Living in Roseville is a trip sometimes. After all, there was a successful campaign a few years back to ouster our Mayor who now harasses the current city council with the tenacity of an angered wolverine. And it wasn’t too long ago when, despite hefty public outcry from the rest of our neighborhood who attended several meetings at the city hall, a developer tore down a beautiful section of woods in what ended up being customer-designed houses (as opposed to the “dual-living units” that they originally wanted). Never you mind that one of the council members was looking to purchase one of the parcel of land to build a home on, which I think constitutes a certain level of conflict of interest.
But hey — nobody’s perfect. And that brings me to the mail I received recently.
Our city is exercising a pilot program called “The Neighborhood Enhancement Program”, which I find to be hilarious. The program, ostensibly, is to get people to adhere to the city charter and it’s litany of gated-community-like requirements. Some of these requirements are common courtesy types of things; IE don’t leave cars parked on the lawn, don’t leave trash about you property, etc. However some rules are just moronic. Example: You are not allowed to leave your garbage can in view from the street unless it’s refuse collection day. This leads to neighbors turning stool pigeon on neighbors and that leads to poor community spirit. And during one of the many, many rants available for viewing at the Roseville Issues Forum, the former mayor actually ran aground of very blatant truth: The City Hall doesn’t meet half of the requirements they intend to now enforce.
My letter was about some boxes that I was too lazy to take care of. They’re gone now, but I eagerly await what this new program has in store in the future. Why? Well as it turns out the City Council wouldn’t allow me to challenge my supposed violation directly to the city council if I wanted to. Yay for democracy and due process.
Meanwhile, as Roseville along with many other cities across the nation struggles with budget constraints to afford arbitrary and totally not politically motivated “inspections” of its citizens’ properties (like, totally), it seems that Roseville School District cannot afford to bring my daughter to middle school next year. In a form letter, that one assumes went out to a great deal of people, I was told that since my daughter lived within 2 miles of the school she would attend for 7th grade, and even went as far as to quote me the MN State Statutes on such, that if we wanted a bus, we’d have to pay for it. For the record, the letter states that we live 1.92 miles from her school.
Now, apart from the fact that they want my daughter to walk along a major city thoroughfare and cross over a dilapidated bridge over a major highway in order to get to school, a quick Google Maps search quickly ascertains that the distance she needs to travel is, in fact, 2.1 miles. Not to be picky of course, but since I was 8 hundredths of a mile within their measurements and want to take a few hundred from my pocket, I figure throwing that one tenth of a mile back in their face is more than justified.
But it’s definitely got me to thinking about the law on the books. And so I’ve sent notification to my State Senator John Marty as well as my State Representative Mindy Greiling (whose daughter I attended high school with, and who also happens to be the chair of the the House K-12 Finance Division Committee) to see if I can get their attention on the matter. Because it seems to me, during a time of economic hardship, that leaving families with the option of paying money they probably don’t have in their budget or forcing their child to walk along busy streets is tad bit ludicrous. And it ties directly to the arbitrary distance of two miles, not taking into account that two miles where one person lives can be vastly different from two miles where someone else lives. And I don’t even live in northeast Minneapolis — I shudder to think what people there must be going through.
I am by no means the type of parent that shelters their child, I just think this is ridiculous. Not only should my 12 year-old daughter not be walking along busy roadways and across highways to get to school, I don’t think anybody’s child should have to do so. It used to be that children weren’t supposed to cross major streets when going to school — at least that’s how it was when I was growing up. I think it should be that way again.
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