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James DeBenedet 808 Millwood Ave. Roseville, MN 55113 November 16, 2011 Ms. Karen Eckman,Chair,GLWMO Board 666 Cobb Road Shoreview, MN 55126 By email attachment Re: GLWMO Finance and Governance Report Dear Ms. Ekman, I have read A Report of the Governance and Financing Task Force for the Grass Lake Watershed Management Organization,which I will hereafter refer to as the report. I also attended all task force meetings and provided significant research results input to the task force process. I disagree with the conclusions and recommendations of the report and am just as troubled by the lack of integrity of the task force process as the project ended at our meeting on November 4th. My main objections are detailed below. Premature Dismissal of the Task Force The task force was established to assist the board in the analysis of alternatives and the selection of criteria for ranking alternatives and making a final decision on the future financing and governance of the GLWMO. The original task force solicitation cited goals of improving clean water stewardship and making sure public money is efficiently and effectively spent. At the beginning of the November 4th meeting,Vice Chair Westerberg announced that the evaluation criteria agreed to at the previous meeting were unsatisfactory and needed reconsideration. He also informed the task force that only board members would vote on the revised criteria and on the final scoring. In my opinion,this was done to limit voting to those board members who wanted to guide the process to a predetermined result. In any event, it is my desire, under the circumstances that my name be removed from the final report since I had no involvement in the final criteria selection and ranking or the final scoring and decision and I think the end product does not meet the original project goals. Definition of Improved GLWMO There is no explanation in the report nor was there much discussion at our meetings of what an improved GLWMO would be or how it would be accomplished. There was some reference to hiring two more employees or consultant employees to achieve improved results. However this was not fully explained in the report and I believe the board does not know what these employees would do,what their job descriptions would be or what their salient qualifications would be. Critical expertise in managing programs,environmental monitoring and reporting, public education,and other tasks could C:\Users\stefjim\Documents\Roseville\GLWMO\GLWMO Minority report.docx Page 1