November 18, 2007
Illegal aliens on city commissions?
At last week’s council meeting, your city council members were actually debating whether or not to allow illegal aliens to be on city committees and commissions!
It started out innocently enough with city manager, Doug "The Lame Duck" Reeder, going through a list of many things for the council to consider, among them allowing residents to serve on city commissions and committees. Sounds innocuous enough, right? Residents, I thought, well why would they be bringing this up to discuss, certainly they don't want non-residents or people who do not live in Brooklyn Park to be on the Charter commission or the Planning commission or any other commission for that matter. So why are they talking about this? Why did Mayor Lampi want this on the agenda?
A little background first, the council has struggled in recent years to get people to volunteer for commissions from certain districts, particularly the west district. I don't know why, but that's the way it is and has been for a few years now. So to combat those unusual phenomena, the council opened up some commissions to have at-large positions and to allow people from other districts to serve instead of someone from the district that is currently open. A good solution?
However, last weeks discussion was a bit different, for some reason the council wanted "residents" to be allowed to be on the city's commissions. I would have guessed that was already one of the intended criteria for serving. There was a subtle twist that not everyone would immediately pick up on though. The term resident is much different than registered voter. You see the current ordinance states that you need to be a "registered voter". Think about it, to be a registered voter one has to be a legal resident or NOT an illegal alien.
By changing a few very innocently sounding words, the city could be allowing, actually encouraging, illegal aliens to decide what the city's charter says or what type of zoning laws we have - Do you want to hand over your city to illegal aliens? Tell your Mayor and city council members this is a bad idea.