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VOTERS IN NORTH BRANCH TOWNSHIP have a new polling place with the completion of the new township hall in August. The new hall is located on County Road 18 west of North Branch and will be used as the polling place on Tuesday, Nov. 4. The 40 by 60 foot building was constructed by Ralph Nadeau Construction Co., White Bear Lake, at a cost of about $25,000. The building project was approved by township residents on a vote at the annual town meeting last March. The polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 4.


DEMOCRACY SPRINGS TO LIFE ON TOWNSHIP DAY
~source Star Tribune by Jennifer Brooks



Residents in the state's smallest communities participate each year.
   Thousands of Minnesotans turned out Tuesday for an election tradition as old as the state.
   The second Tuesday of every March is Township Day. It's Election Day in almost 1,700 townships across the state and when polls close, it's time for the annual township meeting, where budgets are set, tax levies are decided and every resident has a chance to step up and talk about whatever's on their mind.
   "It's the closest government to the people," said Gary Pedersen, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Townships, who saw plenty of Township Tuesdays during his two decades on the Elmira Township board in Olmsted County.
   The annual elections and meetings, he said, are "grass-roots governance at its best and the finest."
   In Castle Rock Township, after polls closed on a hotly contested township board supervisor's race, about 30 of the community's 1,400 residents gathered for their annual meeting to talk about budget planning, road projects and other burning issues – like why it's so hard to get good broadband access in this corner of Dakota County.
   "It's a great tradition and it's a great chance to see what's going on in your local government," said Castle Rock Township Clerk Barbara Lang. "If you have a concern, you have a right to bring it up."
   Township Tuesday turnout is usually pretty light, although large crowds can show up when there's a contested seat or a hot-button issue up for debate. Some townships skip the election entirely and conduct all their business at the annual meeting. There are budges to set, and levies to approve that will fill the general fund and pay for road and bridge work and emergency services in the township for the coming year.
   Most importantly, the annual meetings are a chance for the township residents to come in and tell their neighbors and elected leaders just what's on their minds.
   "People come in and let the township officers know what the issues are," Pederson said. "There's not many organizations where you have the hands-on approach."
   In Olmsted County, he said, topics raised at the annual meeting might include neighbors worried about frac sand mining, or interested in plans for a proposed Sip Rail between the Twin Cities and Rochester, or eager to get into a debate about feed lots.
   The Minnesota Secretary of State's office does not track Township Tuesday turnout or election results, which feature plenty of write-in candidates and surprise upsets.
   Townships have been voting like this for the past 150 years, but they weren't all doing it on the second Tuesday of March until 1970, when then-Gov. Rudy Perpich declared the date Township Day. Built into the law is a provision that if the weather is too foul on Township Tuesday, the elections will be rescheduled to the following week – a luxury voters in the General Election don't have.
   In 2009, new legislation gave townships the option of shifting their elections to November, to save money and manpower or to boost turnout. About 590 townships now vote in November rather than March.
   Townships are Minnesota's original form of government, written into the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 as a way of dividing the territory into tidily governable squares, 6 miles by 6 miles in size.
   Today Minnesota's 1,790 townships still tend to be 36 square miles or smaller, with populations ranging from more than 10,000 down to the single digits.




TAKE A LONG, SLOW WALK DOWN A DUSTY GRAVEL ROAD . . .


Writes AI B of Hartland: "I love gravel roads -- narrow ones with lots of dust and bend.
"They are not always the best paths to travel, as in the winter the twists in the road often fill with snow, making the roads unusable. But oh, in the spring, summer and fall, a gravel road is a place to wander.
"Every day on such a road dances a new dance.
   "A gravel road is a special place. A place to be without company. There is a quiet happiness to be found in periodic reflections. A time to think and to be grateful.
   "I was a regular walker of gravel roads almost as soon a I had learned to walk. Sometimes I would walk at a slow and deliberate pace. At other times I would run in most haste. A gravel road was a place that was easy for me to get along with. A comfortable spot where my imagination had no boundaries. A place where I could laugh loudly over nothing. A place where I could be unseen by anything other than the hawk flying overhead and the deer hiding in the tall grass.
   "True, the road could be hot and dusty in the summer, but that made me appreciate the gentle breezes it occasionally provided all the more.
   "I would sample the raspberries that fruited for my pleasure. I would smell the delightful aromas offered by the wet soil following a rain and by freshly mowed hay. My eyes were well fed by the beauty of the wildflowers that grew among the thin, young saplings bordering the road. (The young trees had fled to the open spaces offered by the road ditch. Trees do not grow well in the shadow of their parents. They grew tall away from home.)
   "Often, a car would stop. I would decline the kind offer of a ride. 'Why walk when you could ride?' I'd be asked. What I was doing was so much more than walking. I was enjoying life.
   "I still walk gravel roads. I still hear nature's softest voice as the breeze blows through the wind-catching hedge of small trees and grasses. Why walk when I could ride? We all leave our signature upon the land. Mine will be footprints in the dusty crown of a gravel road. I walk instead of riding because walking a gravel road is on joy I do not want to disappear from my life."