Richfield's Wreck-A-Home Regime Strikes Again!

Now Richfield has to tear down 18 houses AND pay $5.7 million to rebuild 66th Street?

I used to think Richfield was a Lakota word that meant tear down more houses. Not anymore. Not after hearing about the city’s latest reconstruction scheme.

Now I know Richfield is just another code word that anal-retentive deconstructionists use when they mean build more bike paths.

In case you’re wondering about Richfield’s latest sacrifice for the greater good of urban living, here’s a little synopsis. But it’s not the version from City Hall. Forget about the carefully-worded, PR-conscientious, city-approved account of our Urban Hometown’s latest demolition. Here’s the truth.

Because of the ever-growing population in the Twin Cities Metro area and the lousy engineering of crowded Crosstown 62 nearby, a lot of drivers have started getting off the highway and getting onto the residential thoroughfare we all know and love as 66th Street.

That’s right. A lot of drivers have started using 66th Street (also a county road) in Richfield’s backyard, near an established residential area. And I do mean A LOT of drivers. And they’re driving A LOT more vehicles than 66th Street was initially designed to accommodate — possibly up to 20,000 cars and trucks each day now use it as an alternative route.

Needless to say, not all of these 20,000 vehicles belong to Richfield residents. Thanks to airport expansion and systematic teardowns disguised as “Urban Renewal,” our dwindling population numbers less than 20,000. Although no scientific study has ever been made, we can safely assume that most of these drivers now using 66th Street live outside the city limits of Richfield.

In other words, people from other suburbs have now created a big mess that Richfield has been strong-armed — once more — into cleaning up.

So now Richfield is stuck with paying $5.7 million dollars for making the demolition known as Concept 4B a reality.

But hey, some federal funding and county money for the project are coming in, too. More importantly, Richfield will get even more bike paths! Yay!

Before even looking at the artist’s conceptual of the Concept 4B plan, I knew the latest redesign had to do with building more bike paths. How could I have possibly known that? Easy. If you live here long enough, you learn there’s no difference between the city’s s**t and shinola when it comes to destruction and renovation.

If you know anything about the history of Minnesota’s oldest suburb, you’ll immediately recognize this “urban redevelopment” as all too familiar B.S. in the M.O. It’s just the same old, same old story between another all-powerful entity and our gutless Richfield City Mothers and Fathers who keep trying to call the shots but always fail. They just can’t say no to the powerful outsiders.

In this case, they couldn’t say no to coughing up nearly six million dollars to solve a problem that was never Richfield’s responsibility in the first place.

Richfield always goes along with whatever the outsiders want, even at the expense of its own residents and residential areas.

Contrast our city’s unconditional accommodation with the unified vigilance of St. Louis Park or Highland Park. Any threat to their residents meets with immediate resistance and legal defiance. Their attitude is simple: We’re residents living in a residential area, and you can’t push us around. That goes for the MAC, MnDOT, X-cel Energy, and any other outsider who wants to mess with their residential neighborhoods.

Thinking of rerouting flight paths overhead? Planning on building the light rail line in our backyards? Not going to deliver the electrical energy you were contracted to provide? Go ahead, try to do any of these things…then get ready for the fight of your life.

In those suburbs, they protect their own. Not in Richfield, though. Here, City Council members Garcia, Sandahl, and Fitzhenry care more about making points with outside forces than with helping the residents who elected them into office. Let’s hope the dissenters of this project will start searching for legal loopholes to save the 18 homes in question and get out of paying $5.7 million dollars for such unwanted destruction. This means you, Mayor Debbie Goettel, and you, Councilman Pat Elliot.

Elliot was actually quoted in the “Star Tribune” (December 10, 2014) as having “harsh words for county and state traffic engineers…” But for my money, he wasn’t harsh enough:

“To me, it’s disconcerting…that 18 homes have to go so we can accommodate Hennepin County and the incompetent engineers that developed Crosstown 62, that doesn’t serve the traffic it’s supposed to,” Elliot said.

“Those inadequacies and those inefficiencies on the engineering side with the county and MnDOT put us in a position where we’re backed into a corner. And I don’t appreciate it and I’m not willing to sacrifice 18 homes to do that,” he said.

But just wait. As long as we’re in Richfield, more “sacrifices” will be in store for us.