Going back almost four years, this blog has been covering (OK, linking to other conservative bloggers who’ve been covering) the malfeasance, misdirection and/or sloth of former Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher in re his policy on issuing handgun carry permits.  At his nadir, he was rejecting one out of eight permit applications. That’s a lot of human rights being trampled on.

It was one of the reasons such an unholy alliance – “progressives” angry about equally-egregious accusations about the sheriff’s first amendment record, and conservative gunnies – united to topple Fletcher in favor of Bostrom.

It’s been a year. How’s it going?

For the answer, I turn to – of all people – Grace Kelly at MN “Progressive” Project:, who to be fair hated Fletcher long before most people did.  .

It has now been almost a year in office for the new Sheriff Bostrom. How is the gun permit processing going? Basically, using our best evidence, it looks like it is going well. Although there are some unexplained numbers.

Which are, in turn, unexplained. I did mention it was Grace Kelly, right?

The first error is to give permits to people who should not have received permits. We rarely find out about those errors. We usually discover those permit errors only when a crime is committed.

And nine years after the first passing of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, we’re still waiting for the first such case.   I’ll call that a win, for Bostrom and everyone else.  (For those who aren’t up on the issue – there were quite a number of permits issued to people under the old, “discretionary” system to people who should not have gotten them; people with crime records and the like).

The other error is to deny permits from people who should have received permits. The best hard evidence is a court allowing a permit on appeal. When appeal is upheld, our tax payer dollars pays [sic] the lawyer’s fees, otherwise the person wanting the permit pays. Usually the cost is about $3000.

From what I’ve been told, $3,000 would be pretty cheap.  Fletcher rang up – according to the late Joel Rosenberg – over half a million dollars in attorney fees awarded to plaintiffs   under the appeal provisions of the MN Personal Protection Act.

Lawyers loved Fletcher…:

Marc Berris used to make jokes that Ramsey county was sending his kids through college just based on the gun permit appeals…[he noted] that no client paid him quite like the Ramsey County sheriff’s office. For years, Berris made a killing by taking on former Sheriff Bob Fletcher. …However this year there are no pending cases in the court appeal process. Neither the Sheriff’s office nor Andrew Rothman, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Defensive Firearm Instructors has heard of any pending court cases… So by the measure of court appeals, it appears that the gun permit process is being applied correctly.

And in terms of numbers?

By another measure, the rate of denial has gone down from a Sheriff Fletcher high of 13.5 percent in 2007 to  4.7 percent of applications, this year through November. This is still higher than 1.7 percent state average. So if the appeals process shows that permits are properly denied, then why are Ramsey county numbers higher?

I’d be tempted to say that it’s all those DFL voters…

…but Hennepin county’s denial rate is, if anything, below the state average.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

Last night I saw something I have never seen before and never expected to see: the outdoor refrigerated ice rink at Northdale Rec was full of skaters, while the two adjacent rinks were bare dirt because of above-freezing temperatures this week.

Mayor Coleman was right: the biggest problem facing the City of St. Paul is indeed the soft ice caused by global warming. Spending millions of dollars on outdoor refrigerated ice rinks was, in fact, a prudent investment.

I stand corrected.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Sa-lute!

How many businesses along University Avenue have been driven out of existence by the Central Corridor light rail contraction?

Hard to say – nobody involved in this boondoggle seems to be publicizing the counts.

But enough that someone’s trying to help people scavenge the space:

Starlings are birds that rest their tired wings in pre-existing nests, taking advantage of readily available real estate to make their temporary homes. Perhaps the same strategy can help some landlords along the Central Corridor fill their empty storefronts, at least until a more permanent tenant comes along.

Cute name.  But I think the only birds that are going to benefit from this disaster will be seagulls – scavengers that pick off the waste others leave behind.

Or Caribou.  Which isn’t a bird – it’s a big hoofed mammal – but it’s also a coffee shop that will enjoy lots of cheap rent in abandoned storefronts, in which to serve coffee to the condo-dwellers – the few that don’t drive everywhere, and also exist.

But I digress:

On Tuesday, two graduate students launched a new volunteer-driven effort to connect University Avenue property owners with artists, entrepreneurs and community groups looking for short-term offices, galleries or event space at bargain rents.

The Starling Project focuses on “meanwhile spaces,” according to co-founder Ben Shardlow, with the intention of filling empty storefronts with evidence of creative enterprises.

