North Kato: We do cooperate

More collaboration urged by group

By Mark Fischenich

NORTH MANKATO — North Mankato officials don’t see themselves as obstinate loners. Neither does the group Southern Minnesota Advocates.

But SMA, a Mankato-based group that promotes regional cooperation, is concerned that North Mankato is withdrawing from cooperative efforts and scheduled a special meeting aimed at “bringing North Mankato to the collaborative table.”

City Councilwoman Diane Norland mentioned the Advocates invitation at a June council meeting, noting that she wouldn’t be able to attend.

“I wasn’t invited, but I’m planning to go anyway,” Mayor Gary Zellmer said.

SMA had initially invited just some North Mankato officials but eventually invited the entire council and City Administrator Wendell Sande.

Zellmer later said the meeting at South Central College was based on an inaccurate belief that North Mankato isn’t open to working with other local governments and area institutions.

“That’s one of the huge misconceptions, that we’re not cooperating with other people,” Zellmer said.

The city most recently dropped out of the local joint economic development organization, Greater Mankato Growth and the related Convention and Visitors Bureau. It had previously withdrawn from the Traverse des Sioux Library System that all other municipal libraries in the region belong to and that is designed to foster the sharing of materials between libraries.

The city also chose not to send a representative to a regional planning retreat held in Chaska earlier this year. And it is resisting agreeing to an unspecified financial contribution to a multi-jurisdictional monitoring effort of the Mount Simon Aquifer to measure whether the region’s largest water source is being depleted.

Zellmer quickly points to places where the city is cooperating, including in the Highway 14 Partnership, the Envision 2020 planning process, an effort to revitalize the city centers of Mankato and North Mankato and more.

Randy Berkland, the chairman of Southern Minnesota Advocates, said the group knows North Mankato collaborates in many cases. A former member of the Mankato School Board, Berkland said the city has been a great collaborator with the school district.

But Berkland said attendance at the meeting topped 40 people, providing evidence of worries in the community that North Mankato was withdrawing from regional efforts.

“I think they recognize that there’s concern out there,” he said of city officials. “The fact that we called a special meeting to talk about it wasn’t lost on them.”

SMA, which promotes cooperative efforts to boost the fortunes of the entire region, wants North Mankato to rejoin Greater Mankato Growth. The intent of the meeting, however, was a broader invitation to be more engaged in regional efforts.

“We felt it was worth the effort to hold a meeting or two,” Berkland said. “... Just attempting to keep communications open.”

The first meeting included a strong attempt by North Mankato to refute the notion that there’s a problem.

Zellmer, speaking after the meeting, said he explained why the city withdrew from its GMG contract.

“We weren’t getting what we wanted and had to try something different,” he said.

As for the regional retreat in Chaska, the city has participated in previous retreats and considered them valuable. But city officials thought it was a mistake for this year’s event to be held outside of the Mankato area when the economy is in a deep recession, Zellmer said. A better choice would have been to spend those dollars locally.

“We took a stand,” he said.

And the aquifer study was similar. It’s an unfunded state mandate at a time when a similar study that was already funded by the state could have provided the necessary monitoring, according to Zellmer.

“What we were doing was questioning why there was two studies,” he said.

Berkland said the meeting resulted in “an honest airing of how we see the world.”

Now and then, two sides will see the world very differently, something Berkland said he’s witnessed as an attorney.

“I sometimes try lawsuits about a traffic accident and you couldn’t even tell the people were at the same intersection,” he said.

At this point, a second meeting between SMA and North Mankato hasn’t been scheduled.