I think this is going to be a humdinger of an election.  Alongside my predictions from this morning – GOP holds both chambers of the Legislature – I think Chip Cravaack will stave off Rick Nolan, setting the stage for what could be an epic realignment in Minnesota politics.

Beyond that?  I think Lee Byberg has laid the groundwork for what could be – let’s be conservative, here – a result that is unexpectedly good, and disconcerting for Collin Peterson.  And I think it would have happened even without his improvident slander of pro-lifers.

And while I think it’ll take a complete economic collapse and mass civil disorder to make Minneapolis anything but a DFL playground, I think Chris Fields is going to surprise people with his results on November 7.  He’s run a masterful campaign; in a just world, there would be no contest; in a district that wasn’t a one-party thug-ocracy, the statesmanly Fields would make short work of the whiny, petulant Ellison.

As to the 4th CD?

Here’s where we need your help.

Redistricting shaved Betty McCollum’s advantage down, but it didn’t gut it.  The 4th Congressional District was as blue as the Oceana Ministry of Truth’s uniforms before redistricting, of course; and it absorbed a lot of purple territory in Stillwater and Woodbury (as well as a few bright-red districts full of Real Americans up in Grant Township).

Which is a huge improvement, don’t get me wrong.

And so Tony Hernandez has been fighting this campaign to win.  And along with that, there’s been a solid effort by a lot  of candidates at the legislative level.  I think we’ve got a solid shot at four or five new seats in the legislature, either flips or open seats, as well as defending the seats we already do have.

And – this is huge – I think Blake Huffman, Dennis Dunnigan and Sue Jeffers have a solid shot at getting on the Ramsey County Commission.  And if that happens, the Ramco Commission will have a conservative majority!

If there’s a habit from the Old Fourth that we need to put to rest, it’s the idea that Saint Paul and Ramsey County Republicans only turn out when they think it matters – competitive Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races.  The media has done a painstaking, and fraudulent, job of trying to convince them that the Presidential and Senate races are foregone conclusions; they do it to try to convince Republicans not to show up at the polls.

This is where you come in.

The Hernandez Campaign is organizing a phone bank – along with several other campaigns and BPOUs in the 4th CD – to Get Out The Vote, starting tonight and running up until the election.

And we need people to sign up by clicking here and picking a time

Whether you’re a Paleocon, a Neocon, a Ronulan, a LIbertarian, or even an old-school Eastside Kennedy Democrat who’s had enough of the current regime, this is your chance to help convince people that this election makes a difference, and to help cajole them to the polls.

The fact is, Romney has a chance.  Tony Hernandez has a shot at shocking the world – perhaps by winning, perhaps by showing the state that the Fourth is not a safe sinecure and convincing Betty that a nice cushy six-figure gig with a non-profit is a lot less work in 2014.  And if we stick the landing on all five (or more!) of the legislative opportunities and the Ramco Commission, this will have an immediate and lasting effect on politics at the state level.  .

Saint Paul’s business sector is collapsing.  If downtown business occupancy rates are under 30%,it’s only because state government has been renting so much of it; the City is also party to the destruction of the downmarket but once-at-least-breathing University Avenue business strip.  Crime is rising, the school system is garbage (although the superintendent is doing the usual fine job of pre-emptively foisting the blame on the taxpayers), and with over 1,000 vacant properties (with many more forfeited via one path or another to the city, which is busy dumping them on the market for peanuts after filtering them through the non-profit system that helps install so many of the City Council in office), it’s impossible to sell a house without getting the fiscal Abner Louima treatment.

The Saint Paul Council, and Mayor Coleman, are at a loss for a response other than “tax the living crap out of whoever in the city still pays taxes”.  And building indoor ice rinks and traffic roundabouts and bike expressways.

So when it comes to the whole “run a responsible city government that doesn’t impede the city’s success”, the Saint Paul City Council is a big fat flop

But everyone’s got their sweet spot.  The St. Paul City Council does excel at worthless smug symbolic frippery:

St. Paul became the first city in Minnesota to formally resolve that federal military spending needs to be trimmed.

A resolution sponsored by St. Paul City Council member Amy Brendmoen unanimously passed the seven-member board Wednesday, Oct. 10. It asks the state’s congressional delegation to support shifting funding priorities from military operations to the needs of local communities.

“The bottom line for me is that federal spending impacts the money that goes to local initiatives,” Brendmoen said.

Of course, some of our old friends are involved (emphasis added):

 Wednesday’s council meeting was attended by members of various anti-war and social justice groups, as well as state Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, and anti-war activist Coleen Rowley.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a professor [shouldn’t that have scare quotes? – Ed.] of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, said that if every American taxpayer received a bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, St. Paul taxpayers’ share would total an estimated $1.7 billion over the past decade.

I guess you have to be a highly-educated “peace studies” “professor” to think “military spending” is done in the form of “government goodies” coupons that can be redeemed for more ice rinks and light rail trains.

But what if that putative 1.7 bill had been available for local spending, rather than exacted by the IRS or borrowed from China?

With people like Sandy Pappas and the Saint Paul City Council in charge, we’d have gotten $1.7 billion more in ice rinks, drinking fountain art and electric cars for city employees.

This sort of thing is apparently all the rage among PC liberal circles these days:

Other major cities to pass resolutions in favor of trimming military spending are Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn. Rowley said peace activists have approached the city councils in Eagan and Lakeville but have yet to receive responses. They also plan to approach Apple Valley, Inver Grove Heights, Shoreview and Mounds View officials in coming days.

If we could trade “trimming the defense budget” with “sending the city councils of Saint Paul, Philly, LA and Hartford to Afghanistan”, I think it’d be a fair trade for everyone.

This morning, we addressed Aaron Brown’s look at HD6B, up on the Iron Range, where political newcomer Jesse Colangelo is running a helluvva race against DFL/union kommissar Jason Metsa.

