I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”. 

Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up. 

But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*. 

It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985. 

Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader. It wasn’t just defense.

In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time.

This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Sure,” you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the East Side of Saint Paul. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, IBM, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York. 

And we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy. And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices. That’s all gone now.

It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere. 

But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less NAFTA. 

3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. 

And it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota. 

And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite. 

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things.

In 1986, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. 

Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?

Sure. It happens. 

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. 

So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services? 

Because that determines the city and state you get. 

I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture. 

That’s a problem.

The other day, I went to downtown Saint Paul and actually parked and patronized a downtown business for the first time in probably over a year and a half.  I was meeting someone at a downtown cafe to talk some business.  

I met them at 4PM, on a Robert Street where a desultory car or two swished past as I wrangled with one of Saint Paul’s byzantine meters.  

I hit the button, entered my space number, and waited while it buzzed and whirred…

…and said “Invalid Space: Rush Hour No Parking Zone”.  

I looked up and down the street.  I saw a northbound car a block away.  

That was it.  

Downtown Saint Paul hasn’t had a rush hour that “rushed” since Norm Coleman was mayor.  

Somebody hacked the City of Saint Paul:

What is it about information technology that makes every level of Minnesota government so very very bad at it?

It would seem Mayor Carter could have diverted some time from setting up college funds and yakking about Universal Basic Income to make sure the city’s patching was up to date and tell city employees to stop answering scam emails. 

Speaking of bad ID, Governor Walz called out the 19 year old cooks:

This isn’t the “Hummers patrolling the streets” National Guard. The MN Guard actually has a cybersecurity unit.

And, knowing what we know now…

No, I mean knowing what we have evidence of, it’s not the dumbest idea. If MN IT responded, the fix would cost more than building the Rondo Land Bridge. And it’s a good, free training opportunity for a cyberwarfare unuit.

I’ll give it an 80, so far.  

Not sure if I’m getting tired of Trump winning – but I’ve had enough of Saint Paul losing.  

The Cub on University Avenue is closing after several decades:

The store at 1440 University Ave. W. will close its doors to the public on Aug. 2, and 96 store employees will be laid off starting on Sept. 22.

In a statement, a Cub spokesperson said the closure is part of an effort to “optimize our footprint.”

“We know the impact our stores have for the people who work in, shop in, and live in our communities. Like any food retailer, we’re constantly working to optimize our footprint, which includes investing in stores – like our newly remodeled Cub in Burnsville, MN – as well as closing stores where necessary so we can operate as efficiently and effectively as possible,” the company said.

“Optimize our footprint” is apparently how corporations say “We’re tired of the shoplifting, vagrancy, panhandling, the lack of prosecution of anything that happens, and the fact that so many people who do shop at Cubs will go to Roseville because of less hassles and a lower sales tax”

I live less than a mile from that Cub – and I haven’t gone there in literally decades.   Back then, there were 3-4 big box groceries in that half=mile; Rainbow, Target and Walmart (although it wasn’t one of the Wallmarts with the big grocery sections, it was still a low-price option); Cub was never as cheap as Rainbow or as clean as Target.   

After Rainbow and Walmart disappeared?  It was easier and cheaper to go to Roseville.  

So, the Saint Paul City Council appears to be rolling back its stupid, ruinous “rent control” ordinance…

…sort of. 

But – only the buildings built after 2004?

I’m no expert, but this sounds to me like it’s a plan to:

1. Make it impossible to pay the upkeep and taxes on older buildings, and so to
2. Squeeze the owners out into selling cheap, so as to
3. Build more multi-unit housing, which of course steers money to the non-profits that employ the St. Paul DFL’s farm club.  Because they always get a taste.  Always.  

Saint Paul is basically Chicago on the Mississippi.  

XCel Energy’s sponsorship deal with Saint Paul’s major arena is over:

All I know is that after twenty years of calling it “The X”, the new sponsor is going to have to be Excedrin, Microsoft Excel, X, Space X, or Ex-Lax, or I’m never going to remember it.

Saint Paul’s much-ballyhooed all-boss-lady City Council not only can’t do its job.

It breaks the law while doing it. 

Jane McClure is a long-time writer for the Highland Villager. 