OK – it’s not a dumb idea, per se.  Eventually the market will fill the vacant space – it’s a big metro, still.  And those people and businesses in turn will…

…well, either languish in the arid parking-free no-mans-lands between the big stops, or get priced out of the market by the Caribous and Patagonias and McDonalds and Dunn Brothers that can afford the newly-gentrified rents at the  intersections that the Met Council has selected to be the “winners”.

Which, in turn, will be someone else’s grad school thesis.

You’ve probably heard:  Saint Paul had its first “Instant Runoff Vote” last week.

And I think the results demonstrated why so many cities that have tried to implement IRV have repealing it.

Doug Bass was less unimpressed by it than I was, and he helpfully ran an instant replay on the St. Paul Ward 2 “Instant Runoff”; 61% of Ward 2 voters initially rejected incumbent councilman Dave Thune, who won after three rounds of counting.  Bass unpacks the whole process (read the whole thing).

Bass concludes:

At this point, Im willing to accept that IRV provides a reasonable snapshot of the will of the people, until shown otherwise.  I would like to see the returns in more detail.  For example, out of all the first choice ballots for Thune, how were the second choices distributed?  Did a ballot with Thune as the fifth choice put him over the top?  Someone might say its none of my business.  But that doesnt keep me from wondering.

I have more pedestrian worries.  The campaigns this time around seemed to worry more about how to game the ranked-choice system than they did on actually talking issues.  Granted, it’s a one-party city, so they never have to actually talk issues.

Which is a signal fact of Instant Runoff Voting; it seems to get adopted in one-party cities like Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Tacoma and the like.  Could it work in a place with competitive races?

We may never know.  I’m not aware that it’s been tried.  And even many of the one-party cities that adopted it in a wave of fanfare over the past decade are quietly retiring the idea.

What do they know that we don’t?

It’s mostly a rhetorical question.

…when the left was screeching blue murder over electronic balloting?  How “Diebold” was in the bag for Republicans, and how transparency in the voting process was the most important factor in democracy?

Hey, I don’t disagree. Transparency is good.

So where all those “transparency is king” people now that the Twin Cities are both being beset by an electoral system that virtually nobody understands, gives an electoral edge to people who don’t get the most votes, and virtually guarantees that more elections will end up in the sort of costly re-election brouhahas we’ve had in 2008 and 2010 in Minnesota?

Mostly supporting electoral politics’ shiniest new toy, “Ranked Choice Voting”.  Saint Paul’s first ranked-choice election has led  to a recall among the city’s seven city council races – the fractious race in Ward Two, where incumbent Dave Thune got 39 percent of the vote.  That would have been a weak plurality win in a normal election.

This time, it means the “Green Party” candidate, Jim Ivey, whose campaign was largely based on trying to game the Ranked Voting system (and whose party is one of “IRV”‘s biggest proponents, for this very reason) and who got 26 percent in the first round, stands to potentially benefit in today’s recount:

Ivey has what looks like an edge. With about 1,300 second-place votes, he has a 4-3 edge over Thune among second-choice designations. But according to Ramsey County elections manager Joe Mansky, it’s not that simple.

“Because we know that not every ballot has a second choice,”Mansky said. “More to the point, the lowest-ranked candidates get counted first, meaning they have the greatest impact on the results.”

That means the reallocation will be a ballot-by-ballot battle, watched over by the candidates’ supporters in St. Paul.

And if nobody gets over 51%?   Chaos reigns!

If you’re a conservative and live in Saint Paul, you need to get to the polls today and vote for Elizabeth Paulson, Pat Igo and Kevin Huepenbecker for School Board.  There is a crying need for common sense on the SPPS Board; we have our chance!

Also, Cynthia Schanno is running for City Council in Ward 2, against Dave Thune.  The City Council is doing a terrible job; there needs to be a change.

Finally – if you live in Bloomington, Hans Anderson is running for Mayor.  He’s a solid conservative, an engineer by training, and he can help defuse the fiscal time bomb facing that city.

Get to the polls!

Here’s Andrew McCarthy at NRO Online.

Info on Michele Bachmann’s fundraiser.

Here’s Cyntha Schanno’s website. Please help her win the Ward 2 City Council seat.

Here’s the video I shot at “Occupy MN” this past week.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Bridges deficient. Millions needed for repairs. No money in budget because . . .

. . . the money was diverted to light rail.

Priorities, people. Focus on priorities.