Today – some older but equally intrigueing news that I just haven’t had time to get to; there is one precinct in Saint Paul that is ever-so-close to voting Republican.

The Pioneer Press’ Frederick Melo reported on this a few weeks back:

The intersection of Cretin and Selby avenues is the heart of Ward 4, Precinct 6, a precinct that, like the other 96, mostly has long favored Democrats in local, state and national elections.

But in this precinct, Republicans have managed to trim the Democrats’ lead by larger and larger numbers in the past 10 years and even chose Republican Sen. Norm Coleman over Democratic challenger Al Franken in 2008.

Looking at the results at the SOS site, it’s one precinct where Tony Hernandez’ 2010 campaign came within eighit votes of Senator Dick Cohen.

Read the whole fascinating thing, assuming you didn’t a few weeks ago

And then ask yourself – if a precinct in a moldy blue one-party city like Saint Paul – aka Pyongyang on the Mississipi – turns red, what does that mean?

I mean, the fall of the Soviet Union started with protests in Gdansk – the Thunder Bay of the Baltic.

From small things, big things one day come.

(Optimistic?  If you’re not fundamentally an optimist, then there’s no point in being a Republican in St. Paul).

If you’re in Saint Paul this evening, stop by the Hernandez for Congress Taco Fiesta, from 5-8PM.

It’s at 2028 Dayton Avenue in Saint Paul:

View Larger Map

Come on over! Suggested donation is $30 – or feed the whole family for $40!

Here’s the lefty playbook when it comes to exacting more tribute from the people:

1. Make a demand.  Say, a 30% in crease in the school district levy, amounting to an increase in taxes of almost $40 million a year for eight years.
2. Point out that if the voters don’t acquiesce to the demand, the thing that the taxpayers most value – in this case, 364 teachers.  That in a school district with 5,300 employees, only 58% of whom, a little over 3,000, ever set foot in a classroom.   That means you, the lefty, plan on laying off 12% of the district’s teachers – if the voters don’t give you what you want. (No administrator jobs are at risk, naturally)

It’s the way a petulant teenager acts when they don’t get their way.

It’s the choice Saint Paul Public Schools superintendent Valeria Silva has given the voters of Saint Paul.

And it’s worse than that.  Greg Copeland, chair of “Vote NO 30% Levy Tax Hike!”, writes:

“The St. Paul School Board majority, following the recommendation of the Superintendent, showed so little respect for St. Paul Voters that it chose to combine the expiring 2006 Levy Renewal with a 30% Levy Property Tax Hike in a single ballot question, rather than giving voters an open choice of two questions, as it easily could have done; one to renew and another on the proposed 30% levy property tax increase.”, said Copeland.

There are so many angles to this story.

Blackboard Fodder:  Teachers union members are among the most reliable Democrat voters out there.

But when every single bureaucracy that emjploys them uses this exact same tactic – using their jobs as bargaining chips, and never, ever touching the admin jobs that are the district’s greatest sacred cow – I have to wonder; don’t teachers ever get tired of it?

Do they all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?

Mush, Sled Dogs!:  I’ve been a Saint Paul taxpayer for a quarter of an endless freaking century now.  Near as I can remember, the Saint Paul Public Schools have gotten every single levy increase they’ve ever asked for.   And yet the schools never get anything but worse.

The district is under the impression that the few remaining businesses and residents that actually pay taxes are like ATMs with no limit.

We are not.

In the immortal words of  Little Steven, “I’m getting tired of paying for sh*t I never get / Somebody promised justice, and they ain’t delivered yet”.

Subsidizing Failure:  And yet the schools get worse and worse.  The efflux of families, especially lower-income and immigrant families, to charter, parochial and suburban schools has ripped a minimum of 12% out of the district’s population (and many of the families are putting their money where their mouths are, and leaving the city).

And while some of the marquee schools – the ones that serve the white upper-middle class children of the more-connected government workers in Saint Anthony Park and Desnoyer and Highland are more or less adequate and make most of the right noises on command, the SPPS has among the worst achievement gaps in the US.

The Saint Paul Public School District is a failed venture.  Since it is a wholly-owned arm of the St. Paul DFL, it is in every way a symptom of the failure of one-party rule in Saint Paul. If it were a business, it would go out of business.  If it were a regulated business, it would be shut down by the government.  If it were a charter school, the Department of Education would padlock it and MN2020 would wrinkle its organization nose and write a snarky “white paper” on what a crappy idea it was.

But Superintendent Silva and the School Board – loyal DFLers all – are doing what they do every time the levy comes up; holding guns to the teachers’ heads, and saying “pay up or the teachers get it”.

Call it “Valeria’s Choice”.

The people of Saint Paul need to send our worthless, incompetent school district a message; do a better job, or (heh) get out of the way and give the job to someone who can.

Last week I blogged about the idea of having dinner at Mai Village on University this evening.  Mai Village, of course, is in the news because after spending nearly 20 years investing in the community around it – including upgrading from an almost-literal hole in the wall to a big, gorgeous room eight years ago – they are on the brink of extinction thanks to the Central Corridor.

I got sucked into a political thing this evening – so I’m thinking Sunday night instead.

I’ll be shooting to be there around 6:30 or so.

Apropos not much.

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past 25 years.

And in that time, the half-life of a GOP campaign sign in my neighborhood is roughly five days.  They – every single one of them – gets stolen or destroyed.

“It’s just kids out pranking” say the local DFLers.  “There’s nothing political about it”.  But my DFLer neighbors’ signs remain blissfully undisturbed.

(And at least one source reports to me that they’ve seen a middle-aged woman in a mini-van stealing Tony Hernandez signs.  Pranking kids?  I think freaking not).

Whomever it is, it means either…:

• The DFL in Saint Paul runs a perennial campaign to silence dissent, or…
• DFL-leaning “Kids” (and “moms”) have no respect for difference of opinion.

