A 90-year-old former teacher's attempt to set Gov. Tim Pawlenty straight about her town's bid for a small slice of this year's bonding bill found its way to the Capitol basement.
Dorothy Chase was a member of the first Chatfield High School class to walk across the stage of Potter Auditorium at commencement in 1936. Today, she's an articulate advocate for the Chatfield facility's renovation and enlargement, both to make the Bluff Country town a more vital fine arts destination and to provide permanent housing for Chatfield's unique, internationally known sheet music lending library.
A month ago, Chase sent Pawlenty a letter informing him of Chatfield's significance in Minnesota history and introducing him to George Potter, the school superintendent who convinced the New Deal's Public Works Authority to build an exceptional small-town venue for the performing arts. It's been a regional attraction for 75 years, she explained. (It helped give Chatfield its nickname, Bandtown USA.)
"You say Minnesota cannot afford such things in a recession. I say we could afford it in the Great Depression. We can afford it now," Chase wrote to the governor.
Pawlenty vetoed bonding-bill funding for the sheet music library project two years ago, singling it out as an example of DFL profligacy. His criticism resumed this year when DFLers again put the project into their bill -- but it wasn't always clear that the governor knew what project he was talkiing about. More than once, he referred to Potter Auditorium as a "pottery center."
Reached by phone Friday, Chase said she's still waiting for a reply from Pawlenty to her letter, which invited him to come to Chatfield and debate the merits of the Potter Auditorium proposal. She's heartened that the bill the Legislature sent to the governor Thursday includes $2.2 million for Chatfield. But she knows chances aren't good that the project will survive Pawlenty's promised purge of projects he considers excessive.
She had one more message for the governor: "We are very diligent and determined in wanting to get this project done. Somehow or another, we will."