And as she points out, it seems the Council is walking all over the state’s Open Meetings Law:

The Open Meeting Law prohibits serial meetings, or meeting one-on-one or in smaller groups to make decisions before a public meeting. Serial meetings can be seen as ways to avoid public discourse or to reach some kind of agreement in advance of an open meeting. This depends on the facts of each matter, of course.

Serial meetings can also occur through electronic or written communication, including phone conversations, emails, texts and social media.

City Council members contend that they have long discussed issues one-on-one before taking major votes. This practice predates the current council. That still doesn’t make it right.

Discussing is one thing. Making decisions in private is another. Making promises that lead to decisions is another.

 

The rule of law is the first casualty of all-“Blue” government – in city hall as well as on the street. 

If it seems like just yesterday the national media was swooning over Saint Paul’s city council – the first all-female city council in the US, we were told – it’s because it practically was just yesterday that the entire establishment was swooning over them.  

They’re women, donchaknow.  

And I’m not gonna say I predicted this, but you know I kinda predicted this:

The president was, as luck would have it, my “representative”, Mitra Jalali – a woman whose “flexibility” on issues and identity makes Tim Walz look all boring and consistent; she left the council in January to focus on her health or something. 

Since then, the council has deadlocked on everything from a temporary replacement for Jalali, to space for the city’s new Sudanese-style trash collection service to stage its trucks (forcing Mayor Carter to declare an emergency and, speaking of emergemcies, forcing Mayor Carter to appear like a relative moderate and grownup.

Or perhaps the one person in the transaction who shows up for work: the councilwomens’ attendance is a little dismal:

That’s may actually be worse than the DFL in the House of Representatives. 

UPDATE: Mayor Carter has appointed Jalali’s legislative aide to serve out the term.  I don’t think this is over. 

Saint Paul’s “Tony Soprano”-style trash collection system – which has morphed over the past decade from individually-contracted vendors to a dozen or so vendors allocated across the city by a city plan that drove most of them out of Saint Paul, to now one single contracted vendor that sucked up to the city properly, is facing a shutdown before it really starts:

After years of bitter debates that came be called “the trash wars,” the start of the new garbage hauler’s contract on April 1 is supposed to mark a turning point in the city’s bid to take a more central role in managing the service.

t. Paul City Council members voted 5-0 on Wednesday to block the new hauler, FCC Environmental, from placing its truck yard on a lot the company purchased last summer off West Seventh Street, just blocks from the Schmidt Artist Lofts.

The vote stems from a January appeal filed by a neighborhood group, which has argued the trash facility would undermine long-term plans for residential, mixed-use, transit-oriented development in the area.

Lesson #1 – the most powerful people in Saint Paul are white upper middle class “artists” living off government “humanities” grants in lofts. They may be even more powerful than white progressive 60-something livelong DFL women from Mac Groveland.

Hard as that may be to believe. 

Lesson #2 – White Saint Paul progressives apprently think that trash goes to the same place food comes from; some magical building. 

To:  Mayor Melvin Carter, Saint Paul
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant and Human ATM
Re:  Election Denier?

Mayor,

You said this yesterday:

Quick point of order, yerroner – the rest of us pay taxes, too.  Lots and lots of them.

And we won the election.  In an electoral-college landslide, in fact. 

Aren’t you glad the Senate still has a filibuster?

That is all.

A friend of the blog emails:

I am amazed at this council that, when elected, seemed to be highly liberal, rubber-stamping and with very little differences of opinion. And yet, they surprised me in voting 6 against 1 to not immediately restrict drive throughs in Saint Paul.

Some of the comments from council members were actually thoughtful, as if they were listening to and hearing their constituents. They talked about how constituents are questioning if this was the most pressing issue and they agreed. They seemed to understand how this ban could affect jobs in the neighborhood, jobs currently relied upon by their constituents. They even seemed to understand that a business could just start up elsewhere if we make conditions too harsh. 

Only Council President Mitra Jalali seems to be the out of touch person here. She thinks her constituents are bothered by the Taco Bell drive through (as opposed to maybe they don’t walk that area because of the open drug use of the nearby rehab house – Kimball Court). 

There is hope. I know a broken clock can be right twice a day. But, hey, I will take the win.

 

I am equally surprised. I didn’t expect the Council to resist the Highland Park Prog Lifestyle mafia.

Well, everyone but Jalali.  She continues to fail to impress. Which is a fairly evergreen remark.