Neither of them is a particularly flattering verdict of the Saint Paul DFL.

I got this email earlier this week:

This is a burned Vote Yes sign in the Macalester Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul.

There are several Vote No signs up and down our block. All unscathed.

This needs reporting.

This is not the first time this has happened.

More of that respect for diversity, I guess.

(Or words to that effect.  It’s from Google Translate.  But I figure most of my audience isn’t going to be able to correct me on this [1])

So I went to Mai Village last night.  Mai Village was one of the little welter of ma-and-pa small businesses that, between the mid-eighties and the beginning of the Central Corridor construction, helped make University Avenue…

…well, not exactly “thrive”, but then the only thing that really thrives in Saint Paul is government.  But compared to the desolate, vacant, blighted strip that the street was in the eighties, a couple of waves of Southeast Asian immigrants – Vietnamese and then H’mong, Lao and Cambodian – at least brought people, activity, commerce and life to the Avenue.

But it wasn’t the kind of business that Saint Paul’s government or the Met Council wanted – white, MPR-friendly, upper-middle-class, Caribou/Patagonia/Noodles-And-Company kinds of businesses.  So they decided to drive their accursed train straight down University.  This, on top of Minnesota and Saint Paul’s already-crushing regulatory burden.

Someone asked in the comment section the other day “what kind of business will make it on University?”  Little service-oriented businesses that don’t need parking, maybe?  Tiny hole-in-the-wall places with as little overhead as possible and fanatical little clienteles, I’d suspect.  The big winners, of course, will be the big national chains – Caribou, Patagonia, NoodleCo, Chipotle – that have the financial wherewithal to ride out the construction and the political clout to score vacant space near the stations that will squat in the street every half-mile through Frogtown and the near North End.

Of course, if you’re in between those stations, you’re screwed.

Mai Village isn’t a hole in the wall – not anymore.  When I first when there, of course, it was almost literally that; a nondescript little warren you entered through a door in a seedy-looking brick wall with very little fanfare directly off of Uni, with fantastic food.  They made the “mistake” of investing in their business and in University avenue, back before the Central Corridor.  They built a beautiful restaurant, full of Vietnamese artifacts and decor and big gorgeous windows looking out on the street, back when the street was a slowly rebuilding strip of humanity.  It’s big, comfortable, serene – and I do love the food.

Today the view is of rail construction, and the Mai Village is hurting, struggling to make the payments on an investment based on pre-construction customer base with a clientele that’s been gutted by the rail construction.

So I’d like to grab dinner there one of these nights (actually I did, last night, but I’m game again); I’m craving the chicken curry, truth be told.

So I’m going to have a…well, not “MOB” event, really, but I’m going to throw this out there; I’m going to Mai Village next Thursday, September 27.  Let’s say 7:00, to allow time for people to try to navigate the area.  I’ll just be grabbing some more chicken curry (or maybe the ginger pork with rice noodles – I’ve been craving good Bun Heo Nuong since Vina closed).  If you can show up, by all means do.  It’s not a “protest”, per se, although I won’t discourage people venting about the Mogadishu-like morass that the construction has inflicted on the neighborhood, the misery of trying to get anywhere in the area, and the difficulty of parking (and I’ll give you a St. Paul-resident’s shortcut or two for those of you coming to Frogtown for the first time, later next week).  And it’s not political, really – liberals’ money is just as good as anyone’s.   Come on down.

If you’d be so kind as to leave an RSVP in the comments, I’ll make sure I get enough seats when I go next week.  Or just show up.  Either way, hope to see you there.

(more…)

If I were to suggest a pseudo-MOB event , hypothetically, to get together at the Mai Village one of these next evenings – partly to support a business that is beleaguered by the Met Council’s Toy Train, partly to protest the Met Council, partly because Vietnamese food really rocks and has gotten criminally short shrift since Thai became the hip Asian cuisine – what would be better…:

• Thursday night
• Saturday night
• Sunday night

Nothing super formal; just thinking about doing an informal “Hey, let’s do this” kind of thing.

(And wishing I’d done it for my good friends at the late, great Caribe Bistro while there was still time…)

Please sound off in the comments.

Yet another University Avenue business – the Mai Village, which was one of the great University Avenue success stories until the Met Council’s toy train came along – is bleeding out the nose:

[Owner Mai] Nguyen said profits were down at least a third since construction began, which amounts to about $30,000 a month in losses. The $15,000 a month mortgage, which doesn’t include property taxes or insurance, has been impossible to keep up with, she said.

Mai Village did receive a $400,000 loan from the city — which has been deferred — to help build the restaurant. In addition, it received a $20,000 forgivable loan for help with construction-related losses, but Nguyen said that is a “drop in the bucket.”

In addition, the county halved the restaurant’s property taxes when the building’s value decreased a few years ago.

The couple has appealed to city leaders for more help, but has received little response, Nguyen said.

And the response (with emphasis added)?

City Council Member Melvin Carter III said his office has done everything it can to help Mai Village, and that there isn’t enough money to go around to help all the businesses that are suffering.

Anyone up for a MOB Vietnamese food night / slash / primer on the Central Corridor Business Destruction Zone?

Joe Doakes from Como Park apparently wants to cover the same turf Larry King did in his old “USA Today” column:

Minnesota is in the middle of the pack on gun rights, not rotten, not great.

Minorities can’t get a job because The White Man is oppressing them – now they need more sleep? What next, affirmative action for sleepers?

Federal shenanigans to artificially prop up the housing market? Or local Vacant Building ordinances at work?

Finally, can we get Russ Stark busy on this, so we can stop seeing those annoying Packers jerseys around town?

I may just apply for some sleep-based entitlement.  Today, anyway.

The other day, we mentioned 4th CD GOP chairman John Kysylyczyn’s canceling of the only meeting scheduled for the district’s full committee before the election.  Under district rules, the full committee is the only body that can authorize the district to donate the second half of the district’s customary $10,000 donation to its endorsed candidate, Tony Hernandez.

