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Interview with Sharon Sayles Belton

Interviewed by Linda Mack

November 17, 2008

Minneapolis Riverfront Redevelopment Oral History Project Sharon Sayles Belton - SB Linda Mack - LM LM: This is November 17, 2008 and I am with former Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton at the GMAC [Real Estate] Offices in Richfield, Minnesota. Tell me when you were mayor, exactly. SB: I was the mayor of Minneapolis from 1994 through 2001. I was elected in November 1993, took office in January, and then concluded my service on or about the first of January 2001. LM: I want to make sure we cover a couple of areas. One is really how you helped turn the city back toward the river. What were some crucial moments in that path? A question I’ve been asking most people when I start is what was your first kind of relationship to the river, or perhaps in your case, it’s more as a city council person. How did you decide to really turn your attention to the river? SB: All very good questions. First, let me tell you that I volunteered to be the chair of the City Zoning and Planning Committee. I wanted to chair that committee. I had an interest in planning, based on other positions that I had before coming to the city council, and I had an interest in zoning because of the issues that impacted the Eighth Ward. Lake Street runs through the Eighth Ward. If you remember what Lake Street looked like in 1984, Lake Street really was a commercial corridor that was going through transition, and it was also a corridor that was plagued by pornography. I understood that in order to change the face of and better plan for Lake Street that being on the Zoning and Planning Committee was going to be helpful. So I was very interested in serving on that committee. While on that committee, it was also important for me to understand where the city had been in the past with regard to planning and land use, not just for the Eighth Ward but city-wide, because my responsibilities were for the whole city on those topics. Obviously,

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that work created an opportunity for me to understand and to review other reports that had been developed by the city’s planning department in the past. There had been a committee that had been put together that represented a lot of different stakeholders along the river. Unfortunately, like a lot of reports, they’re well intentioned and they languish. Nothing happens with the reports. Good ideas, but without a champion, they’re just a nice report with a lot of good recommendations that don’t go anywhere. That’s one of the factors that contributed to my interest in the river. There was a second one. The second one had a lot to do with the fact that I also sat on the Community Development Committee [CDC] for the city. Again, this is going back to 1984 to 1994, so my involvement on the river started when I was elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 1984. LM: Yes. That’s a good point. SB: It is important to remember, because it speaks to the length of time in which I have been paying attention to the central riverfront and also the different reasons why I paid attention to the central riverfront. LM: Right. SB: So what I wanted to say was by serving on the Community Development Committee and also being on the Zoning and Planning Committee, I had the opportunity to kind of look at those things that had happened already in the central riverfront and to participate in the critical evaluation of why they were or were not successful. There was a major development that occurred on the central riverfront called Riverplace. Riverplace did not enjoy long-term success. It was a wonderful destination for a short period of time and everybody had great hopes for Riverplace. But Riverplace was not successful. One of the things that we had the opportunity to do is to think about what was going to make a community investment, like Riverplace or anything else that we might choose to do on the east bank, successful. I thought that the origin for finding what that success would look like rested in between the work of the Minneapolis Community Development Agency, which is the MCDA, and the work of the Zoning and Planning Committee. So that’s where we started looking for what went wrong and what we could do about it. My belief after reviewing . . . I don’t remember the name of the report anymore. There was a report that had been commissioned prior to 1984 and it included residents from northeast Minneapolis, people from Saint Anthony. Again, the report is there, so you can find it. In that committee, they talked about things that we could do to celebrate the historic Saint Anthony Falls area. It talked about the rich stories and the history of the city and the county and the state that were not being told. Many of the elements that we could use to interpret those stories were still there, but they were kind of lost in the decay and the dilapidation of the buildings that were currently lining the river, mostly on the west side, but still some, you know, on the east side.