Speaking of which, I wonder if they ever got that little problem with the Washington Avenue Bridge – as in, “is it and its old-fashioned truss construction, not too different from the old 35W Bridge, strong enough to handle trains zipping over it” – resolved?

You’re hearing a lot of “right on time” happy-talk from the Met Council on the Central Corridor’s building schedule.

And it is a fact that the project seems to be on time in terms of getting track laid.

But carrying off a major rail construction project in the middle of a busy (work with me here) city is like creating and then raising a baby to adulthood; getting laid is the easy part; it’s the details afterward that’ll kill you.

And so it seems to be with the Central Corridor, according to an excellent piece in the PiPress from Frederick Melo earlier this week:

The front of Jack McCann’s University Avenue office buildings east of Raymond Avenue has been torn up since April. That’s when Central Corridor light-rail line work crews dug up his yard to get at water lines.

McCann said it was understood the crews would return to repair the broken sprinkler pipes now sticking out of the ground. But they haven’t.

“They didn’t come back and restore it,” McCann said. “It’s shoddy work.”

Instead, work crews installing the new transit line are focusing on meeting a Metropolitan Council deadline for reopening a three-mile stretch of University Avenue between Hamline Avenue in St. Paul and Emerald Street in Minneapolis.

By Nov. 30, they’re required to open two traffic lanes in each direction, or face penalties of $10,000 per day.

Will Walsh Construction reach the goal? Some business owners doubt they’ll get the four lanes open and complete related projects by that date.

And it’s looking more and more like if they meet it at all, they’ll meet the “letter of the law” – getting the streets more or less open – rather than tying up all the loose ends….

…which are killing business up and down University.

I’ll urge you to read the whole thing.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on what happened at the Ramsey County Charter Commission last night.

The 10-8 vote did not impose a tax  It rejected an amendment the county charter that would have allowed a referendum on the Ramco Commission’s agreement with the Vikings to ask the state to exempt the plan from a referendum on a sales tax hike to pay for the stadium – which is contrary to state law and the county’s charter.

There are really only four things, now, that can come between Ramco’s taxpayers and a generation of paying Wilfare:

1. If your state legislator supports this boondoggle – a give-away to Zygi Wilf and the DFL’s trade-union water-carriers – they need to hear from you.
2. The downtown “Brotherhood” will have to find a way to steal the project for downtown Minneapolis.  Don’t rule this out.
3. The Ramco Commission needs to hear from we, the residents, that this must not pass.  I doubt it’ll work, but it’s worth at try.
4. Ramsey County voters will need to wake up and realize what a bunch of hamsters the DFL-dominated Ramco Commission is.

I like to bike.  My current commute is 16 miles each way, if I do the whole thing (and I usually don’t; most days, I’ll throw my bike on the rack and drive to a park-and-ride and bike the last 8-10 miles,although my goal by the end of bike season, November-something with any luck at all, will be to ride the whole thing at least once a week).

Jason Lewis’ accusations notwithstanding, bikers pay all sorts of taxes; for starters, very few of us bike exclusively; most of us drive cars, and pay gas taxes, and as I showed some time ago, those of us who mix biking and driving actually benefit the rest of you taxpayers and gas-buyers.

I mention all of this purely to set up the fact that I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks bikes are in and of themselves a communist conspiracy, and that bikers have been sucked, wittingly or not, into some “progressive” vortex.  It’s just not true.

But like most conservative bikers, I do the odd theatrical facepalm when I see the institutionalized arrogance of the Bike über Alles crowd.  And we have just such a case on display in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood.  A “non-profit”, “Transit for Livable Cities”, is proposing a “bicycle boulevard” – not much unlike the one on 39th Street in south Minneapolis, which I accidentally discovered this past weekend, and which seemed oddly devoid of bikes when I saw it – straight down Jefferson Avenue.  And to do it, they want to make Jefferson, especially at Cleveland Avenue, virtually impassable to cars.

St. Paul Public Works plans to move forward this year with a grassy, bicycle-friendly median along Cleveland Avenue at Jefferson Avenue that has drawn both praise and criticism from residents in the area who are weighing the merits of a narrower crossing.

The median would force northbound and southbound traffic along Cleveland Avenue to slow and traffic along Jefferson Avenue to make right turns.

Public Works has tentatively proposed that the median go before the St. Paul City Council on Aug. 17. If approved, construction could begin in October or November.