The committee did, in fact, vote last May to donate the first $5,000 installment to Hernandez.

The vote on the donation passed…:

VC6 Brown : Yea

VC5 Mueller: Yea

VC4 Windsor: Nay

VC3 Taylor: Yea

VC2 Grinols: Yea

VC1 Williams: Yea

State Exec VC Regnier: Yea

Secretary Overlander: Yea

Deputy Chair Boguszewski: Yea

Chair Kysylyczyn: Nay

So back when the district did, in fact, vote on donating money to Hernandez, Kysylyczyn voted no.

He had a reason, of course:

Chair Kysylyczyn: While I supported the donation of $5000 to the Hernandez campaign, I vote NO on the motion before the committee because I support the idea proposed by Mr. Boguszewski of disbursing funds through a matching funds donation process as he has done in his BPOU for their endorsed candidates. A portion of the funds would be provided up front, and the balance provided on a one to one match with private dollars, up to a $5000 cap. Calculations for the matching funds process would start the day the candidate was endorsed. It is my hope that a matching funds policy can be adopted in the future.

The point  of making your district donations a “match” is to provide an incentive for the candidates to work hard at fundraising.  It works just fine when you’re a BPOU trying to get a new, or recalcitrant, candidate to raise funds on a somewhat level playing field.

When fighting for a Congressional seat in a district that hasn’t sent a Republican to Washington in 65 years, with a party unit that can be fairly said to be “rebuilding”, and where Betty McCollum will have a million dollars coming right out of the gate?  While I get the idea, it seems at best to be just a little overelaborate over $5,000.

So what does it say to future candidates?  “We’ve just endorsed you to spend the next seven months of your life working pretty close to full time, putting your job, family and real life on the sideline to take a run at one of the most difficult assignments anywhere in American politics, running as a Republican in CD4 against an incumbent candidate who sleeps on a king-size bed made of union money and will, if you are lucky, only outspend you 20-1.  So here’s a few hoops you gotta jump through.  Oh, you’re welcome!”

Of course, that was then – in May.  Now, there’s the little matter of getting another meeting called to get the second $5K installment voted on.

Tomorrow morning, three campaigns are going to get together to try to lit-drop Ramsey County.

They are:

• Sue Jeffers, solid conservative and talk show host at a station not nearly as good as mine, who is running for the Ramsey County Commission, and who needs to win
• Mark Fotsch, running for MN House in District 66A against John Lesch
• Tony Hernandez, GOP endorsed candidate for US House in CD4 against Betty McCollum

And they need volunteers to help.

So if you’d like a shot at shocking the world, ping the Hernandez Campaign.  Volunteer to lit-drop tomorrow morning (details are at the post I linked).  It’s great exercise, it’s just lit-dropping (not door-knocking), and you’ll be helping to shock the world!

Please sign on up!

(And if you can’t drop literature, feel free to drop a few bucks in the kitty!)

Joe Doakes wrote to alert me to Saint Paul’s city government springing into action:

I realize [St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman is] a busy guy, too busy to personally visit every Mom and Pop operation he’s putting out of business; still, you’d think he could have found his way down there before this. It’s been two years.

I wonder if he’ll take the bus?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Joe linked to h this piece in the PiPress:

Business owners along Central Corridor Light Rail construction on University Avenue will have a chance to voice their opinions and concerns to St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman this afternoon.

The Asian Economic Development Association is hosting the Little Mekong Walking Tour at 2 p.m., Aug. 6, starting in front of 88 Oriental at 291 University Ave.

Topics of discussion include the impact of construction on current and future businesses in the area. A number of businesses have expressed their concerns with dramatic drops in business as the light rail construction has tied up traffic and limited access to their shops.

The tour will visit businesses in Little Mekong, an Asian culture and business district on University Avenue.

How many of those same businesspeople do you suppose attended the Met Council’s rounds of perfunctory “public meetings”, held over the past decade to gather public “feedback” about the project, to be recorded and shelved while the Met Council went ahead and built the same precise misconceived project they’d always intended to?

And I wonder how many of them even thought about voting for someone other than a DFLer – the party that regards them as interchangeable reliable votes, and their businesses as chattel – at the time?

Time to think about it, guys.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I work with real estate in the Twin Cities. It’s no secret there have been a lot of foreclosures in recent years. But I’m noticing an ominous change in the nature of the foreclosures.

The economy was sliding before September 18, 2008, when Treasury Secretary Paulson said the wheels almost came off and McCain suspended his campaign to rush through the first TARP bailout, but the intensive media news afterwards and the government reaction to the problem, accelerated the decline.

Joe notes that there’ve been three waves of foreclosures:

The first wave of foreclosures starting in 2007 were limited liability companies owning rental shacks in Frogtown who saw what was coming and walked away in strategic defaults. The foreclosures dumped foreclosed homes on the market, depressing market values just as politicians and bank regulators started getting tough on loans, making it hard to move those homes off the market.

And, in Saint Paul terms, just about the time the city’s idiotic housing policies started laying the groundwork for the further gutting of the city’s housing market.

The second wave in 2008 – 2009 were 3 and 5 year ARMS taken between 2003 and 2005 taken by Asians and Hispanics in Central Corridor and the East Side using alternative loan programs (no doc, stated income, ALT-A, etc). These were subprime loans given to people who got in cheap but couldn’t refinance when their interest rates reset because property values had fallen so they walked away, also some flippers who bought Frogtown shacks in 2007 thinking they’d gotten a bargain but couldn’t make the payments when more foreclosed homes flooded the market driving down rental prices.

Not to mention the city dumping the properties it owned due to its vacant building ordinance back onto the market.

But both of those waves were mildly predictable, and old news.