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The other issue was what could we could we do to salvage the investment in Riverplace? That was really one of the big drivers. I think what I learned in reading the reports and talking with the professional staff and listening to the people at the Development Agency was that there was something that we failed to do as a city. I wasn’t on the city council then, so I don’t get to take all the blame for it. LM: [Chuckles] SB: It was still our responsibility to find a solution. What we failed to do when we made the investment in Riverplace was to really understand how much that river divided the east and the west bank, the CBD [Central Business District] from the east side. What we needed to do was we needed to find a way to close that gap. I very strongly believed that the way to close the gap between the Central Business District and the east bank and the investments that we had made along the east bank was to build up the west side of the riverfront. The best way to build up the west side of the riverfront, in my opinion, and the least costly in the short term, was to just bring people down there, to find ways to reintroduce the riverfront to the people of Minneapolis, to the CBD, to the citizens as a whole. The river in and of itself is a powerful tool to do that. So we just needed a cause, and the cause was the history. It didn’t take rocket science. It really was just a question of pulling information that was available that could be discerned from careful and thoughtful analysis, pulling it together and then developing a plan. Obviously, to develop the plan, you needed all of the stakeholders. Some of the stakeholders had been pulled together in this pre-1984 report, but whoever those stakeholders were, we did not believe that they were necessarily . . . I don’t want to say the right people, but we needed to have the right people around the table, people who could really buy into this vision of this partnership and then take ownership and responsibility for helping to make it happen. When you go back to the Zoning and Planning Committee agendas, and we probably had to go through the CD Committee, too, you’ll see the memoranda and the reports that were put together calling for the Heritage Board, the Interpretive Board. I don’t know what the original name for it was, but we created a resolution. We had a report first. We talked about who the right players were. Now, you’ve got to have the Minnesota Historical Society because their responsibility is to interpret the history of the state. The City of Minneapolis, we’ve got some history there, you know. They have access to resources, so they need to be a part of it. Hennepin County needed to be a part of it because Hennepin County is a player. In fact, Hennepin County actually, I believe, either owned one of the buildings on Nicollet Island, the Durkee . . . Remember the old Durkee? LM: Yes. SB: Or it was we were trying to get them to move the old museum up there on Third Avenue by the MIA [Minneapolis Institute of Arts], move that down to the Durkee. If you go back and look, you’ll actually see some committee reports that talk about the designation of the Durkee Atwood and our conversations with Hennepin County about the museum. We went up to the museum and did a review of the museum. We talked

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about the fact that they were underfunded. Nobody really knew all the history of Hennepin County . . . LM: It would still be great if they were there. [Chuckles] SB: It would still be great because it would be an opportunity for us to kind of build a critical mass of the interpretation of the region on the river. We had beautiful ideas. So we put together this committee: city council members, Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, citizens, members of the legislature, etc. We needed a lot of people to kind of buy into this because to bring this amount of resource into the area was going to be significant. We brainstormed all kinds of wild ideas that aren’t so wild today because they happened, which were to get people to be able walk across the Stone Arch Bridge, to light the Stone Arch Bridge, to unearth the ruins of the old flourmills at the river’s edge, because they’re there. If you go there today, they have been opened up to a degree, and you can see how the water flowed right into these mills and the power of that water then used to churn the generators, etc. We wanted the people to be able to see that. We got pretty darn close to that. It’s not as perfect as we envisioned it. A lot of things happened, including the fire. We were brainstorming big visions. We used those big visions to get people to buy into being on this committee, on this board, and then started breaking down that big vision into doable parts, one flowing into the next. One of the things that I really want to be sure I share with you is the fact that the vision was two-fold. Not only was it an opportunity for us to tell the story of our history and our heritage, but it also was to link the east and the west bank. If you think about it today, because we were able to link the east and the west bank, in my opinion, and create a destination for the river, it’s one of the reasons why we were successful in being able to attract all of the housing development down there. LM: Oh, absolutely. Yes. SB: The river was no longer a divider. I mean, it was like crossing the street. LM: Yes, yes, except more fun. SB: More fun! Except more fun! You could walk. You could bike. You could Segway. You were crossing the street; it just happened to be a body of water. You’ve got a neighborhood down there on that riverfront, you know? It’s absolutely wonderful. Our goal was to bring the power of the CBD and all those people who were downtown and get them over to the east side, so they would go to the restaurants and they would go to the clubs, the cultural places that for such a long time had been entertaining the east side. Kramarczuk’s, all these places, the Baltic [Imports] shop where they sell the amber and all those other little things from the Baltic States. Some of these cool, little places and

