Crown Hydro Insults Minneapolis Park Board, Rejects Proposal as Unreasonable

The public comment portion of the Minneapolis Park Board meeting kicked off last night with the representative of Crown Hydro leading off his remarks with a scathing, indirect insult:

"When I first became involved with this project I was told it was a fools errand...that trust in the Minneapolis Park Board is trust misplaced."

He then went on to reject the Park Board's revised proposal as "not commercially viable" and "not commercially reasonable".

When it was my turn to speak I offered the following to the Board:

President Erwin, Commissioners,

My name is David Tinjum, thank you for allowing me to speak tonight on the topic of Crown Hydro.

This project has changed dramatically subsequent to the last board meeting on May 4, 2011.

In some regards you have made great strides to clarify and mitigate troubling aspects of this project - I commended you for your work.

However, more work remains, not the least of which is creating an up-to-date financial analysis of the proposed joint venture.

I'm here to ask you to table this resolution until such time you have performed due diligence commensurate with the scale, complexity and risk this project represents.

Thank you

The Board, which was scheduled to vote on the proposal, instead passed a motion removing the issue from the agenda.

What does this mean for the project?  At this point it's too early to tell.  Crown Hydro could just go away, but given the history of this project, that seems unlikely.  They could take legal action against the Board.  or, they could continue their efforts at the State House and Senate to pass a bill forcing the park Board to give them Nationally Historic Parkland under threat of having their funding cut off.

Stay tuned.  On Monday we'll publish an in-depth breakdown of the project and the "unreasonable" proposal from the Park Board.

Update on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 1:03PM by David Tinjum

Clarification to quote from Crown Hydro representative, based on the video transcript of the meeting:

"when we engaged in this conversation back in March, there were a lot of people who told me that trying to work out a deal on this project is a fool's errand and it'll never get done...any trust placed in the Park Board is missplaced..."

View the video of the meeting...