Welcome

The West District of Brooklyn Park will see a change in 2012 with one of our council members retiring. This council member has served us well and I thank him for his service.

We need fresh, new, experienced leadership on the Brooklyn Park City Council. We need leadership who understands what it takes to bring new jobs to our city, new business development, new ideas in fighting crime and someone who does more than just show up to vote.

Brooklyn Park is an incredible city of people who care about each other and their community. With all of our successes, many of them led by my friend and our former mayor, Steve Lampi, we can do even better! Issues such as business and job development, real solutions to crime, and a greater sense of who we are as a community are all at the top of my priorities.

As the economy improves our city has a huge opportunity for business growth and job creation. Not through government programs, but by our city government changing its attitude toward development and businesses, along with just plain getting out of the way.

While Minnesotans have watched for two decades as businesses have moved to places such as Sioux Falls, we in Brooklyn Park have the opportunity to work toward being the “Sioux Falls of the Twin Cities”. We need to change how we view businesses. We need to study our rules, fees and regulations and improve (change or eliminate) those things that are holding us back. We need to make our sign ordinances more friendly and reasonable. Most of all we need to change our attitude toward those wanting to bring their businesses to our city. All too many times we’ve seen our staff, our Planning Commission and our City Council micro-manage developments, sometimes to the point of losing them altogether. Today we have a huge, empty field near the Target Campus because of this kind of micro-managing.

No one is for handing over the keys to developers and businesses, what we need is a more reasoned, more understanding, and a more business-experienced council who will welcome growth and new jobs instead of telling them what color the top of their building should be. It’s time we view business growth and expansion as a good thing because it is.

We need to study the successes of similar communities around the Twin Cities and take their best practices and implement them here. There’s no reason Brooklyn Park can’t become the fastest growing city in the metropolitan area given our location, our available land, our available work force and the help we can be to them who want to grow here.

John with longtime BP volunteer Mark Hanna

When we’re able to bring in new businesses it means more jobs – good jobs. Along with good jobs comes the peripheral businesses that support those jobs – restaurants being one of the key areas. Until we improve the job market in our city we won’t see the growth we all want in restaurants. Most restaurants can’t survive on just evening business alone, they need a good lunch following. Bringing in thousands of new jobs, good paying jobs, we will see the new restaurants we all want to see.

With new restaurants hundreds of entry level jobs are created for our youth, or part time opportunities for others. This is can be a piece of crime solution, taking youths off the street and give them good things to do – work.

For these things to happen we need leadership who understands business and knows our community. We need someone who will not just show up on Monday nights and vote, we need leadership who will cheer-lead for our city, who will actively recruit businesses to move or expand here, and someone who will work tirelessly for the changes we need to make in order to bring our city to the top of the list of places new businesses want to expand to.

All of this helps each of us in a very real way. The more businesses we have in our city the more business property taxes we collect. This helps every homeowner by keeping your property taxes in check. It also means more stable homes and families because more people will have jobs.

My experience with years of volunteering in our community, as a business-builder, as a technology innovator and as a former State Representative offers us a chance to make the changes we need to make to help create a better Brooklyn Park.

Questions? Email me at john@johnjordan2012.com.