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stuff should be seen by all. Nye’s Polonaise Room, you know. You don’t just go to Nye’s because you’re on the northeast side. LM: [Chuckles] SB: You go Nye’s because it’s the coolest piano bar in the greater downtown area or Surdyk’s or any of that other stuff. Do you know what I mean? The goal was to bring the CBD to the east side, and we needed ways to do that. The easiest way was to have us share the culture and the walk-abouts, the biking and the skating. All of that sort of thing. That was the easiest way. Then once you get people comfortable coming there all the time to relax and enjoy and to meditate, guess what? They could imagine themselves living there, and they would. The other thing that we did as we were building the interpretation of our history was we were also talking to people about the housing stuff. The first person we talked to was with Brighton Development. What was the lady’s name? LM: Peggy Lucas. SB: Peggy Lucas. I asked Peggy Lucas to come over to my office. By this time, I was the mayor, I believe. I asked Peggy Lucas to come over to my office and just chat with me. I chatted with her and her partner. What was his name? LM: Brustad. SB: Was it Dick Brustad? LM: Yes. Richard Brustad. SB: Okay. We got him and Peggy Lucas to come over and talk to us. I wanted to talk to them about the North Star. Here’s what happened. I actually had been in New York City with my husband [Steve Belton]. We were going to some shows, and then we wanted to go down to SoHo, because we had heard about SoHo, how SoHo was kind of turning into this kind of really cool place. We visited some art galleries and some little restaurants and whatever. I just said, “Oh, my god, honey, this is the coolest thing. This is just great.” So I had a visit with Peggy. I said, “I’ve just come from New York. I was in Chicago. All these people are taking these ratty, old warehouses and they’re turning them into condos, and they’re selling like hotcakes. Why can’t we do that to these factories that are lining the river? Let’s try that. Let’s try this one on the corner.” It was simple. It was right there at the head of the Stone Arch Bridge. It was a reasonable place to start. Peggy, you know, she didn’t dismiss it out of hand. She went out and she did some due diligence and did some checking. She talked, I’m sure, with developers and financiers and whatever, and ultimately came back. I don’t know how much time it took her to come back, but she ultimately came back and said, “I think we can do it. Let’s try.”

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She had the hard task, obviously, of trying to find a bank here that would give her the construction loan and all of that. The building had been abandoned for a long time, and it had to be checked out for environmental hazards and all kinds of things like that. You’ve got to get in and try to figure out whether or not you can create an exciting layout. And, lo and behold, they did. Those apartments were as cute as they could be. I remember, to this very day, the open house, and we were walking people through. I think all the floors weren’t yet done, but they had a model unit. It was amazing! It was amazing and people said, “Oh, this is fun! I could do this. I could see myself here.” LM: I assume that the city assisted in this? SB: Yes, we assisted. I don’t remember anymore the level of the assistance. By this time, you see, we had convinced people that investing in housing on the riverfront, particularly at the gateway of the Stone Arch Bridge, was a good idea. We had enough people on the city council who believed in the work of the heritage group and their long-term commitment to the interpretation of the river. We enjoyed some success with the community as a whole, the business community, people on both the east and the west side, the Downtown Council, the Chamber. Everybody had already now come to believe that the solution was closing the gap between the CBD and the east bank. Everybody was able to see that what we lacked was this ability to cross this big barrier. We didn’t have enough critical mass on the east side to support all of Riverplace. LM: Right. SB: There was not enough from the suburbs who were going to come in everyday and support the retail shopping, specialty shopping at that, for such a massive facility. So you just had to find the critical mass. The closest critical mass was the CBD. The next best thing, guess what, is to create a new critical mass, and that’s what we did. We set about the business of creating the critical mass along the riverfront. LM: Can I ask a question about the formation of the Saint Anthony Falls Heritage Board? SB: Sure. LM: This is something that Betsy Doermann thinks was very important, and that was that the elected officials themselves were to sit on this board and not their designees. SB: It is. LM: She really credits you for that formulation. SB: The reason why that was important is because in order for us to accomplish the objective, in order for us to make the infrastructure investments, these infrastructure investments had to be incorporated into our planning documents, our capital planning documents, and they had to be budgeted for. You cannot leave that to staff. You need to