Cleveland is the main way of getting north and south from Highland to the Midway.  Having a big gnarly bottleneck at Jefferson will not just be a huge pain, but it’ll squeeze traffic into the side streets or bump it over to Fairview, which is already overtaxed; with light rail contruction, getting north and south through Saint Paul anywhere west of Lexington (so far) is a sisyphean nightmare.

The citizens against the Jefferson Avenue Median have a facebook page.  And Joe Soucheray – who benefits from being one of few mainstream conservative commentators who don’t froth against biking for no reason takes the proposal apart.

More later…

While the Legislative GOP warns Minnesotans about what DFL rule will bring, one group of Minnesotans is living it today.

Businesses along University Avenue in Saint Paul are learning what it means to be “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota”.

A business owner along Uni writes (anonymously, because businesses that offend the mother city tend to get more visits from city inspectors):

They (met council) finally have the loan application available for us businesses (that was mentioned in their April news release).

It’s late June.  Just saying.

Funny, it’s 13 pages of incredibly detailed information and requirements of us….but I don’t remember approving these folks’ use of my tax money to build their worthless light rail.

I have to prove my business is worthy of their loan, but they don’t have to prove their light rail is worthy of ruining our business.

Sigh.

Just keep repeating to yourself “I’m happy to pay for a better Minnesota”.

I say this still holding out hope that we will survive. There’s a chance we will. Things aren’t as dire as they could be…we’re hanging on…but barely these past couple months!

Here’s the loan app & info…just came out today:

Loan application:

http://stpaul.gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=16866

Flyer about the loan program is attached.

And it’s interesting to see what a goverment bureaucrat’s idea of “help” for a businessperson is:

Max loan, by the way is $20,000. Last I checked we are $10,000 down this May compared with last May. That is ONE month. I mean, if we actually meet all their qualifications, we’ll gladly take the loan/grant/whatever, but it will help make a dent for maybe 2 months during the how-many-years construction? Again, not being ungrateful…just saying, I don’t think these people realize how much it costs small businesses, especially restaurants, to operate day-to-day. We need to average $20,000-$30,000 per month in gross sales to simply survive, if that puts things in perspective…we are the definition of small! lol.

Even better?  The bureaucrat’s idea of what it means to talk to businesspeople:

Business resources

http://stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=4533

But wait! They will save us with brochures!

This link goes to their “ready for rail checklist” to help businesses thrive during construction.

Array

It is insulting to my intelligence as a business owner. I read it an literally said to myself, “are you f-ing kidding me?”

How patronizing these people are! We have done every single thing on this list, except “attend their workshops” because, well, we are busy running our business. Nothing on their stupid check list will change the fact that nobody wants to drive near the mess that is University Ave. Nothing on the checklist will make customers choose to take a longer lunch break because it takes them so long to get to us.

Well, good thing they told us to simply “reduce overhead and operating costs in advance of construction.” Gee, really? I had never thought of trying to reduce costs until I read your brochure! Thanks! I suppose if we stop paying employees and stop buying food we can reduce costs (seriously…day to day we are forever working to never miss an opportunity to reduce costs….most businesses are…like I said…this checklist is insulting).

OK…enough venting again. I could go through every bullet point on their list & tell you how worthless it is….because none of their items actually reduces traffic congestion or creates parking.

To the bureaucrats in St. Paul ,Ramco, the Met Council and the State, empty buildings means cheap rent for non-profits!

Support your University Avenue businesses.  Goodness knows your state isn’t.

I was out at Grand Old Day yesterday.  I took a stroll down the avenue from Fairview to about Victoria, and then back.  With about 200,000 people out there in high-80s heat and tropical humidity, it was warm out there.

But the Saint Paul GOP booth was set up in a nice bit of shade a block or so east of Lexington.  I stopped by to chat with the crew there, including the St. Paul GOP’s school board candidates Pat Igo, Lizz Paulsen and Kevin Huepenbecker.

Now, when you’re a Republican in Saint Paul, you expect a certain amount of flak; most of it rote and unimaginative, some of it just plain weird.  It’s normal, I suppose, when you’re in a one party town where the majority have never had to defend their assumptions.

It was, apparently, no exception on Sunday.  There were lots of people out on the avenue, and most, not unexpectedly, didn’t care about politics at all.  And most that did were perfectly polite.

Oh, there were some of the usual crowd, the ones we get at the fair; the ones that chant a few chanting points (“Single Payer Now!  Single Payer Now!”) and scamper away before anyone can engage them. And there was one nutter, apparently a former DFL candidate who’d lost an election, who came to the booth, sputtered for a bit, and when challenged, interrupted; “I’m not here to discuss with you; I’m here to tell you!”.

