NEW: Lakeside/Lester Park post. A&L tied together with Diamond Willow?

Here is an interesting twist. Well, I don’t know if you even want to call it a twist. It is a fact that adds many questions in this case. I am of course talking about the St. Lukes Lakeside/Lester Park Clinic and the Diamond Willow Assisted Living project. Diamond Willow is owned by a group called Five Star.

After talking with community members opposed to this project, I learned some very interesting news shortly after the voting for the project. It became evident that one of the two developments in this case have something very interesting in common.

As many people know the community against the project and those parties vying for the project have had community meetings with each other. A source last night told me in one of those meetings a question came up to the Director of Diamond Willow. The question was who owned them? The response was shocking; Five Star, who owns and will operate and benefit from Diamond Willow is owned by Rob Link, from A&L Development, who is obviously the developer of this entire project.

Why is this issue? In the course of the meeting the developer, Rob Link from A&L had said “don’t blame us we doing what are clients are asking us to do”. Yet come to find out that one of the clients is actually him for which he has a vested stake. Now not only is he the developer of the project but he has part ownership in Five Star, Diamond Willow Assistant Living, thus a true direct financial benefactor, rather than just a "hired" developer which follows his clients request. He is the overall "Mastermind" her. Mr. Link chose to leave this very big part of the financial equation out of the discussion, and even side-stepped this important correlation, it had to be forced out, when left with no other choice.

Lakeside talk.

I hope to be posting this later tonight but I may not be able to because I still don't have the info I want for it. I will post it asap if it is not up tonight.

I will however post a couple of other thing related to the issue. I have posted on Duluth Solutions forum a topic about this issue. Here is just part of what I said about the issue there.

It became clear to me last night that the residents of the Lester Park area are in fact getting a bad deal if this was to pass. I have been keeping up on this issue even when I don't live in the area because it is an important one. There are a number of topics I would like you to think about when you think about this issue.

1. Property values

2. Commercial vs. residential property

3. Environment

4. Quality of Life

Head over to Duluth Solutions to check out the rest of my post and what others are have to say about it there. Fell free to comment there and here as well about the issue. It does not matter if you agree with me or not. We need to have discussions like to. It will only help but make Duluth strong as long as we take action because of the discussion. You can get to Duluth Solutions by clicking the link: www.duluthsolutions.com .