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staff the implementation. You need to staff the coordination, you know, of the projects, but not the commitment to do the projects. So we enjoyed, again, support from the City Council. I sat on it as the mayor. The county board had two or three people who sat on it, and their job was to leave the board and to go back to their prospective bodies and win the support for the capital investments that we had proposed to phase in over a very specific time schedule—very specific time schedule. My job, as the mayor, as well as the members of the City Council, was to go back and win the support. The nice thing that I had in my favor was we put the budget in front of the council in advance of the big fight. You know, if there wasn’t agreement . . . We presented a plan that included the plan investments along the riverfront. LM: Well, this all makes it sound easy. But what were the challenges? [Laughter] SB: It was never easy. It was never easy; it was always hard. It was always hard because the riverfront and capital investments were always competing with the rest of the investments city-wide. Who owns the riverfront? What I used to always say is that the riverfront is not just the purview of the council member of the Second and the Fifth and the Third or the Fourth Ward. Those are the wards that maybe touch various points of the river, but the river belongs to all of us. The heritage of the city belongs to all of us. The success of the CBD belongs to all of us. The goal to expand the number of people living in the downtown, that belongs to all of us. That’s not just a Seventh Ward issue. That’s a partnership and agreement we have with the Downtown Council and the Chamber. We want to increase the number of people living in downtown to X. Where are we going to do that? Can we do it along the central riverfront? Yes. Does that help us to achieve some other objectives? Yes. It strengthens our ties to the east side. This is the intricate puzzle that you have to put together as a member of the Zoning and Planning Committee. This is the puzzle that we started positioning back in 1984, in the early years. So we knew where we were going. Then the question was can we get the right synergy at the right time to keep this thing moving in the right direction? Could you get enough buy-in from all of the people who have to buy into it so that you could actually secure the investment? That’s the hard part of it. Everybody can see the picture. They can see the puzzle and it looks like it’s all fitting together nicely. Every member of that City Council had a ward, had a project, had an agenda that they were really trying to advance and carry. Investments along the river might not have been on the A list. LM: Right. SB: So what we had to do was get it to the A list if the timing for the implementation required that. So how do you move it to the A list? The way that we tried to move it to the A list, Linda, was really trying to help people see how much the investments along the central riverfront helped us to achieve our overall objectives, city-wide objectives. We wanted more people living in the city. We wanted to bring people back from the suburbs. We wanted to restore confidence in the city. We wanted to clean up blight. Remember, the riverfront was a very, very blighted area.

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LM: Right. SB: People didn’t go there. I remember talking with Carl Pohlad. This was when we were in a discussion about the ballpark, the early discussions about the ballpark. One of the discussions about the ballpark had the ballpark on the river. LM: Yes. SB: I remember calling up Carl Pohlad and asking Carl Pohlad if he would have lunch with me. I told him I wanted to take him to lunch, and I wanted to drive along the central riverfront. So Carl Pohlad and I are in the back of his car—nice car. We got a box lunch and whatever. LM: [Chuckles] SB: We were talking. What I’m doing in the car with him is just sharing with him the picture, the vision for the river, saying, “Over here, we’re going to do an interpretation of the bridge. We’re doing to do this over here. This is what we’re going to do with the museum.” It was selling him on a vision. “And you want to put your ballpark right here. The people, before they come, will walk around the river and they’re going to love the city. When they’re done, they’re going to leave the ballpark and they’re going to walk around the river. They’re just going to have a ball. There’s going to be ice cream. They’re going to come over on their bikes, the whole nine yards.” I just painted him a vision. You know what Carl Pohlad told me? Carl Pohlad told me—this is one of the most successful businessmen in Minnesota, maybe in the country, you know what I mean? LM: Yes, he’s up there. SB: He’s up there. He had not taken a ride on the central riverfront. He didn’t remember ever having been on that road. LM: I can believe that. SB: He told me that. I was shocked, but I learned something. LM: You had a really good idea. SB: Yes, I knew we had a darn good idea. Absolutely. Because there were a whole bunch of other people who were in the CBD who had never had cause to come down here, never had cause to ride along the banks of the Mississippi River and see how beautiful and majestic it is, to even think about or dream about or envision any of the things that may have happened here forty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. How wonderful is it to be able to do that? I knew we had something going on. But I also felt a certain amount of sadness that for all of this time, with all the things that had been here before, that no one ever felt like this was their front yard.