Now, Joe’s got the bad news:

The third wave in 2010 to now are occurring all over Ramsey County, to borrowers on 30-year, fixed rate mortgages. These are traditional Minnesota borrowers who’ve homesteaded these properties for years, hanging on hoping for a turn-around but finally had to give up; or people who wanted to retire but can’t sell their home for enough to cover the loan so they let it go.

The first wave was froth and had the economy rebounded, that would have ended it. The second wave was fat – people who shouldn’t have had loans anyway – but the third wave is the muscle and bone of the economy. These are prudent borrowers who raised families in their homes and now have lost their life’s savings. That’s going to have a lasting impact on our economy far beyond this election.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Between the glut of city-owned properties (being handed to non-profit friends of the City Council, natch) and the continued Obama recession, Saint Paul’s housing market is screwed for years to come.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

It occurs to me that President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That Yourself” theme may not be original to him.

The St. Paul City Council already had one like it, only theirs is longer: “If you have a successful business, you didn’t build that; at least not here because we won’t let you.”

Not sure which version I like better.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s like asking “who do you like less: Rick Astley or Vanilla Ice?”

Why choose?

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes in re the St. Paul City Council’s vote to fund a new stadium in downtown for the St. Paul Saints:

City Council approves stadium funding, city resident has questions:

What kind of rinky-dink stadium are we getting for a lousy $50 million when the Twins stadium cost 10 times that much? The Saints already have a rinky-dink stadium in an inaccessible location, do they really need another?

Is a seasonal recreational facility consistent with the City’s vaunted Comprehensive Plan for Downtown Business and Retail district? Shouldn’t a ballpark be in an industrial zone – as the current one is – to allow for parking and tailgating?

Why does the Housing and Redevelopment Authority have $2 million free land sitting around for a ballpark? Why isn’t that in housing? What will the HRA do with the Midway Stadium site and how much will that cost?

What “other projects” is the Council gutting to pay for the stadium? If those projects are such low priority the stadium takes precedence, why were they funded in the first place instead of taxes being lowered?

Is the City borrowing this money on “Revenue Bonds” (if the team fails to pay rent, the bondholders take the hit) or “General Obligation Bonds” (city taxpayers are on the hook for everything)?

In re that last question, the answers are simple, if depressing:  the answer is “whatever will benefit the City Council and its friends, regardless of its affect on the taxpayer of Saint Paul”.

Am I wrong?

Twin Cities urban planners seem to think that if they just make driving a car inconvenient and headache-prone enough, drivers will throw in the towel, get a job downtown, and start riding the bus.

Which seems to be the main impetus behind this initiative – turning Charles Street (which runs parallel to light-rail-construction-addled University, two blocks north of the construction nightmare) into a “bike boulevard”, with traffic circles, bike lanes, speed bumps, and none of those dang cars.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

University Avenue is impassable to bicycle traffic now, but when the light rail is done . . . it’ll still be impassable. Parking lane gone, trains down the middle, buses in the right lane and all the other frustrated motorists wedged between. So where are those cars and bikes now? On the adjacent parallel streets as far North as Minnehaha.

And down to Marshall and Selby.  The traffic nightmare hasn’t ebbed; just metastasized.

” Organizers said an overwhelming number of respondents think that there are already too many cars, often driving too fast, on Charles Avenue and that the street is unsafe for children. Residents also worried that traffic would increase when light-rail construction is complete.”

Well yeah, dummy: frustrated motorist traffic has had to self-divert to side streets because the largest, longest, busiest East-West throughway in the City has been completely shut down and it’s never going to reopen to normal levels. This is news to you? You’re just figuring this out now? Don’t urban planners ever visit the sites of their glorious triumphs? Don’t they read the papers (or SITD) to see the chaos and havoc they’ve created? Why didn’t they plan for it up front (or did they, but had to wait for a “crisis” to arise so they could “solve” it)?

Joe has too much faith in Wahhabi transit activists.  They’re a little like post-modern German artists, the type that glumly intones “Art IS destruction and ugliness” as they unveil their latest, “installation”, a dancing man clad only with a jar holding a gutted cat pickled in urine.

Like the post-moderns, the chaos – to drivers, anyway – is precisely the point.  The goal is to make driving, and drivers, miserable.  And to them, it’s no matter if you deal with that misery by jumping on the train, or by expressing your anger, fulfilling their prophecy that drivers are base, benighted, spoiled, arrogant and above it all.

They win either way.

So naturally, the same urban planning geniuses who caused the problem on Charles are springing into action to make things even worse. The City will install bike lanes, traffic circles and speed bumps to slow traffic through the neighborhood. Cars that were shoved off University to make room for the train will be shoved off Charles to make room for the bikes. That’s great in the summer but have you ever tried to plow snow around traffic circles and speed bumps? There’s already one traffic circle on Charles and the snow ridges around it are a nightmare.

I know that circle.  The winter before last, the intersection was like an Andean goat path.  The side streets in that neighborhood are very narrow; it’s hard to get a plow around that circle – so it never went around the circle!

The bicycles will be in storage but cars still won’t be able to use the street. Might as well go all the way and tear up the tar completely, sod the street and turn Charles Avenue into lawn.

Hey Mitch, get ready for even more motorists up your way, all of them late and angry. Should be . . . interesting.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Way ahead of you, Joe.  Traffic on Thomas, Marshall, Minnehaha and Selby is all up.  And the city is reacting the way it always does.

Writing more traffic tickets.

As we saw during the whole stadium fracas, the Ramsey County Commission is as spendthrift a body as exists anywhere in Minnesota politics; but for the fact that it lacks the clout on Capitol Hill that the Downtown Minneapolis Brotherhood musters, the citizens of RamCo could be stuck with the tab for Zygi’s Playhouse.

And so we need some new blood on the Ramco Commission.

Sue Jeffers is holding a fundraiser tonight at the Blair House (Selby and Western in Saint Paul).  It’s going to feature appearances by Bob Davis and Tom Emmer from some inferior talk station.  You can register in advance (or just leave a donation if you can’t attend) if you’d like!

