All posts in the topic HRA appointment process troubling, for 6/16/08 council meeting (Short link)
Summary
- There are 4 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Dick Houck at Jun 16 18:27 UTC
I find the current Roseville Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA)
appointment process to be more troubling than it typically has been in the
past. And that's saying a lot in light of past history.
In just the past three years, the process has been chaotic and ethically
challenged at best. In this short time there are several issues that should
concern those who have an interest in an honest and open process. They are
as follows:
1. The Roseville Review reported a quote from one of Mr. Klausing's
future appointees who claimed that he was promised the seat several months
before there was an opening.
2. Housing inspector Joe Schueneman was essentially dismissed from the
commission without explanation which later turned out to have been done to
create an opening for the appointee mentioned in item #1.
3. An attempt was made to appoint a person to a position before the
public was allowed to submit applications.
4. Mr. Klausing has denied citizens an interview opportunity even
though Mr. Klausing ran on a campaign platform that everyone would be
interviewed, and voted for this in a council resolution dated December 6,
2004, and even made several grandstanding speeches on this subject in 2002
and 2003.
5. Mr. Klausing attempted to appoint someone for two consecutive
terms, over the objections of some council members, which I think most
people would believe fails the smell test no matter what the situation is.
6. A citizen was appointed even though their application was not
submitted by the deadline. This is interesting because the Roseville Review
has an article from the late 1990's where Mr. Klausing is complaining about
the city council at that time deciding to extend application deadlines when
they didn't like the candidates who applied (which included him). This is
essentially the same end result as him now accepting applications after the
deadline.
The recent concerns about the current appointment process go back a few
weeks.
Last week (6/9/08), there was a vote scheduled for an appointment to the
HRA. As is typically the case with Mr. Klausing, no name was mentioned in
the council packet distributed to the public 3 days before the meeting.
Apparently it is a state secret. Note that Mr. Klausing in the last two to
three years has not been very willing to disclose his selections for any of
these commission appointments. He didn't disclose his choices for the
appointment of Tom Kough's council seat until a day or two AFTER the council
vote was taken.
So it surprised me at last week's council meeting that Mr. Klausing was
asking for a delay until 6/16/08. Klausing said, "I am going to pull the
HRA appointment. I don't want to proceed this evening. I would like to get
the name in the packet so I will get it off to staff by Wednesday (6/11/08)
so everybody could see who my recommended appointment is before the council
meeting." So could he have turned over a new leaf and he truly wanted to
share this name with the public instead of springing it on everyone 2
seconds before the vote?
Well I looked in the packet posted on the internet on 6/13/08 for the
meeting tomorrow (6/16/08), to see if Mr. Klausing followed through with his
promise and I got my answer. NO NAME LISTED, promise not fulfilled.
I would like to share my frank opinion on what I think is going on here.
Based upon conversations with several other knowledgeable people who watched
the meeting last week, we believe that the claim of delaying in order to put
the name in the council packet was simply a ruse.
What we believe to be the case, and this follows the past actions of Mr.
Klausing, is that he has been working outside of the meeting, contacting
council members by telephone, in order to arrange the votes for some
particular person he wants to appoint to the HRA. He doesn't want a repeat
of the embarrassing rejection of an appointment he recommended a year ago.
Yes after Mr. Klausing brought it back for a revote one or two more times,
finally it passed, but overall it was a major embarrassment.
He did not have enough time to appropriately twist the arms of some council
members in time for last week's meeting. So he came up with this ruse of
wanting the name in the council packet, something he has never insisted upon
anytime during his term as mayor, as an excuse to get more time to do more
arm twisting.
So now we have a council packet for tomorrow's meeting (6/16/08) and I
suspect that Mr. Klausing will have successfully arranged the vote prior to
the start of the meeting. Most certainly Amy Ihlan will be cut out of the
process, which she has indicated has occurred several times. (at least that
keeps her out of the ethical problems I have outlined below) Since the vote
has been prearranged, there will only be meaningless window dressing type of
discussion about the person they plan to appoint, in order to make it look
like this is all happening in the public eye.