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LM: Yes. SB: They really had turned their backs on the river. That was proof, in my opinion, that they had turned their backs on the river. It became just another one of those strong and powerful reasons for working hard for the vision. I haven’t told a lot of people this story of Carl Pohlad because it’s not important. LM: Well, it’s illustrative. SB: But it is illustrative. It really helps to reinforce what a resource we had here and how few people knew of it. LM: That reminds me about the Milwaukee Road Depot. I would like to know how, finally, after thirty years and at least fourteen development plans, someone was found who would actually do it. SB: Yes, yes. If you talk to Gary Holmes, Gary Holmes will probably tell you, “I’m still mad that I let that woman talk me into doing that.” [Laughter] LM: That was you? SB: Yes. I’m glad that it happened. LM: Oh, my gosh! That was a real turning point. SB: Wasn’t that a major turning point? Remember how we got to that project. We bought that site through the Resolution Trust. We got it for a bargain. LM: A couple million, I think. SB: Yes, a couple million. Very polluted. We bought into some long-term environmental cleanup strategy, because we knew we weren’t going to be able to attract a developer right away. So we were able to buy into a cleanup strategy that allowed for the oils in the soil to be cleaned up kind of over time with these special microbes. That was just a wonderful project. So they’re eating away the pollution, etc., and we’re waiting for the right time. Then we start thinking about what we want to have happen there. We, obviously, must have had an RFP [request for proposal]. LM: Oh, I think there were many. SB: Yes, I think there were many, too. LM: [Laughter] SB: I don’t remember who was in the final line up of the RFP when we ultimately settled on CSM [Corporation]. I just don’t remember the details.

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LM: I’m not even sure there was an RFP, because it seemed like there had been so many. SB: I’m sure we had a process. I don’t think that you can get into a development deal of that magnitude without a process. I think we believed that CSM and Gary Holmes had the greatest potential of being successful on that site. LM: How did you convince him that this was a good thing for him to be interested in? SB: Remember, there were so many things that happened at the CSM site. First of all, we had—this is kind of terrible—our mind kind of set a little bit on what we wanted to see there. We knew we needed to have some kind of hotel. We knew that we wanted the track in the back to be something. We talked about ice. LM: Right. SB: Then we talked about it, you know, being a family destination. Then we threw out ideas like the water park. [Laughter] I don’t remember all of the details about how we managed to get Gary to believe that this thing could work, but ultimately he did. Then the project got in trouble. I don’t want to say he got in trouble. LM: No, it was more expensive. SB: The project got in trouble, not so much around the expense. The trouble that we got into in the project is now we had Gary Holmes all excited about the project, and then we got into the debate about whether or not it would be a union hotel and it started with the card check. LM: Oh, yes. SB: The union wanted them to be able to walk in the door and to have Local 17 or whatever be the union. And Gary Holmes, I don’t think, in any of his other projects, had had a union operation. He wanted to be non-union or he wanted to let them decide. We had numerous meetings with Gary Holmes trying to help him to understand that the wage rate that he was paying his workers was, you know, similar to the wage rate of the unionized workforce, and the unionized workforce wasn’t something that he should be afraid of. He didn’t want to go into the development deal in advance committing, but we were committed to getting the workforce hired on and letting them choose. If they chose, then the workforce would be unionized. The restaurant and hotel workers, they wanted their deal upfront. Because there was public money involved, they were pushing really hard to try to ensure that. Meanwhile, the building trades . . . We were just at that space where we were just starting to get people back to work in building and construction. So the building trades wanted to see the project go forward. LM: Wow! SB: We had this big showdown.