By the way, out on the East Side Dennis Dunnigan is running a very good campaign for Commissioner as well.  This is a very winnable seat.  If you can help him with time or money, by all means do.

After fighting against a full-court regulatory press by the City of Saint Paul for months and months, yet another entrepreneur – from that hive of business-friendliness, MInne-freaking-apolis – has opted to cut his losses.

Joe Doakes writes:

The City fought them long enough, they gave up and went away. Thank Thune we kept that Bad business off Grand Avenue. Now there’s room for a Good business, something that sells hand-dipped candles, maybe. Or maybe mystic crystals and wind chimes. To pedestrians or bicyclists.

Joe has too much faith.  In most parts of St. Paul, it’d be some kind of city-funded non-profit.  But on Grand Avenue, it’ll be a chain.  No, not a plebeian chain like Chipotle; not a local chain like Pineda.  No, it’ll be some national, fashionably-PC, high-end place like Patagonia, with the self-righteous cachet to overcome most of the objections and the money to beat the rest.

That’s what this City needs more of, good businesses like that.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Hey, we can take our train to Minneapolis for cupcakes!

In a couple of years.

After spending the last few years doing its best to kill off businesses on University Avenue, the Met Council is embarking on yet another effort to get people to go to places most of them never went in the first place, and can’t get to now because of all the light rail construction.

Joe Doakes of Como Park responds:

I’d like to shop Central Corridor but I can’t get there – it’s torn up for miles, even cross streets – and will be until 2014. What’s the point of inviting customers to a destination they can’t get to?

Wonder who these ad people are related to, or who they knew to land this contract.

Joe Doakes

To be fair, you can get to these destinations.  Although the route resembles something from the first Indiana Jones movie at times.

According to generator of meaningless statistics Bundle.com, Minneapolis children are among the most spoiled children in the US:

Bundle “examined spending by households with children at stores that sell toys, clothing and other services for tots, kids, and teens.” Parents in Manhattan and Brooklyn had the most spoiled kids (by far). The next up on the spoiled list were kids in Miami, Fla., Minneapolis and Tulsa, Okla.

While right across the river…:

But on the list of least spoiled kids, St. Paul came in second…

Clearly, Saint Paul’s  politicians were raised in Minneapolis.

It was four years ago this summer that we first started trying to take stock of the City of St. Paul’s new “vacant building” policy.

Under this policy – passed in the spring of 2008 by the St. Paul City Council, with little fanfare – vacant homes that have been classified as Category II (needs work) or Category III (teardowns) need to be brought up to current building codes to get their certificate of occupancy restored.  Which, with a house built in 1920, is going to be $100,000-200,000 worth of work.  In Saint Paul, that’s on top of a house that probably got foreclosed with a bubbled-up $200,000+ mortgage which, in a distressed neighborhood like the East Side, the North End or Frogtown, is on a property that sits on a block with several other foreclosures, in a neighborhood with many more, and might go for $50,000 today.

So sales prices have plummeted – median home prices in Saint Paul crashed by nearly half from 2007 to 2011.

And as those prices plummet, the odds of getting a refinance dwindle away to nothing, increasing the likelihood of more foreclosures.

You were warned.

It’s starting to have an effect that the local leftymedia is starting to notice, even if they misattribute its caues.  The Daily Planet, a non-profit left-leaning news site, has a report from the East Side:

Active in her church, outdoors often with her home daycare, and prone to taking long walks, Carol Overland is one of those ladies who everybody in the neighborhood knows, or at least recognizes. She’s lived on St. Paul’s East side for 35 years.

In the last three years, she’s noticed something new. “They put up a blue sign or a white sign and it’ll say ‘Notice of Foreclosure,’” she said.

“There’s one house right up here,” she said, pointing. “There’s a house down here. There’s a house on Cottage. There’s two houses going down towards Ivy.”

It’s a piker, of course; one could find blocks around Payne and Maryland where half the houses were vacant, at one point.

A recent report by the interfaith non-profit ISAIAH titled “Lost Homes: How the foreclosure crisis has hit the East Side and North End of St. Paul,” describes the crisis. Members of the organization are pressuring city officials to implement solutions laid out in the report.

We’ll look at the “solutions” in the report tomorrow.

“There’s this silent, selective tornado that’s just touching down and—Bam. Bam. Bam,” said Jonathan Zielske, pastor at Hope Lutheran Church, near Overland’s home. “If it were a real tornado or a real flood, city officials would all rush and try to do something.”

A real tornado or flood is not controllable by humans.

This disaster, on the other hand? It’s got the fingerprints of the Saint Paul City Council, just as surely as those of Bank of America, all over it.

The coalition is pushing hardest for a foreclosure mediation program that would encourage bank representatives and foreclosure candidates to sit down with a third-party mediator and come up with a solution that works for everyone. They argue that mediation could prevent foreclosure for some homeowners and offer a graceful exit for others.

The solution would address charges that banks have pushed homeowners out only to resell homes at prices the original owners could have afforded.

In other words, the banks are “charged” with lending home-owners one amount – say, $200,000 – and then not writing that down to $110,000.

Who’d have thunk it?

More tomorrow.

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.” – Abraham Lincoln.

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a worker-bee volunteer at the Tony Hernandez for Congress campaign.

When I mention this to people in my relentlessly-DFL neighborhood – and among some of my stalkers on Twitter – I get some fairly predictable responses:

• “Wow.  Sounds like a difficult race“.  Stipulated!
• “You are teh looser! Bettty MacGolum will win teh race, and you shoud not even try two stop her!” More below.
• “Why?”

The “why” is easy; to win.  To send the first Republican to Congress since the 1940s from CD4.  Not to “move the needle”, or to make the DFL spend money to keep Betty in office, although both will be byproducts of a campaign to win the Fourth CD.  But this isn’t about half-measures and consolation prizes; it’s about winning.