I guess I wonder where the ethical line is drawn on the issue of what kinds
of public business should be done in the public eye. Is doing telephone
calling to prearrange a vote on a commission appointment crossing that line?
Does doing this essentially make council discussion of the candidates at a
public meeting, prior to the vote to appoint, a meaningless exercise?
We saw with the Davanni's alcohol issue that changing a council report a few
hours before a council meeting and not sharing it with the public,
apparently raises no ethical concerns with council members and the city
manager, so I guess that the apparent HRA appointment process outlined above
can't be much worse, right?
John M. Kysylyczyn
K Solutions LLC, owner
3083 Victoria Street
Roseville, MN 55113
email: <email obscured>
home office: (651) 484-1384
www.ksolutionsllc.com
Mayor of Roseville, MN 2000-2004
in my opinion, the HRA should just be abolished, and former Mayor John K., i
wish you would never have created the HRA. so far it has mainly been a way to
create a slush fund for pet projects of the city council. it has also been a
mechanism for raising additional taxes outside of the general levy, even though
the general levy has had very large percentage increases in the last few years.
the HRA has been a way to hide city expenses that in the past were part of the
general budget and are now outside of the general budget.
recently, HRA levy money was used to pay for a large percentage of the
unbudgeted visioning process even though housing was a very small percentage of
the visioning process. HRA money should only have paid for the housing part of
visioning.
the HRA levy is being used to pay a large percentage of at least one regular
city employee, and i wonder if the percentage of their salary that the HRA pays
for is equal to the percentage of their time spent on HRA work.
now, it is being proposed that HRA money be used to pay for part of this
planned intrusion in our private property rights by having inspectors go
through every neighborhood of roseville looking for possible code volations,
rather than waiting until someone files a complaint as has worked just fine in
roseville for decades.
we've all heard about the "nanny state" that the state legislature seems to
want to create in minnesota, now it seems with rental licensing and inspectors
combing through our neighborhoods, that our city "leaders" want to create a
"nanny city" in roseville. since city "leaders" feel they know what is best for
us even if we don't agree, how long will it be before they find a way for
police officers to start inspecting the inside of our homes. i believe it won't
take long for them to find some justification for that.
every time we voluntarily give up a right, it just snowballs until we don't
have any rights left.
so, let's end the HRA, end the rental licensing and end the neighborhood
inspections without complaints. all of these just cost us more tax money which
should be staying in our own pockets during these trying economic times and are
just more unnecessary intrusions into our private lives.
Unfortunately the decision at the time wasn't whether to spend money on housing
type programs or not. If it had, I may not have been in support of creating
the HRA.
When I first sat in the mayor's seat in 2000, the city was spending thousands
of dollars on housing type programs with no citizen, and practically no elected
official oversight. The staff came to the council once a year for what I
thought was about a 15-30 minute presentation and then a vote to rank 5 general
categories as to how we wanted money to be spent. The whole process was a
joke.
Some of the programs were also a joke, but on the other hand some were very
worthy. Then during this same time, there were some changes in the law so you
could no longer overcharge people for building permits in order to fund these
programs. So for the good programs, another funding source was needed.
So the challenge was how do you get some oversight by the people, and how do
you get a funding source that was not some bottomless taxpayer hole, both at
the same time. Well the answer was to create a Housing Redevelopment
Authority.
Now we have citizen and elected official oversight over housing programs,
spending probably 30 hours of meeting time per year, plus time outside of
official meetings. That was an improvement over the 30 MINUTES a year that was
spent previously.
In the money category, we got a separate tax levy for the HRA which is capped
at approximately $550,000 a year. Now they have never levied to the cap, but
there is a cap. That cap adjusts with the market value of the city. Since
this is not buried within the city's regular tax levy, the cost is easier to
follow.
Now if the city council had a cap like that on our city budget, we wouldn't
probably have had 5 years of increases at two or three times the rate of
inflation. We certainly wouldn't be faced with a potential 8% tax increase
this year.
When I take all these factors into account, I believe that the three of us who
created the HRA, (myself, Mr. Schroeder, and Mr. Kough), would consider it a
success.