For a while, after winning complete lopsided electoral sweeps in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, the DFL victory parties would break out into chanting the line in the title.

Ownership has its privileges, as they way – but local DFLers sure seem to be squiggling away from any responsibility for that ownership.

A friend of the blog emails:

It was a town hall meeting to talk about the mess that is the Hamline Midway Neighborhood. The question was what is the city doing with Snelling University. The corner is so trashy, there is litter everywhere. 

Our council member for the area, Mitra Jalali, proposes that the priority is trees and bicycle lanes.

She says it’s either that or a place for people to park their cars.

I mean, I suppose if we eventually get rid of all of the residents and businesses in the area, then no people will be there, thereby eliminating litter.

But, I have to believe, looking towards the thriving areas of St Louis Park’s West End or the shopping area in Eagan that Jalali is probably prioritizing the wrong thing.

All of Melo’s reporting of quotes on X from that meeting are pretty entertaining as the elected people try to dodge any responsibility for where we are today in St Paul. 

 

Thats right, Councilwoman Jalali – it’s the design of the streets.

I’m adding emphasis to this next bit:

Worth looking at- Sandy Pappas saying she actually rides Green Line (but was getting a ride home from husband after the meeting). Leigh Finke saying that millions of dollars were given to DNR for trees and “they spent it in outstate which didn’t need it” so this year, gave “even more money” to Met Council “who has to spend it in the metro area.” 

Yup, our problems are not enough trees …

 

 

 

 

Until the city gets serious about crime, drug-dealing, vagrancy and vandalism – all of which are epidemic at Snelling and University – the new trees would just serve as canvasas for taggers.

Sort of like that freaking Loon at the southwest corner of the intersection. 

More on that later this week

So, the housing permit numbers for the Twin Cities are in. 

And if putting people in houses is  your goal, they are…uh, not good:

Saint Paul:

And Minneapolis:

Was it rent control? Bidenomics?

Why choose?

Hard to believe it’s been thirty years since Guy Harvey Baker – a Gulf War Marine veteran with, clearly, mental illness issues – killed officers Ron Ryan, Tim Jones, and a police dog named Laser (story from 2014).

The PiPress had a fairly good retrospective of the events – with one crucial omission:   

Ryan, 26, was checking on a man — Guy Harvey Baker — who was sleeping in a car in a parking lot at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood about 7 a.

He picked up a .38-caliber revolver from his lap and shot Ryan.

Scores of officers joined the search for Ryan’s killer. Jones had the day off, but he came in to help.

Laser picked up Baker’s trail about 10 a.m. on Conway Street, not far from Johnson Parkway.

Mara Gottfried’s story, ten years ago, was a good retelling.  But she leaves out how the police actually found Baker’s “trail” on Conway later that morning – and, in a way, the story of a man who is both the story’s unsung hero and third (human) victim.

Lyle Granlund – 48 years old, at the time – was having breakfast with his kids on the upper level of a three-plex he owned across from the parking lot.  One of his sons yelled that there’d been a shooting.  Granlund grabbed a handgun and loaded three rounds – all he could grab at the moment – and went to his window.  He saw officer Ryan on the ground, and saw Baker driving toward another woman, standing in the doorway of a nearby apartment building, apparently getting ready to rub out the only known witness to the shooting. 

Granlund – an expert marksman – pondered taking out Baker.  But he held up, worried that the Ramsey County attorney, the infamously anti-gun Tom Foley, would prosecute him.  So he opted to fire two shots through Baker’s back window, shattering it and leaving the rounds (intentionally) in Baker’s dashboard, to hopefully scare Baker off and mark the car for the police.  He saved his third round, in case Baker decided to come for him.  But no – Baker accelerated away from the scene of the Ryan shooting…

…and it was by the shattered window that the SPPD found Baker’s trail, a couple hours later, nearby on Conway Street.

I interviewed Granlund later that year, for the old Gun Owners Action League (a predecessor of GOCRA and MN Gun Owners Caucus) newsletter.  Granlund told me that while the SPPD remained officially mum about his contribution to that day’s search, more than one senior Saint Paul cop had come to his door in the following days, paying their respects to his effort to save their fellow officer.  A lieutenant left him his SPPD tie pin – a gesture that Granlund, in our interview, still found deeply touching.

I wrote about Granlund again, almost ten years ago, in a piece that includes a lot of useful background and  a link to a now-disappeared column by Ruben Rosario. 