Of course it’s a difficult race.  In 2010 – as good a year for the GOP as we’ve seen in recent years – Betty McCollum trounced Teresa Collett by 2:1 which, ironically, is the same margin of IQ that Teresa had and has over the Congresswoman.  Name every candidate in recent memory in the Filthy Fourth – Ed Matthews in 2008., Obi Sium in 2006, Patrice Battaglia in ’04, Linda Runbeck in ’00.  Every one of them would have made a better Congressperson than Betty McCollum who, near as we can tell, serves no purpose other than pom-pom girl for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

(No, seriously – read and listen to her.  She talks like a junior high kid trying to get through a civics class presentation.  Look at her website sometime; she seems inordinately proud of having rid America of the scourge of National Guard ads at NASCAR events – which seems to be her signal accomplishment.  Or something).

Nobody doubts that this is going to be a very, very tough race.  Just as the CD8 race in 2010 and the CD6 bout in 2008 were very, very tough races.  Nobody doubts that the DFL considers CD4 “their” turf.  And for the next ten years – until the next round of redistricting, with ten more years of DFL mismanagement driving more and more people out of Saint Paul and its’ more DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – it may well stay that way.  That’s life.

But CD4 isn’t the same district it was in 2010.

The way I see it, there are five paths to victory for Tony Hernandez.  And he is going to need to take all five of them for this to be a victory, or even an especially close race.

It’s Not Your Grampa’s Fourth CD – Redistricting didn’t do Betty any favors this time.  Where the old Fourth was as solidly DFL as could have been designed – Saint Paul and a bunch of DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – the New Fourth includes the entire swath east of Saint Paul all the way to the Saint Croix River, including Woodbury, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, and a slew of other suburbs full of people who, in many cases, fled the blight that the DFL brought to places like Saint Paul., Roseville and Maplewood.  They’ve spent years working hard, building communities run in many cases by good, solid, thrifty, competent conservative GOP city and county governments – working far to hard to see it all dumped in the sewer of incompetent, spendthrift, venal DFL perfidy that seems to have chased them down.  This is especially true of the wave of minorities who’ve moved to places like Woodbury, seeking decent schools and streets safe from that most noxious DFL constituency, petty criminals.

This is especially vital for Asian-American voters – those who moved up and out of Saint Paul to Woodbury because they were tired of a school system that marginalized their young men, and the ones who still live there and whose businesses along University have been sacrificed by the New Mandarins of the Met Council.

And for Latino voters, who came to America to find the kind of opportunity that McCollum seems to think awaits them only by dint of Government favor.

There’s also the little matter of all those Stillwater people sitting in endless traffic jams all summer because of the years McCollum spent opposing a new Stillwater bridge (before shamelessly flip-flopping).

It’s possible they may vote DFL.  We’re going to try to fix that.

Betty Is Long Past Her Shelf Date – McCollum has been in Congress for what?  Ten years?  And the interesting thing is this – election in, election out, her numbers just keep dropping.  Wave year or slow year, fewer and fewer people turn out to vote for her.  Oh, the unions keep funding her, and lavishly so, but when it comes to actual voters, even in landslide Democrat years, people just don’t care about her that much.

And they don’t have to – in a “safe” district where the DFL can traditionally run a set of wind-up chattering teeth and count on 55% of the vote.

But the Fourth isn’t like that any more.  It used to be a 70-30 district, maybe 65-35 in a bad year.  Now it’s probably more like 60-40.  Which is still a tough race – but it’s also about where the 8th CD was two years ago.  And we know how that turned out.

No Coattails:  The DFL can usually count of 40-odd percent of Minnesotans voting for whatever piece of crap the Democrats endorse for President, Govenror or Senate.  It’s a fact of life.

But Americans are much worse off than they were four years ago.  And to the extent Minnesotans are better-off, it’s because of GOP policies held to by Tim Pawlenty against the DFL’s best efforts, and by a GOP majority against Mark Dayton’s obstruction.

Now, the DFL’s paid PR arms – Common Cause and Alliance for a Better Minnesota – will be doing their best to try and obscure and confuse that fact.  It may even work – the 2010 gubernatorial election showed that 43% of Minnesotans are ill-informed, incurious, or just gullible – but they’ve got their work cut out for them, because in this election, Barack Obama is going to have all the coat-tails of a Daisy Duke tube top.

It’s Not Your Grandfather’s GOP:  While the Fourth CD GOP seems to be planning to be irrelevant in the coming election, it’s a different GOP than in previous years.  The Ron Paul surge brought a flood of new, passionate voters, activists and candidates to the fore.  In the past, I’ve challenged them to make sure they express some of that passion down-ticket from Ron Paul and Kurt Bills – and to a gratifying extent, many of them are.  There are more young Republicans running credible campaigns this year than in any year I can remember; unlike previous years when half the GOP legislative candidates were “warm bodies on the ballot” that didn’t fund-raise or door-knock, every single Republican race in CD4 this year is a real effort.

And that’s not all.  Four years ago, when it came to outreach among New Americans and minorities, the GOP had nowhere to go but up; it couldn’t have gotten any worse.  But over the past two years, conservatives – especially Dan Severson and his crew – have been actually doing the long-neglected work of building relationship among all those New Americans.  Will it make a difference in this election?  Perhaps – and the effort is as much about 2020 as about 2012.

So will the combination of newbie fervor, outreach and Obama and Dayton’s underwhelming record make a difference?

We’ll see.

Just Plain Passion:  Tony’s running a hard, aggressive race.  He’s got some good people working on his campaign – one of the fruits of the previous 4th CD GOP “establishment’s” effort to find and train campaign-management talent.  The campaign has nothing to lose, everything to gain, and is doing something the GOP in the 4th has tried before – taking the battle to the enemy – but hasn’t had the resources to pull off.

Will those five paths lead Tony to the Capitol?  Well, if I, a simple volunteer, have anything to say about it, absolutely.

