Fighting City Hall. They say you can’t fight city hall and win, but residents of Invergrove Heights, Minnesota recently proved getting involved in your community has a big pay off. Unelected planning councils, county planning commissions, and other layers of local, regional and state government can sometimes be daunting. There are a lot of complaints about the heavy hand of government, and you often hear the words, “I would get involved but it never does any good anyway”. A group of residents in “InverGrove” as it is called, found out they were going to lose their homes through Eminent Domain Condemnation when they learned the county planned to build a 6 lane highway right on top of their homes. Homeowners gathered, organized, learned the details, suggesting solutions. Moreover, they learned to work together. Sometimes partisanship can be a great thing, but sometimes the ‘my way or the highway’ approach literally means, the highway. Learn how these people worked the system to a ‘win-win’, and how compromise isn’t always a dirty word. The question is whether this kind of approach can be applied to bigger problems in bigger cities; Invergrove Heights is a suburban city of about thirty two thousand people. The moral of the story? Faceless councils and bureaucrats make decisions for communities that are often simply guidelines, and they’re adopted because no one says anything. You can alter these plans if you get involved. Hear how they did it, in their own words. By the way, yes we can cover local stories from the road, this time in Amarillo, Texas! Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul. 

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