 Granlund was right, of course; Foley did try to prosecute him.  Their attempt to get him for “reckless discharge” foundered when the police lab found Granlund’s two rounds exactly where he said they’d be in Baker’s car.  The Ramsey County Attorney’s office dropped its  attempt to prosecute Granlund only when the SPPD told Foley he’d get no cooperation from the police.  Someone listing himself as a retired SPPD cop tells the story in this thread. 

Oh yeah – and Granlund was denied a Minnesota carry permit; the SPPD that (quietly) regarded him as a hero also didn’t think he had any reason to need one. 

Gottfried picks up the story from 30 years ago today.

Baker heard the dog whining outside a fish house where he was hiding, saw Jones through the window and, through the side of the shack, shot the 36-year-old officer with the gun had stolen from Ryan. When Laser bit his leg, he shot the dog, too.

No prosecutor will ever issue an indictment, and no jury will ever hear the case – but in a very real if indirect way, Officer Jones was killed by official gun-control hysteria. 

The tragedy didn’t end that day.  When I spoke with Granlund, probably in September or October, he was clearly upset that he’d not been able to save Jones by killing Baker.  It went much deeper than that; Granlund spent the next ten years depressed about the episode.  He died in 2004 of a heart attack, at age 58, and is buried in the same cemetery as Officer Ryan. 

The lesson?  Let nobody tell you that an armed citizen can’t do immense good; one, and God only knows how many more, people are alive today because of Granlund’s action. 

And let no weasel government official get away with terrorizing the law-abiding citizen without a fight – preferably ending with a prosecutor sent to the unemployment line at the polls.

The families of the slain officers are the main focus of Gottfried’s story, of course.  I’ll urge prayers – or whatever your worldview does – for the families on what has to be a miserable anniversary.

This is an update of a piece that first appeared in SITD ten years ago today.

Mayor Melvin Carter – who makes $132K a year – thanks “the President”…

For wiping out his student debt transferring his student debt to America’s plumbers, truck drivers, waitresses and warehouse pickers:

I’m not sure what bothers me more:

• The President ignoring the SCOTUS and just going ahead and buying the votes
• Doing it for a vote that was never going to go to anyone but Biden anyway.

Graft is bad. Redundant graft is worse.

Minneapolis is increasingly run by showy, shrill, demogogic “Democrats Socialists of America” radicals intent on rebuilding the city in their image.

Saint Paul, as long as I can recall but even moreso in the past 15 years has been run by an informal assembly of white NIMBYs from the various Parks (Highland, Merriam, Irvine, Saint Anthony) and Crocus Hill. They mostly bring ideals from the sixties and money from the fifties to the 2020s.

I’ve long joked about them – but darned if they aren’t generally just a tad less oppressive

I said “a tad”.

I did mention they are NIMBYs, right? These are the people who shut down the “Back to the Fifties” hot rod cruise on Snelling and University, because while they want all the amenities of living in a major city, they also want it to as quiet and placid as an Iowa pasture. They jammed down the city’s “Tony Soprano”-style trash collection system because they – who don’t apparently need to leave home much – got tired of hearing different trucks going through their alleys and down their streets every week. Given a choice between every other possible option willing to redevelop the old Snelling Bus Barn, they wanted a soccer stadium, and got…a soccer stadium (surrounded by a vast vacant field).

Crime – while significantly lower than Minneapolis, then and now – is a serious problem.

There’s a perception among some who don’t live here that people, especially business owners, are either OK with that, or helpless to fight it. Neither is true. For example, one property owner along University Avenue has taken to playing classical music, outdoors, on loudspeakers. It’s a measure that actually has an effect on crime where it’s been tried.

Which, for the NIMBYs, isn’t good enough, as a friend of the blog points out:

The Hamline Midway Facebook page was lit up with hyperbolic comments about the classical music coming from some parking lot, “it startled my cats!’ “it’s not good for the birds” “we have young kids” “those businesses are so rude”-

Turns out the decibel level was only 70. About as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

Did sound travel a bit with the wind, the air of the particular night? Possibly. Were the NIMBY neighbors likely piling on the hate and hyperbole because of who was playing the music and why? Most definitely.