Will it be a brutally tough race?  Absolutely.  But I’ll send you back to the Lincoln quote at the top.

And of course, these races don’t happen without help.  Tony’s campaign needs volunteers – and unlike some previous campaigns in the district, if you volunteer, you will be put to work!

And of course, money.  Betty McCollum can count on her masters, the government unions, to prop her up with close to a million dollars this cycle (because “Money in politics is evil”, as long as it’s not Democrat money).  If Tony’s gonna win – or qualify for any of the big national donors – he’s gotta earn money here at home.  If you can pony up a few bucks, please do.

Jesse Ventura was nothing but a fraternity prank run amok.  If you want to really shock the world – as in, make Chip Cravaack’s victory look like a fart in a tornado – let’s give Tony’s campaign a push.

What have we been telling you as long as this blog has existed?

The businesses along University Avenue that the Central Corridor doesn’t starve out of existence now, during the construction phase, it will either price out of existence in the few areas – around the stops in the less-blighted areas – that get gentrified, or starve out the business in between that are beyond easy dead-of-winter walking distance from the stops that can’t also afford to build off-street parking for customers.

But those last two are well in the future.  We’re still in phase one, starving out the businesses we already have along Uni:

Ne Dao is worried. Business at her normally bustling grocery store has slowed the past two weeks, and she fears it will only get worse once the massive light-rail transit construction project lands on her doorstep.

Ask the Panellis, from the late, great Caribe Bistro; it doesn’t get any better.

Many of the Asian businesses located along the five-block stretch of University Avenue recently dubbed the Little Mekong business district say they’re losing customers and sales. Business owners blame the road construction that is making way for the Central Corridor light-rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul.

The road work on their stretch started in March and is expected to finish in late October. At University and Western avenues, the owner of Mai Village restaurant says she’s had to lay off the hostess and cut back from 10 servers to five because of the drop in business.

The problem was clearly inherited from George W. Bush.

Seriously?  I know the Mai Village.  The Mai was started probably close to twenty years ago, one of the wave of businesses started along Uni in Frogtown by Asian immigrants – first the Vietnamese, then the Hmong – who took the blighted stretch of the avenue between Lexington and the Capitol and turned it into, if not “Architectural Digest” fodder, at least a place with people, traffic, commerce, jobs…

…life.

Not the kind of life the DFL approves of – it’s not the kind of thing that fits the DFL’s vision of what Saint Paul’s Main Street should be.  Caribou. Patagonia, and lots and lots of government offices and non-profits.

Little Asian restaurants, founded by families who risked everything to leave Communist dictatorships to come to America, pooled their resources after years of working at scut-work jobs, leased ratty-looking little holes in the wall in blighted neighborhoods, built them into successes (and eventually nicer buildings, at least for those who kept their businesses on the avenue), and eventual hard-won prosperity?

Disposble!

This year, Mother’s Day, typically her busiest day of the year, was a dead zone.

“I don’t know how long we will survive,” said My Dung Nguyen, who along with her husband, Ngoan Dang, have owned Mai Village on University Avenue for more than 20 years.

The construction – as predicted in this space and in the spaces of everyone who really pays any attention to these things – has led to a long chain of destroyed businesses, wiped-out lifes’ savings, and misery in among all the dislocation for us Midway residents.

The sound of Bobcats and work crews, coupled with the dust they’re kicking up, have left her rose-filled haven of a patio empty because customers don’t want to sit out there in the middle of a construction zone.

“My customers, some of them tell it to me straight. They say, ‘I love your family. I love your food. But I’m sorry, I won’t come back until the light rail is done,'” Nguyen said.

What can I say?  If you’re ever down on Uni and are looking for a great Vietnamese meal, give the Mai a try.  They – and every business along Uni that isn’t part of a national chain with cash reserves to ride out the construction – will need the help.

Institutional Minnesota – the white, upper-middle-class part of it that was born here and never had to sail across a shark and pirate-infested ocean and learn a second, difficult language and start their lives over in a strange, cold land – is responding as usual; with blithe arrogance disguises as effort:

“Change is hard for many people. We’ve heard this from businesses elsewhere on the corridor and in other areas,” said Laura Baenen, a spokeswoman for the Central Corridor Light Rail Project.

“Change is hard for many people” is the “I’m sorry you were offended by what I said” of the social engineer.

Along with the arrogance, we have the out-of-context diversions:

Baenen noted that more businesses have opened on the entire corridor in the past year than have closed. From March 2011 to March 2012, 64 businesses opened on the corridor — including Washington Avenue, University Avenue, and Cedar and 4th Streets in downtown St. Paul — while 59 closed.

I’ll just bet they have.  There’s a lot of cheap space available now!

Now – how many of these “businesses” are non-profits that will bring no meaningful commerce to the Avenue?

I’ll get back to you on that.

And it looks like there’ll be more cheap space, as things are shaping up now:

The Asian restaurants are the ones that have been hardest hit, Thoj said. “Just in Little Mekong area, most of the restaurants are seeing a 25 to 50 percent loss. We have about 12 eating establishments. They all drop in customers during lunch and dinner.”

Back at Mai Village, Nguyen says the vision that the Metropolitan Council has of light-rail bringing prosperity to Little Mekong is still a long way from happening.

In the meantime, she says she and the other longtime owners are just trying to hold on to see that day.

“We put our heart, our time, our everything in here,” she said. “We would like to see it a success if the light-rail is done. But that is a big question.”

Silly eggs.  Your hearts, time and everything exist at the pleasure of the DFL’s omelet machine.

These are people who did everything right.  They rejected socialism for freedom.  They threw everything they had into succeeding – with very little to no government help – in a new, sometimes hostile land.  And they succeeded.   Indeed, the only mistake most of them made – it’s a statistical fact – was voting DFL.

And there’s noplace else to take a boat to, this time.