But while I was standing there, a couple of women – drawn, dessicated, haggard-looking fiftysomethings who’d clearly had a couple of Bud Lights at the beer garden – brushed past me.  “You people are cray-zee“, said the first woman, wearing a beer cap and a beer T-shirt.

“Really?”, I responded.  “How so?”

The woman, standing on the other side from me of a family, with a couple of small children, bellowed “you can’t run a government with no f***ing money!”.  Before we could point out that the GOP is offering to raise the budget, her and her friends waddled away, waving their arms like they were guiding aircraft in to a flight deck.  “You know, there’s kids here”, I yelled after her.  “Might wanna, y’know, watch the language…”

But they were gone.

And I thought – was this yet another symptom of the St.Paul DFL’s approach to everything?  Their ends justify their means?  Gotta break eggs to make a vegan omelette; your mania trumps everyone else’s rights?  If you wanna yell, then you’re gonna yell, and screw anyone in the way?

Or was it just a couple of drunks, babbling?

I kept 0n walking.

Joe Doakes from Como Park – who knows his way around a city budget – writes:

The Legislature failed to reach agreement with the Governor meaning no state aid money for cities. Mayor Coleman wants to know how many cops the Republicans want him to lay off to balance the City budget.

Of course, the rest of the city’s bureaucracy is off limits.  But we digress.

Sad to say, Mayor Coleman has a point. In the Obama Economy of straitened finances, local government may be forced to privatize some services including aspects of police protection. Citizens may need to assume responsibility for their own safety. But many people have found themselves unable to afford to do so, or have been prohibited from doing so, by onerous government regulation or market forces. How can we address this urgent public safety issue consistent with reduced city government revenues?

It’s a tough question.  But Joe has an idea:

I think Congress should pass a Community Re-Armament Act requiring gun dealers to sell pistols to people who traditionally have been underserved in the firearms market (felons, minors, the insane); establish a federal agency to subsidize the price of those guns at taxpayer expense; assign BATF to audit gun dealers to make sure they’re selling enough guns to children upon pain of losing their dealer’s licenses; have Community Organizers sue high-profile gun dealers for “redlining” by failing to make enough such sales; wait 15 years to view results.

Empowering those traditionally excluded from power: I’m astonished Barney Frank isn’t all over this idea. Hey, it worked so well in the housing market. What could possibly go wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Leave out the “felons, minors, the insane” bit, and it could work…

Last Friday, I wrote about Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth’s problems as it comes to money.

And Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman was quoted:

“If the leadership of the Republican Party wants to come and look through my budget, tell me how many cops they want me to lay off, tell me how many fire stations they want me to close, tell me how many libraries I’m supposed to close. The fact of the matter is they’re governing in ignorance. They don’t know what we do. They have a mythology of what cities do. They have a mythology of where we spend our money.”

And in the “debate” between Rep. John Lesch and candidate Greg Copeland on the Marty Owings “Capitol Conversations” show last March, Lesch asked for exactly the same thing – meaning that we’ve had requests up and down the entire DFL hierarchy for Republicans to come in and give input on the city budget!

Well, what a great place to reach across the aisle!

I think it’d be a fine idea to take some copies of the City’s operating budget, sit down with a bunch of businesspeople and taxpayers, and bang through it, line by line, and dig out all the waste.  Just so that we and the Mayor could fully understand each others’ positions.

I mean, I’m not talking “the leadership”, per se; I think some Saint Paul businesspeople and taxpayers would be just fine, although I wouldn’t mind having some of the legislative budget leadership there either.

But I think getting 10-15 copies of the operating budget and some budget hawks together – say, at O’Gara’s some evening – with an eye toward educating each other, would be a fine idea.

Hmmm.

(SCENE: BUD OLSON and TREVOR PUCKETT, two City of Saint Paul Public Works employees, are having breakfast at Mickey’s Diner on West Seventh Street).

WAITRESS: Here’s your coffee.  Pancakes’ll be up in a minute.  (Walks away).

PUCKETT:  So you get that car for your daughter yet?

OLSON: No.  I’ve been trying to find her one of them rice-burners, a Toyota or a Honda or a Mazda or somethin’.  Can’t find ’em.

PUCKETT: Why’s dat?

OLSON: Oh, cuz of dat “Cash for Clunkers” thing the Republicans foisted on us.