No word yet on how many sleepless nights these very same neighbors have when some crazed homeless person is screaming through the night, or some gang banger is ghetto blasting the stereo, or any of the many other normally heard sounds way above 70 dbs in Hamline Midway. No, if anyone would be as hysteric over those noises, there’d be a slew of anger bestowed on that person. The rage would find its way to the poor soul’s boss and the person would be fired because who wants and angry mob screaming “fire the bigot” showing up at any business?

The path between dotty but well-connected Merriam Park biddies (aged 30-90) and policy in Saint Paul is short, paved better than any Saint Paul street, and has no bike lanes or speed bumps.

A friend of the blog emails:

I don’t know how I feel about this one.

On one hand, I don’t think that what the developer wants to do is a bad design. I’m sick of the developers squeezing in tiny 800 square feet apartments everywhere and charging high rents and making places artificially trendy.

Also, I love that CM Noecker reminds everyone that the specific zoning for the area was asked for by the neighbors and that should mean something-

 “It’s this recent community process that says this should not be RM2, it should be RM1,” Noecker said. “There is a value and a status in plans that are community-created and then adopted by this body. … The community has said we specifically don’t want this parcel to be RM2.” 

The community process was a backlash against CM Jalali’s election to the council because those neighbors knew that Jalali has never met a developer that she doesn’t like on Marshall Avenue.

But, those Merriam Park Marshall Avenue neighbors are the same neighbors who constantly think that they run the entire city and they think that gives them the right to tell other neighborhoods what they need and don’t need. They meddle so much, that I think they kind of get what they deserve in their own neighborhood, too. If I were like them, I’d organize a loud group of people to shout at the council that Marshall Avenue needs this space to be 7 Townhomes with greater floor area ratio and if they don’t support it, they’re just racist.

I’m not them, so I won’t. But, the other reason that I don’t really know how I feel about this vote is that I don’t know if I want too much precedent set in the “community process” in this town. After all, those same Merriam Park Marshall Avenue residents who are the activists that are trying to remove I94 through “community process.” 

*Sigh* We just someday need better choices on the ballot- voting ought to be the community process.

These apartments are pretty clearly built on the cheap by developers with an “in” with the city council. In 50 years they will be slums.

And the people voting for our oh-so-special city council, and/or their descendants, will be turning Woodbury and Inver Grove Heights into blighted cesspools.

A friend of the blog emails:

I was always afraid the activists had too much control, [the FOB’s spouse] was confident that the state wouldn’t do something this stupid. But, it is getting talked about in mainstream media now. It’s probably really going to happen, isn’t it? 

The FOB is talking about the “Plan” being pushed by “advocates” to replace I94 between the downtowns with a “boulevard”.

Normally at this point, of course, I’d say it’s just another racket to transfer money from the taxpayers to the non-profit and consultant “advocate” class. They can write puff-piece reports and squalls of PR material on the indirect public dime, build entire careers out of yapping about vaporware projects.

But the people who love to play with the levers and buttons and knobs of government have gotten their hands on this, so I’d say the odds are pretty decent that a lot more money will be spent on this.

The obvious question is, what happens when an untstoppable money-squandering force (the drive to gut 94) meets the immovable money-squandering object (the drive to put a deck over the freeway to rebuild Rondo)?

They can’t both win…

“Go ahead, tear down a couple of stores that were half of the commercial heart of the Midway”, said all the people who don’t live in the Midway. “It’ll bring hordes of soccer fans in from their “Urban Life Theme Park” homes in Marcy Holmes and Longfellow over to pre-game at the local bars, and carouse about the place afterward!”

“Trust us!”

I warned ’em. I sincerely tried.

The game day ritual:

1. Watch hordes of cars (and a quick surge of people on the train) pack Snelling, Hamline and University, and the neighborhood streets all the way up to Minnehaha, clogging everything for a solid hour.
2. A couple of hours of noise and pandemonium and hearing the mob singing “Wonderwall”. By the way, of all the songs they could have picked, why in the flaming hootie-hoo did it have to be “Wonderwall?” I swear, “Afternoon Delight” or “Pilot of the Airwaves” or “Who Let the Dogs Out” or a root canal are less irritating.
3. Another hour or two of clogged streets and pedestrians stagging through the neighborhood as they get while the getting’s good. Because nobody wants to be stuck on University outside of a crowd.

One will spend less time waiting for Godot than for the wave of prosperity that professional soccer was supposed to bring to the Midway.

