by Tom Driscoll
The wind squeaks. Rusty oaks litter rutted
deer trails with wet potato peelings. Saw a fat doe at dusk the other day
limping on a foreleg broken at the knee. Screwball fall. Dark all day. Beans
moldy in muddy fields. River’s up in Rushford, and smells like more rain.
Odd Year Election
In a little town, day-after-day-after-day,
the same cars and trucks slow and roll through the same solitary stoplight at
the same downtown crossroads hemmed by the same whispering storefronts and the
same empty buildings staring off into space like cattle, the same grouching
corn drier and the same beer truck double-parked in front of the same
dowdy-looking restaurant right at noon when the same siren shatters the daily
drone of rural commerce, and the same tradesmen in camouflage vests and the
same nurses and dental technicians wearing color-coordinated uniforms and
comfortable shoes and practical hairdos walk in front of traffic across the
same highway for lunch.
There is such a crockpot-like slow-simmering,
self-similar congruity to late-October noon in a small town you might be
inclined to think that everything tossed into that community soup and cooked
down to mush would all taste the same. Not so, at least not politically, not in
Rushford slightly more than 2-years after the great Rush Creek flood nearly
wiped this non-descript little town off the southeast Minnesota map.
Retired State Patrol lieutenant Les Ladewig
was the Mayor of Rushford the weekend of August 17-19, 2007 when 17-inches of
rain fell and wreaked havoc throughout Winona, Houston and Fillmore counties.
Roiling floodwaters topped levees that had protected Rushford for 30-years and
poured into the low-lying central business district and adjacent neighborhoods
with curious names like Brooklyn and Jerusalem.
Residents will not soon forget the noon
sirens going off at 4-a.m.. Police stopped in rising water at the stoplight,
yelling into a bullhorn for residents to evacuate their homes.
Firefighters in boats rescued people from
second-story windows and from holes chopped in roofs. Before daylight Sunday,
Mayor Ladewig and Fillmore County Sheriff Daryl Jensen set up a command post on
an island of high-ground in the Rushford City Hall-Library building. When the rain
stopped, the clouds remained. Gray clouds and smelly brown water. The flood
destroyed nearly 280 single-family residences, 40-apartment units, many of them
senior-housing, 35-manufactured homes, 70-businesses and 5-churches.
In the hectic weeks after the flood local
business owners wrangled with FEMA and state disaster officials over damage
estimates. Governor Tim Pawlenty wrangled with mainly-DFL lawmakers over
whether-or-not to convene a special session of the legislature to craft a flood
recovery package.
Meanwhile, 2,500-people-per-day at it’s peak,
displaced residents, flood clean-up volunteers, politicians, network camera
crews and reporters gathered at Montini Hall in St. Joseph’s Catholic Church
for hot meals, bottled water and community support. No one was sure what would
become of Rushford, and Mayor Ladewig became the face and voice of the Rushford
recovery effort.
How odd now, 26-months later,
tens-of-millions of dollars and tens-of-thousands of volunteer-hours expended,
after countless weeks of special council meetings, months of nothing but flood
recovery, day-after-day-after-day, to find the 63-year-old Ladewig in possibly
the most contentious and arguably the closest race of his public service
career.
Chris Hallum is challenging Ladewig. A member
of the 1989 State Class-A Champion Rushford basketball team, current president
of the Rushford Area Society for the Arts, frequent leading man in community
theater productions and, since the flood, a vocal critic of flood-recovery
decisions and policies, the 39-year-old Hallum promises to listen to residents,
weigh their concerns before making decisions, something he says Ladewig has
failed to do.
If Mayor Ladewig was the public face of the
flood disaster, City administrator Windy Block was the architect of recovery.
And though nobody is saying it publicly, but this odd-year election is really a
referendum on Block.
The City administrator doesn’t live in
Rushford, a source of grievance for some because he doesn’t pay Rushford
property taxes. Block rents an apartment and commutes 3-hours home to
Montevideo on weekends. According to opponents, Block’s many spending plans are
going to tax businesses and home-owners right out of the town they love. The
administrator counters that future growth depends on public investment now.
Block, the council, EDA and other commissions
like library, airport, electric utility all propose capital investment and
spending plans as if Federal, State and philanthropic funds still fill local
coffers.
Critics of new spending argue that local
tax-payers, especially retirees on fixed-incomes, can’t afford
Ladewig-and-Block’s wish list of street and sewer improvements, waste water
treatment upgrades, new library, new City Hall, new 600-seat community center,
new airport hangers, expanded electric distribution, publicly-financed
infrastructure for a tax-abated motel north of downtown, and of course
operation and maintenance costs for these installations.
As this odd year campaign winds down to
Tuesday’s election, Chris Hallum and his supporters say that City Hall spending
is out of control and that Mayor Ladewig has to go. Many in the electorate hear
an implicit promise, that once Ladewig is no longer Mayor Block will either
serve dutifully at the pleasure of a politically realigned mayor-council team
or he will be sacked.
Les
Ladewig, who served on the school board for 11-years as well as on the City
council before becoming Mayor in May-2006,
doesn’t bother to criticize his opponent, instead he lists all of the
unfinished business he plans to attend to after he is reelected Mayor of
Rushford.
Photo by Tom Driscoll, of Windy Block (foreground), Les
Ladewig (center) and recovery program manager Chuck Pettipiece testifying at
the Capitol before a Senate panel looking into flood relief for Rushford,
October 2007.
Read about and see photos of last week’s candidate
forum in Rushford.
Minnesota writer Tom
Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural
America at The Small of America. He
can be reached at [email protected].
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