PUCKETT:  Sheesh.  That’s what Chunky, my mechanic – you remember Chunky?

OLSON: Nooo.

PUCKETT: He’s the guy who was at that cookout I threw a couple a years ago, who told that joke about the two nuns and the camel?

OLSON: (shakes head)

PUCKETT: Oh, I laughed.  Anyway – Chunky says that he can’t find used engines, because the Republicans made them pour acid into the engines after da government bought ’em.  If you wanna put a new engine in your winter beater, you gotta buy a new one.

OLSON: Oh, ya.  Anyhoo, used cars are expensive as hell.

(WAITRESS puts plates of pancakes and eggs on table).

(Both men plow into their pancakes).

PUCKETT: So what are you doing today?

OLSON: Me and the crew got teardowns all week.  Just a buncha 1930s houses that got foreclosed, that the banks that own ’em wouldn’t bring up to code.   So the city’s tearin’ em all out!

PUCKETT: Oh, ya.  My brother in law, Harvey – you remember Harvey?

OLSON: No.

PUCKETT: Harvey Torstenson?

OLSON: Nope.

PUCKETT: He’s about yay tall, has a blonde mustache?

OLSON: Not ringin’ a bell.

PUCKETT: Anyway, he’s a sheet-rocker, and when the city passed that law requiring old vacant homes to get brought up to code, he figured he was gonna make a mint, cuz they all gotta get brought up to code!

OLSON: How’s he doin’?

PUCKETT:  Nothin’.  He says it’s Bush’s fault.

OLSON: So how’s your daughter and her husband doing finding a place to live?

PUCKETT: Oh, same s**t, different day. They can’t find a place to rent in Saint Paul that they can afford.

OLSON: Still in your basement?

PUCKETT: Ya.  There’s just noplace to rent out there.  Or nothing they can afford, anyhow.

OLSON: Huh.  Have they tried going to the city?

PUCKETT: Good idea.

OLSON: (Gathers stuff from seat) Well, time to get going.  Another day another dollar.

PUCKETT:  Workin’ hard!

OLSON: Or hardly working!

PUCKETT: (Laughs)

Joe Doakes writes from Como  Park:

The folks opposing the Stillwater bridge have taken a new tack: we don’t need the bridge because the economy is so bad nobody can afford to move out of the city to commute. In the New Ecomony, we’ll all ride light rail to the soup kitchen.

“Everything we needed to know, we learned during the FDR administration”.

Joe has a larger point:

I may not agree with their conclusion but they’ve got a point: old solutions may not work in the new Obama-ized economy, with double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, poorer immigrants replacing Baby Boomers and trillions of dollars lost from the middle class to foreign banks. Time to look at new solutions in light of the new economic reality.

I spend a lot of time looking at real estate records especially foreclosures. I frequently find properties with two, three, sometimes four loans from do-gooder groups and government agencies, often forgivable if the borrower lives there long enough.

The problem with those loans is they are made only to low income people for small improvements to crappy houses in crappy neighborhoods. Putting a new furnace and water heater into a crappy house doesn’t buy you a house worth more or a nicer neighborhood to live in; you just get a warmer crappy house.

Low income borrowers tend to have less cash in reserve so when they have trouble making payments, that crappy house goes into foreclosure and sits vacant until inspected by the city as a Vacant Building at which time it needs a total upgrade to wiring, plumbing, insulation and energy efficiency. No foreclosing bank-owner or new buyer would sink that kind of money into a crappy house in a crappy neighborhood so the house is abandoned until torn down by the city.

Thereby wasting the new furnace and water heater, if they haven’t already been stolen by vandals along with the copper pipes.

New Economic Reality Solution? Stop giving money to poor people to make trivial improvements to crappy houses in crappy neighborhoods. De-fund the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and the St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority. Stop giving taxpayer money to feel-good do-gooder groups such as Greater Frogtown Community Development Corporation or Neighborhood Energy Connection.

If society must help homeowners improve their homes, the funds ought to be prudently invested in loans to middle income folks with decent homes in decent neighborhoods who actually have a chance of keeping them up and repaying the loans. Otherwise, the money is simply wasted. We all work too hard for our money to simply waste it.

As for the crappy neighborhoods, urban renewal Chicago-style: start a fire at Lexington and let it burn to the freeway. We’ll worry about the East Side next year.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

This blog does not endorse pyromania – but Joe knows real estate.

