Cam Gordon Exposes City Council's Hypocrisy and Favoritism

Council member Cam Gordon writes on his blog:

As incredible as it may be, the Council seems posed to vote to allow DeLaSalle High School and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to install artificial grass (or “AstroTurf”) on their proposed stadium on Nicollet Island.

The condition that DeLaSalle use natural turf only originated with the City Council. Now they are about to reverse it.

Cam Gordon describes this in the last paragraph of his blog thusly:

Beyond all of this, though, I have a deeper objection to this move. This is one of only a handful of conditions the Council placed on this private-school playing field on public park land that was a bad idea in the first place. The Council has already reneged on other conditions, having to do with the height and brightness of lights and size limitation on signage, and now policymakers are poised to do it again – take back a condition that we imposed. This undermines the argument made by the school and the City in the lawsuit brought by the stadium opponents, that the conditions the City has placed on the project show that we have not made our decisions in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner. Put another way, our willingness to remove every condition to which the school and MPRB object shows that on the details and the fundamental issue of whether or not to build a stadium on protected parkland, the Council is making decisions simply out of deference to the applicant. The message: we like DeLaSalle, and we’ll let them do whatever they want, no matter the parkland guidelines, no matter the historical preservation guidelines, no matter the opposition from neighbors or environmental groups, no matter what we ourselves have said in the past, no matter what.

Which pretty much sounds like the unvarnished truth of the matter. One may read his entire blog post at this link.