City of Brooklyn Park: Business Initiative meeting very encouraging

After attending one of the three "Businss Forward" initiative meetings this week I am encouraged that our city may finally be ready to make the changes necessary to move us in the right direction.  That direction would be to make our city more business friendly, ready for job growth when the economy recovers.

The three issues that kept coming up were exactly the issues I've been discussing in this space for a year or more:

1) Over regulation.  Get city government out of the way and let business do what they do.  Part of that is changing the attitude from the city council down to the lowest city worker to be more friendly and understanding to what makes our city do well.  That is successful businesses, job growth, and a vibrant local economy.

2) Crime.  Crime is real, it's not a perception.  And part of fixing that is taking the issue seriously and prosecuting criminals instead of plea bargaining everything away.

Did you know that Brooklyn Park will not prosecute a gas theft?  Yep, you don't have to pay for gas if you don't want to because our city prosecutor won't "waste his time" on "civil" thefts.  In Anoka County the sheriff shows up at your door within 20 minutes to demand payment, in Brooklyn Park it goes in a file.  That from the owner of a number of gas stations through out the northern metro who was at the Wednesday meeting.

In my opinion, our city prosecutor has harmed our city by not taking our crime problem seriously.  He's soft on crime.  For a city prosecutor in a city like ours, we can't afford a person in that position that doesn't have the wisdom to know when to prosecute real crimes.  His contract is up at the end of this year and he needs to be replaced.  You will know which council members are actually serious about crime by how they vote when the contract comes up for renewal.  I'm getting "radio silence" from some elected officials on the issue and that concerns me.  These same people campaigned on crime being a serious and supporting this person for contract renewal would be a violation of their campaign promises.  Change needs to happen in this area and finding someone new would be a major step in the right direction.

3) Image.  The fact is, our image is based in reality.  We can no longer bury our heads and say "the image people have about us is wrong" because it's not, we have crime, high foreclosures, an unfriendly business environment and more.  That's not to say our city isn't a great place to live because it is.  I've lived here for 27 years and that's on purpose.  But we don't need happy talk, we need a frank family discussion about the reality.  And the reality is, we need to fix these issues before our image will change.

We need an Image Rapid Response team to counter negative media stories.  We need residents to contact media outlets en masse when there are negative stories about us to let them know what we're all about.  As we fix our problems, because they can be fixed, that image will start to change.  What I want to see is a front page story in the Star Tribune with the headline:  "Brooklyn Park throws off old image, now the "in" place to live and work".

We need to stop worrying about being politically correct and get to the bottom of the issues facing our city.  Crime isn't rich or poor, black or white, or any other us vs. them thing.  Crime is about people thinking they can get by with it and only getting a slap on the wrist.  Seriously prosecute crimes and send a message to others that we're not going to take it anymore.

What was encouraging from the BI meeting I attended was that people shared these same frustrations and weren't afraid to say so.  These people weren't the usual city suspects that show up at every meeting, these were business people from around our city.  Most of them were people I'd never seen in the years of attending city meetings of all kinds.  As average people just trying to make their businesses work here, it was encouraging to see that we all shared the same frustrations along with many of the same solutions.  If they city really wants to make changes they will take these areas very, very seriously.