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LM: This is interesting. I didn’t know any of this. SB: Oh, my god! It was crazy. It was very hard. We had this big showdown in city hall, because it was a deal breaker. I can’t remember if the City Council vetoed the project and I had to override the veto or what, but it was a very, very tough decision. You’ll have to go back into the records and look at that. LM: Yes. SB: It was a very, very tough debate. At the end of the day, the depot project was able to go forward. I worked so hard on that project. I needed the project to occur, because that project, like the housing project, was the big opportunity to bring a hotel and recreation down to the central riverfront area. In my opinion, anything that was north of Washington Avenue was going to help strengthen the riverfront, that little edge between the CBD and the river. The Milwaukee Depot was critical, in my opinion, to us continuing to make some progress, and I still believe that to this day. LM: Oh, absolutely. It looked like crap, you know? SB: It was dead. Yes! The thing about it is that if you’re going to go into the central Riverfront area, there’s a passage, and the passage was Third Avenue. I’m going to tell you another little piece, and then you’ll just really find out just how methodical we really were trying to be when we put this plan together. Getting Gary to stay on that site was really important and critical. You rightfully pointed out that the cost did increase. But my personal view is that the cost increasing is not a reason to bail. It’s a strong project and after we fought so hard and put our political careers, if you will, on the line against labor to make this happen, come on, this is a party that’s going to happen here. We’re going to make it happen. Gary has gotten a lot of accolades for this project. Again, he teases me and says, “I’m still mad at you.” LM: [Chuckles] SB: But the truth of the matter is that he has a wonderful . . . LM: He’s proud of it. SB: He’s proud of his investment. It’s a beautiful project. They get a lot of use out of the shed. People come and skate. And then, of course, it’s used for every major gala awards program in the city. It’s quite the venue. In my opinion—our documents will show this—if we made that investment on Third and Washington Avenue, we believed it would have the trickle down impact along Washington Avenue. One of the strategic investments that we made early on . . . You kind of book in things. In planning, you really need to book in some things. We had, a few years back, as you might recall, made an investment in Open Book [at 1011 Washington Avenue South] at the far end. When I went to the groundbreaking of Open

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Book, I said to them, “You guys are at the east end of a renaissance that will occur on Washington Avenue. It will take time, and if you look out the door right now, it doesn’t look like it, but just mark my words.” I was at Open Book last year for a poetry reading and the gentleman who is running Open Book repeated that story to the people who were in the audience. “We were the first people on the block.” LM: That was early. SB: “She was there and here’s what she said, and if you look out the door today, it’s filled in.” It’s filled in beautifully. LM: It has. SB: Again, it was all part of - I don’t want to call it a scheme, but a plan. That’s what we learned in Zoning and Planning: put together the long-term vision. It takes time. You may not be there to push the button or cut the ribbon, but if you set the right things in motion, you can achieve the goal. And we did. LM: It did happen. SB: And it did happen. One of the things that we also wanted to do, Linda . . . It’s an element of it and it’s still what I call yet-to-be-fully-realized. [Displays a map] We’re looking at the riverfront, right? LM: Yes. SB: We’re saying certain things have to happen on the riverfront. We know the museum is coming. We know housing is coming. Washington Avenue is coming. Okay. Critical mass. We’ll have a solid critical wall between Washington and the river: people, and restaurants, and places, and things. That keeps the riverfront alive. Right? Makes it safe. There’s always something going on. The river was our cultural heritage. LM: Yes. SB: So if you go from the river south, guess where you end up. MIA [Minneapolis Institute of Art]. There’s a nice report that you’ll find, also. I don’t know if you’ll find it in the Heritage Board records. You might. What it will talk about is the Third Avenue corridor, Avenue of the Arts. The Avenue of the Arts was specifically designed to feed down to our birthplace on the river. It was by design. If you look at the resolution or any of the things that we put in those original documents for the Avenue of the Arts, the idea, notion, was that we would start to tell the history of the people of the City of Minneapolis along Third Avenue. We would soften the corridor by introducing the medians and plantings and then we would do art installations along Third Avenue to pull people down from the Children’s Theatre, from MIA to the riverfront. That’s what we’ll do.