If it’s a year ending in a number, Checkerboard Pizza on the East Side of Saint Paul is back in the news for less than uttelry savory reasons.

And as a Midway homer, it behooves me to point out that, name and signage similarities notwithstanding, the ongoing reality show that is the East Side Checkboard is utterly unrelated to the one on Snelling for the past couple of decades. While delivery pizza hasn’t been much of a part of my life for some time now, Midway Checkerboard is great stuff.

A friend of the blog emails:

How can St Paul Teachers be voting to strike for more money? Weren’t Minnesota schools fully funded?

They left themselves a pretty clever out.

1. The DFL said they were going to spend a $19B surplus to “fully fund” schools
2. But they would never define what “full funding” meant – cannily avoiding having two of Alinski’s rules, “framing” and “making them playi by their own rules”, against them.
3. They did, however, do the end-zone happy dance over doing it (whatever it was)
4. But now teachers are striking and districts want more, and…
5. …DFLers are telling us to quit talking about the thing we asked them to define in the first place, knowing that…
6. …they were never aiming their spiel at smart people with critical thinking skills.

It’s fiendish genius, really.

Also destroys education, and contributes to the destruction of a civil society, but tomayto tomahto.

Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.

It was gentrified well over forty years ago – before the term really existed.

It’s been one of Saint Paul’s most durable commercial corridors since as long as I’ve lived here, and then some.

And it’s been having trouble lately.

Well, parts of it have. We’re told that some parts are doing quite well, all in all. Which, lets be honest, doesn’t surprise me; the parts of Grand that work, work well.

But it’s on the verge of becoming a “Berg’s Law” – whenever there’s a social or economic problem, look for a Public Employee Union.

Bingo:

“The problem isn’t the avenue, it’s that group,” [Golden Fig Fine Foods’s Laurie] Crowell said, referring to the out-of-state pension fund that owns some of the corridor’s largest retail spaces.

The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, known as STRS Ohio and based out of Columbus, has invested some of its teacher pension funds in real estate, including four buildings along Grand Avenue that it has owned since 2006…Salut, Pottery Barn, Lululemon, J. Crew, J.W. Hulme and Anthropologie, which closed late 2022, were all in buildings owned by STRS Ohio.

When looking for a storefront for Evergreen Collective, Hall said she was interested in the building where J.W. Hulme used to be, but said the rent would have been twice as high as her current location.

The vacancies along Grand Avenue are “not a sign that the avenue isn’t working,” Crowell said. “It is a sign that [STRS Ohio] isn’t working with the avenue.”

Of course, it’s not just businesses in STRS-owned buildings that are having trouble. And STRS pleads innocence, or at least competence.

Like most stories re Twin Cities business, there are two sides to the story.

It’s just that there really didn’t used to be a downside on Grand.

So, Saint Paul has a new city council.

Sort of.

Just like the old city council, the new one treats the knobs and levers of government power as their toy and playground.

They’re just a little more overt about it:

And in terms of waving “Progressive” bloody sheets about in public?

Again – same as the old council, but more-so:

Couldn’t see that coming. Honest. Seriously.

I was casting about for the perfect way to describe the incoming City Council, when an email from a friend of the blog did it for me:

The New York Times thinks it’s important that Saint Paul, Minnesota has elected an all-female city council.

I was with a group of women the other day who also were saying how wonderful it was, how diverse this council is now, and laughing at unfunny jokes like “don’t we feel sorry for the middle aged white man?” 

“Change doesn’t happen with the same voices at the table,” Ward 6 Councilwoman Nelsie Yang says in the article.

Funny, I say to the group of women I’m with- these women who were recently elected, their campaigns all sounded the same. And on top of that, their campaign promises and priorities all sounded the same as Russ Stark. Is he middle aged yet? I’ll bet he is. And he’s definitely white. And, this entire newly elected council, why, their priorities all sound the same as another white man who has visited the Twin Cities often- Pete Buttigieg. 

But, their voices, their priorities, don’t sound the same as former Ward 7 Councilwoman Jane Prince’s priorities. She was often mocked and called all sorts of names on social media for being a different voice.

I’m going to break in here and say it: Jane Prince, the former staffer for Ellen Anderson, who used to seem waaaaaay out on the left. [2]

Their voices and priorities don’t sound 100% the same as former Ward 1 Councilman Dai Thao, who was the first Hmong American to be elected to Saint Paul City Council. While he was definitely liberal, because his voice was different, because he didn’t sound the same as those in power, he was often “accused” of being a Republican. LOL.