But it is a fact that Saint Paul is trying to do exactly what New York City did, following every single step of the process that has led every part of Manhattan that isn’t a squalid slum to be completely unaffordable to anyone who’s not a network anchor or a hedge fund manager; harassing small landlords out of business (in the time I’ve lived in the city, the number of small, independent, non-governmental-or-non-profit landlords running less than ten units of housing has dropped from the thousands into the hundreds), destroying the stock of inexpensive housing (as Joe described above), and enforcing absurd requirements on the landlords and other property owners that are left.

Of course, there are no networks or hedge funds based in Saint Paul.  There are fewer and fewer businesses of any kind, beyond government.  Downtown vacancy rates are catastrophic (and masked by government renting more and more space); University Avenue is in the process of being turned into a desert.  The North End, Frogtown and East Side are being gutted, just as Joe describes, by government intervention, coming and going.

Maybe they’ll start a new non-profit to fix it all.

Bob Collins at NewCut notes the impact of the proposed Vikings Stadium tax on Ramsey County (Ramco):

The county has agreed to come up with $350 million, paid for with a half-cent sales tax increase. That puts Saint Paul, in particular, as the most expensive city to buy things in in Minnesota because it already has a city sales tax in addition to the state sales tax and the transportation tax.

He’s got the figures:

City or County Sales Tax

• Saint Paul 8.125%
• Minneapolis 7.775%
• Ramsey County 7.625%
• Hennepin 7.275%
• Dakota 7.125%
• Washington 7.125%
• Anoka 7.125%
• Carver 6.875%
• Scott 6.875%

It’s all mostly academic, of course; between the taxes and the Central Corridor and the blight, hardly anyone shops in Saint Paul anymore.   If it weren’t for all the people tumbling out of the Xcel Center with their capacities all diminished, not much gets bought in Saint Paul but groceries.

“Oh, Berg, you’re just talking like a Tea Partier”.

Well, no – Collins notes it too:

A person buying a new car in Saint Paul (there aren’t many car dealers left in Saint Paul) would pay a sales tax of about $2,031 on a $25,000 car. Someone in Scott County, by comparison, would pay about $1,718.

Between Saint Paul’s idiotic housing policy, its stifling taxes and it’s  moronic light rail construction, pretty soon the city is going to be like a cold Manhattan.

Only without the jobs and social life and money.

Maybe “cold Flint” is better.

Your tax dollars at work:  the Feds signed on to paying half the cost of the Central Corridor at a lavishly-covered pep rally yesterday, featuring…

…bureaucrats.  Like FTA administrator Peter Rogoff, who spoke at the rally yesterday:

“This project truly embodies the president’s vision for winning the future through infrastructure investment…”

“Gotta destroy the city to save it”, I guess.

It will create thousands of construction jobs now while paving the way for many thousands of jobs that will come to the Twin Cities through the economic development successes surrounding the new rail line,” [Rogoff] told an enthusiastic gathering of…

…of who?

…more than 100 local, state and federal officials…

I’m sure that some University Avenue businesspeople will show up in the story eventually.  Just positive.

By 2030, weekday ridership – projected to exceed 40,000 – will top Hiawatha LRT ridership as people gain new access to nearly 300,000 jobs in the two downtowns, at the University of Minnesota and in the neighborhoods in between.

“Central Corridor represents an historic economic opportunity to connect St. Paul residents to jobs, businesses, services and educational opportunities throughout the region,” said Mayor Chris Coleman. “At the same time, it’ll transform one of St. Paul’s most iconic streets and strengthen the communities that surround it.”…

…provided that those “jobs” decide to align themselves along a corridor where already-lavish mass-transit and freeway development hasn’t drawn them after fifty years of trying.  It’s a simple fact – cities aren’t developing the way they did fifty years ago.  The urban rim – the third-tier suburbs and exurbs, the Maple Groves and Woodburies and Elkos – are where the people, and the jobs, are going.  If you don’t believe me, believe Joel Kotkin.

Or believe neither of us; just try to find an example of a light rail development in the Twin Cities area that promised vast economic benefits, and delivered only slightly-altered patterns of decay.  That’s right – the Hiawatha Light Rail line.  Been on that route lately?  The brief spurt of condo development along the route deflated quickly when the housing bubble burst; the only real “development” anywhere along the route has been among bars (catering to the hordes of people who ride the train from the Mall to Twins and Vikes games, as well as the Hiawatha’s bar-hopping crowd) and some developments along East Lake that are more driven by changing demographics and lavish city investment than the light rail line, unless you want to claim there’s a surge of people riding the train to and from the East Lake Target Store or Pineda Burritos.