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Then we will pull people up Central Avenue. Central Avenue was already doing the Art Crawl and all kinds of other interesting things with art destinations. They had taken their warehouses and started creating interesting places. This is a master plan. Before I left, we managed to get, I think, the investments and the capital budget for the medians. We had managed to talk to Judge Murphy and all of them about the installation of the art in their plaza, which they’d already planned. Obviously, they put their art on the other end; we would have, of course, liked it on the Third Avenue end. But still, it was a place, again, on Third Avenue where there was some opportunity for us to be able to do something with the arts. That was what we tried to do. LM: Yes, I read about that. I have to ask: did you take geography from David Lanegran at Macalester? SB: I think so. Why? Because that’s how he thinks, right? LM: [Chuckles] Yes. You think like a planner. SB: Yes, and I think that the thing that I learned at Macalester, and then I learned in subsequent jobs, was that that’s how you need to go and look at solving a problem. You need to step back from it and you need to do the analysis of why it’s a problem, what contributed to the problem, how do you solve the problem. Solving problems is not one-dimensional. It never is one-dimensional. It’s always something complex. Then, if you want to solve the problem and you want to permanently solve the problem, there are things that you have to do. Can you put a band-aid on it? Trust me, in a short period of time, whatever you’ve done is going to be lost, and you’ll be right back where you started from. So we had to do very specific, intentional things, stake in the ground, so as to not be undone without major effort. LM: Right. SB: And that’s what we did. That’s why we always tell people, “The investments that we made in the city, the seeds that we planted, these seeds will bear fruit for long periods of time.” LM: Oh, right. SB: They will continue to bear fruit. They all take various, you know, amounts of nurturing and massaging, etc., in order to be realized, but that’s all that has to happen. That’s all that has to happen. That’s my story. [Laughter] LM: And it’s a good one. SB: It was fun. It was really hard work and, trust me, there were a lot of people who also did heavy lifting on their end. There are a lot of people that we fought with. In the old days, I remember, fighting with John Derus.

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LM: Yes. SB: We fought with John Derus about the bridge. LM: The Stone Arch Bridge, yes. SB: John Derus didn’t want me to do a darn thing with that bridge, and he said, “You let people walk across the bridge and bike across the bridge, and we’ll never, ever, ever get light rail.” LM: And that’s true. [Chuckles] SB: I thought, well, come on now. How long is it going to take us to get light rail. That was really my view. My view was having light rail across the river is really important, but I don’t think that light rail across the river is going to be the first or the second or the third thing that we do. LM: Especially in 1994. SB: Okay. Excuse me. That’s not going to happen. In the short term, we probably have a better chance for us to accomplish some critical investments on the river if we allow for people to be able to walk across the bridge and bike across the bridge. LM: Because then they’re invested. SB: Exactly. You know, give me fifteen, twenty years of that. LM: Right. SB: It’s going to take you that long to do the rest of this stuff. LM: [Chuckles] What about the Park Board? SB: The Park Board…. [Brief interruption] SB: We actually put together a summary of all of the State of the City addresses. The budget speeches might be there, also. The reason why that would be helpful is that in every year that we took an action for a capital investment or whatever, we talked about it in the State of the City address, because that was our this-is-what-we’re-going-to-do list. Then we did a follow up report and said, “This is what we did.” Actually, anybody could take the report and say, “Oh, she said she was going to do this in 1984. Did she really do it?” You could just go right to a report and find out if we did it or we didn’t. LM: Okay.

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SB: That’s a permanent record. LM: Terrific. Fantastic. That’s what Ann Calvert said, “Find out where resources are that we can gather together.” SB: I’ll give you a complete resource list. LM: Thank you so much for speaking with me today.

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