By Jake Weyer

August 20 meeting

Service charges set for Lyn-Lake district

To take care of Lyn-Lake’s new streets, sidewalks, benches and other amenities, the City Council on Aug. 20 approved the first-ever service charges for the Lyn-Lake Special Service District.

The total projected cost for 2011 is $139,250. That includes sidewalk shoveling and ice removal, streetscape maintenance and repair, seasonal tree lighting, landscaping and tree maintenance and trash services.  

The district runs along Lyndale Avenue South from the Midtown Greenway to 31st Street West and Lake Street from Dupont Avenue South to Blaisdell Avenue South. Businesses in that area will each contribute to the service charge through their property taxes. <

By Jake Weyer

Bryant Avenue bike boulevard delayed

The Bryant Avenue bike boulevard, slated to run from the Loring Bikeway Bridge to Lake Street and between 50th and 58th streets, will not be built this year as planned.

A longer-than-anticipated community discussion about the plans prompted the city to push the project to next year. A specific start date has not been set.

“We thought we could get it done, but we had too many roadblocks early this summer with getting folks on board with our plans,” said the city’s non-motorized transportation coordinator Shaun Murphy in an e-mail to City Council Member Meg Tuthill (10th Ward).    

Though public concerns caused the delay, the plans did not change significant

submitted photo

Bob Carney Jr., a former Republican candidate for governor, is a political anomaly in Southwest.

By Nick Halter

Bob Carney Jr. spent just $5,000 on a campaign to become the Republican nominee for governor. He had no staff and no volunteers. No political experience. He lives in a GOP wasteland where, as he puts it, the only Republicans are buried in Lakewood Cemetery, a few blocks down the road from the home where he was raised and now owns.

Yet the 56-year-old independent businessman, documentary maker and inventor wrangled nearly 10,000 votes from GOP-endorsed Tom Emmer in the Aug. 10 Republican primary, representing nearly 8 percent of the Republican vote.

“That’s 50 cents a vote,” Carney said with as smile during an interview at his home two days after the primary.

Perhaps more astonishing is that Carney, a candidate for mayor of Minneapolis