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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