obremski and Densmore answer them.
Note: This is an edited video of the question and answer portion of Sunday’s meeting at the Main Street Moravian Church. I edited out images of the undercover sheriff’s deputy and any audience member. I also shortened the length of some questions and stretches of silence. For a complete, audio-only recording of the meeting, follow this link. Questions remaining: Are the people of Northfield doing enough to help get drug users through recovery? Why did this problem blossom in Northfield in particular? Where does Northfield stand on a time line stretching between “higher amount of drug users” to “very few drug users?” When does that time line begin? When might it end? Here’s a one-minute video clip of auctioneer Ed Kuhlman doing his thing at last week’s Northfield Historical Society auction.
Northfield Police Chief Mark Taylor spoke with me this week to answer some questions about the ongoing investigation of suspected heroin dealing in the city. Unfortunately, my wireless microphone gave me some trouble and the sound quality isn’t what it usually is. The video is 12 minutes, 28 seconds long. The pauses in the conversation are when I asked my questions. Despite editing efforts today, I couldn’t boost the volume of my voice enough to be audible. But, I believe you can hear the chief just fine.
The following video is about 1.5 minutes long. It shows portions of a press conference in the Rice County District Court that took place on Monday, Oct. 27 from 2:30 p.m. to about 3:15 p.m. There were representatives from the Faribault Daily News, KYMN Radio and Carleton College and about a half-dozen other people in the audience.
Here is a video of the entire conference, with minor edits by Benjamin Haynor.
John Mathern, CEO of Mendota Homes, met with me for about an hour two weeks ago shortly after First National Bank took ownership of one of Mendota’s downtown properties. In the video, Mathern references the The Crossing condominium project. The video is about one minute long.
Northfield: Do we work together? from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo. Note: Below is the conclusion of a series of stories I have written about Northfield’s proposals to annex land from Greenvale Township and build an industrial park. All the materials I have posted about the proposals will soon be presented together on a Web page linked through LocallyGrownNorthfield.org. As I move on to cover other stories, I encourage discussion to continue on this important matter. In the eyes of some Northfielders, the city is down by two, at least. Dundas, a smaller city on the southwest border, claimed the College City Beverage expansion in 2006. Prior to expansion, College City held a Northfield address. Faribault, a sometimes rival city 13 miles south, approved Malt-O-Meal‘s plans to erect a warehouse just beyond its city limits in 2008. Malt-O-Meal, with its large plant off State Highway 19 in Northfield, is one of Northfield’s largest employers. Watching the hometown players grow elsewhere was hard for those hoping for economic growth in Northfield. Consequently, citizens are now faced with a difficult decision: Deciding how much risk they’re willing to take to make the city shine in the eyes of attractive industrial developers. “I think that we have not been very aggressive at pursuing opportunities to grow,” Richard Estenson, spokesman for Northfield’s Economic Development Authority, said in late September. “So, my role has been in trying to build a consensus around having yet another piece of land large enough for companies that are here now and need to grow and those that are looking for communities to grow in.” In response to that widely shared perception, city officials have been looking for opportunities, and in August, negotiations began in earnest on a proposal to annex 530 acres of farmland from adjoining Greenvale Township, with the hope of marketing the site to one or more industrial developers. In a city unused to playing the offense, the plan spurred debate among citizens. And some conflict sparked too among residents of Greenvale, which lies northwest of the city. Greenvale supervisors and some residents are concerned about what the township will lose in the annexation, and they are skeptical about ceding valuable land to a city that might not find a use for it for decades. According to Joel Walinski, Northfield’s interim city administrator, the practice of priming land for development without having a single interested developer is atypical for Northfield. But there were also unusual opportunities associated with the plan. Namely, three Greenvale farmers, represented by real estate agency Land Vista LLC, approached city officials about two years ago to apply for annexation before the city even had to ask. The land they offered, with the addition of a small parcel Saint Olaf College agreed to have annexed, would form a contiguous stretch of land bordered to the south by a rural portion of State Highway 19 (see map in previous posts). “We really don’t have any end users in sight,” Walinski said late in September, talking about the proposed business park. “I do believe part of it is, there are probably a number of developers that are sitting back and watching the Northfield process because they have seen things go on here in the past where it has been a struggle, quite frankly, for businesses to move in. They’re waiting to see, ‘Is the city going to take some steps, or not take some steps?’ ” A few Northfield citizens are afraid taking advantage of the anticipated smooth annexation agreement with Greenvale could cause the city to take steps in the wrong direction, however. One of the main drawbacks to developing the site into an industrial park is its distance from a major highway, according to some residents. “Faribault is in close proximity to I-35, so vendors could easily get in and out with deliveries,” Bright Spencer said in an online discussion thread about the annexation and business park posted on LocallyGrownNorthfield.org and RepJNorthfield.org. “This is a huge reason, around the country, and for many decades, it’s not ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s ‘If you build it right off the expressway, they will come.’” Ross Currier, Northfield Downtown Development Corporation executive director and a former Northfield planning commissioner, has also expressed concern about transportation . He has said he would have preferred city administrators to come up with a transportation feasibility study before proceeding any further with the annexation and proposed park. In addition to questions about traffic flow, citizens and city government workers are still looking for answers to questions about finances, how to attract developers and which developers Northfield would like to attract. There are also some environmental concerns. “We are never going to get rid of all the risks,” Walinski said of the concerns about the proposed development. “I think a lot of it goes back to how much money we are going to spend on this. I don’t think that’s been determined yet. But I think we have to put those different options on the board and have the people decide.” As discussions about the city’s economic development continue through the upcoming elections, Estenson said there is yet another challenge he hopes to overcome. “Very candidly, I think we’re suffering right now from a lack of some leadership,” Estenson said of Northfield’s governance. “While I respect greatly the role civic leaders play and how much work is involved, it’s too chaotic for people to have confidence in what is going on. We need the people who are true leaders to show themselves as true leaders.” To a certain extent, that chaos could be an remnant, however, of the philosophy of John North, who founded the city in 1855. “His vision was that concerned citizens from all walks of life would come together for the betterment of the community,” said Daniel Freeman, a local historian who spent much of his career as the proprietor of several downtown businesses. Freeman, an advocate for the development of the business park, said he sees Greenvale farmers, Saint Olaf College and Northfield citizens coming together to create an opportunity in the land deal. He said sometimes, however, Northfield’s affinity for discourse can linger too long in the discussion phase, and then, he said, decisions “don’t get made.” Mayoral Candidate Mary Rossing spoke with me downtown last week.
Mayoral Candidate Eduardo Wolle spoke with me in his office on Friday morning.
Paul Hager spoke with me on Friday afternoon in a Carleton College classroom, where he works as a Technical Director in the Cinema and Media Studies program.
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