And Debbie Montgomery, who was mentioned in this article as the first Black Woman to win a Saint Paul City Council seat. I don’t remember her a lot on the council, but I do know that since her time on the council, she has been accused of being a Nimby and being out of touch with her neighborhood because she doesn’t sound the way these newly elected women sound. 

So, to Ms Yang and the rest of these women that are so proud to be a “different” voice on the council, you can ride that all they want, but the reality is, the majority percentage of the 30% or so of voters who bother to show up to vote in a local election really weren’t voting for change, weren’t voting for a new voice, they were voting for you because you sounded like the white men before you who were virtue signaling all the priorities that you virtue signaled in your campaigns.

Call me a cynic, or a realist, but I suspect our governing class thinks the not-at-all-new “New and more intesectional” council’s, er, predictability is a feature, not a bug:

As Alan Dershowitz once said in addressing a crowd we’d call “woke” today, but merely “PC” in the much less insipid early ’90s:

Your idea of “diversity” is someone with different colored skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you”

So that’s something that’ll never change.

[1] I acknowledge that I am not a biologist

[2] Jane Prince was also a great staffer – who made sure everyone, even pesky Republicans, got answers from Anderson’s office. Try that with Sandy Pappas or Rena Moran or Maria Isa).

SCENE. Mitch BERG is leaving a small cafe. Avery LIBRELLE is walking in. BERG is too tired to care and doesn’t try to evade or escape the encounter.

LIBRELLE: Mer…

BERG: Cut to the f***ing chase, Avery.

LIBRELLE: In “One MInnesota! (TM) “, we are all prospering in a future where we boldly stride forward together.

BERG: Can I have some blue cheese dressing for that word salad?

LIBRELLE: You just hate progress.

BERG: Nah. I hate decay and decline. Here’s an example. The entire Grand Palace center, which used to be the heart of a vibrant neighborhood back before “vibrant” meant “graffiti and panhandlers”, is empty with demise of the Pottery barn.

LIBRELLE: And you’re blaming the DFL?

BERG: Who else has defined the business climate in Saint Paul?

LIBRELLE: The wider state economy, duh.

BERG: Which, according to Governors Flanagan and Klinki, is…

LIBRELLE: Going gangbusters for One MInnesota! (TM)

BERG: So Saint Paul’s main commercial strip is languishing because the state’s economy is…too good?

LIBRELLE: Yes. It’s the GOP’s fault.

BERG: A party that has no power in Saint Paul is responsible for a business climate that isn’t really failing…?

LIBRELLE: Yes. That’s why.

BERG: Huh. Maybe if Saint Paul were to identify as a prosperous city, that’ll help.

LIBRELLE: Oh! The city does identify as a prosperous city! And if. you disagree, you’re a MAGA white supremacist1

BERG: Oh, clearly.

And SCENE

Today is the 82nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

For those who observe.

As I often have over this past few decades, I call out the fact that the first shots at Pearl Harbor were fired by a crew of Navy Reservists from Saint Paul, who’d been mobilized earlier in the year as part of Roosevelt’s build-up to the war everyone knew was coming.

The ship – which was built during World War 1, was thoroughly obsolte, and had been pressed back into service to fill the gaps until new ships could be built – was converted into a fast transport in 1942.

The men of that crew are all gone, now – Alan Sanford, the last survivor, died in 2015. And the Ward itself didn’t survive the war – it was lost in action off the Philippines, three years to the day after it fired the first shot of the war, on December 7 1944.. The Ward was hit by a Kamikaze and crippled.

In a bit of historical poetry almost too unbelievable to be in a Hollywood script, after the ship was abandoned, the ship was sunk by gunfire from another destroyer, the USS O’Brien, who’s commander, WIlliam Outerbridge, had been the Ward’s CO at Pearl Harbor. (And, just because I’m a geek for this kind of thing, I’ll note that O’Brien was built just down the waterfront from this ship, which I wrote about a while back).

But while Sanford, his shipmates and the Ward ˆitself are long gone, the gun they crewed lives on…

…on the State Capitol grounds, acquired from some naval armory decades ago.

Wonder what pretense the Walz administration will use for removing it?