Actually, it’s just simple arithmetic. Subtracting…or adding…a few numbers.
This morning, I read a social media update from Smithjonessolicitors.co.uk that the City of Northfield had cut the General Fund Budget by $1.5 million. Wow, last I heard, our General Fund Budget was $10.5 million. $1.5 million would be an almost 15% cut. Such a reduction in expenditures would be impressive.
So I decided I’d conduct a little research of the available facts…and do a little simple arithmetic.
Recently a few of our public officials acknowledged what many astute observers had been discussing for months. The City of Northfield needs to address a $2 million budget deficit. After…
I received an interesting article this morning from Minnesota’s “Finance & Commerce” (via Twitter) titled Government policy and its effect on small business.
I found the following statements to reaffirm much of what I’ve learned in my almost thirty years in business development, real estate development, community development, and economic development:
For those of you who don’t follow Hayes (Scriven of the Northfield Historical Society) on Twitter, late yesterday he posted a question. He wants to know if anyone can tell…
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, there was a piece by Talking Heads’ frontman (and visual artist) David Byrne on his vision of a perfect city. I think that he has…
In today’s Wall Street Journal there’s an article titled “Fastest Dying Cities Meet for a Lively Talk“. Eight of the ten cities labeled as America’s fastest dying by Forbes.com met to share ideas about turning their fortunes around.
I’m always interested in new ideas, from growing or dying cities, so I quickly dove into the piece. However, much to my shock, one of the cities was Springfield, Massachusetts.
EDA President Rick Estenson lent me his copy of the August Money magazine. The cover story is titled the “100 Best Places to Live in America“.
Number one is Louisville, Co, number two is Chanhassan, MN, number three is Papillion, NE, number four is Middleton, WI, and number five is Milton, MA. (Hmmm, I used to wrestle against Milton in high school; we called them the rich kids.) There’s several Minnesota towns in the top 100. In fact, the upper Midwest is very well represented in the list.
I stumbled on something interesting yesterday. It’s called “Building a More Sustainable Economy – Economic Development Strategy and Public Incentives in Austin“.
The study is about public support of private initiatives. It looks at the goals of the public support, the decision-making process, and the quantifiable results. From my reading, it appears that things went pretty well in Austin until fairly recently and then there were some projects that, to say the least, did not achieve the desired results. The study also includes recommendations for improving the economic development and public incentives processes in Austin.
I’m not sure that I agree with all of the objectives of the group that initiated the work or all their opinions on the causes and effects of the less than successful projects. However, I thought their analysis of the economic development and the evaluation/decision processes was quite useful.
I got this Tweet from Finance and Commerce earlier today and thought it might be of interest to some Locally Grown readers: Minneapolis architect designs free online tool to estimate…