Anyway – let’s scan the list of other notables and see if there are any University Avenue business people (emphasis added by me):

“On this day that is 30 years in the making, we must recommit to making Central Corridor all that it can be: to heal the wound that a freeway opened in the West Bank decades ago, to fully integrate light rail with every mode of transit, and to connect transit-dependent communities to every opportunity,” said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak…

…”We are turning into reality our vision of a network of interconnected transitways,” said Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin.

Hm.  Just more bureaucrats, so far.

We’ll keep looking:

The Central Corridor light-rail line will revitalize University Avenue as a lifeline between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Streetcars operated on University Avenue continuously from December 1890 to Oct. 31, 1953. With a streetcar operating as often as every three minutes, there was an energy and vibrancy to the street life along the avenue.

Supporters expect Central Corridor line will rekindle that same kind of energy and enthusiasm as neighbors meet neighbors, students meet professors and business people meet customers aboard busy trains and at busy rail stops.

A reference to the glory days of the streetcar.  Let’s come back to that.

Let’s keep looking for businesspeople:

“When completed, this project will bring the community together in a way not seen since the age of the street car, but also in a manner modern and contemporary,” said Ramsey County Commissioner Jim McDonough.

McDonought is – I’ll be kind – trafficking in fantasy.  For starters, streetcars were simple little rattletraps, mechanically even simpler than buses, that stopped every block or two, more or less like buses.  Light Rail is big, heavy, “fast”, like little trains rather than buses on tracks.  Light Rail doesn’t bind communities.  It gets people through them in a hurry .

And that’s even if “communities” were the same as they were during the glory years of the streetcar, which they’re not. Urban development has changed in the past fifty years.  The big cities – all of them, not just Minneapolis and Saint Paul – developed at a time when the Big City was where the factories, bureaucracies and banks were; where the capital got invested.  Transit – the fabled streetcars – brought them from the “suburbs” (which, back then, were places like “50th and Bryant” and “Battle Creek”, not Wayzata) to jobs at Ford, Honeywell, the mills along the riverfront, the big banks downtown…

…all of which are now gone, or have radically realigned, taking the need for a big, centralized city with them.

“The federal grant commitment of $478 million is the largest federal grant ever received in Minnesota for a transportation project,” said Metropolitan Council Chair Sue Haigh.

…Rep. Betty McCollum, whose district includes the rail line, collaborated with state and local officials to secure federal funding for Central Corridor as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.”Today’s federal commitment to the Central Corridor represents a great achievement for Minnesota,” McCollum said. “The Central Corridor is an investment in infrastructure that will help meet the demands of our growing community and create new economic opportunities for generations to come.”

“With this commitment, the federal government has recognized that the Central Corridor is not only an important part of an efficient transportation system in Minnesota, but also a vital piece of our efforts to ensure economic vitality in the Twin Cities and beyond,” Sen. Al Franken said. “This new rail line will offer a critical transportation alternative for commuters and create badly needed jobs in our region.”

Not a single University Avenue businessperson.  I wonder why?

It’s simple – the Central Corridor is going to be a disaster for businesses in the Midway.  That’s s given; even CCLRT supporters are saying so, now, after years of denying it, accompanied with that “you gotta break eggs to make an omelet” sneer and the same patronizing “change is scary to some people” you get from junior managers trying to make a budget cut turd seem like paté.   The death toll is rising every week; rumors have it the newly-remodeled Rainbow on Uni at Snelling will close, at least for the duration of the project; others are dropping, week by week.

Beyond that?  Even when (and if – remember the Hiawatha Corridor?  We’ve been waiting seven years for that dog to hunt; it’s still lying on the porch) the economic development takes off, it’ll be in the form of gentrification around the small number of stops on the line.  There, property values and rents will drive out the few businesses that survive the construction.  Chains, with their national and international capital depth, will move in; local businesses will get squeezed out.

Eggs will be broken.

Government is picking winners and losers – and trying to tell you it’s for everyone’s good, because soon we’ll go back to the fifties, the golden age of the lunchpail job and the bedroom community and the trade union, and everything will be all right.

And you know how fairy tales turn out, right?

A while ago, I was back visiting my parents in North Dakota.  While I was there, I visited a friend of mine from high school and college, who works as a campaign manager for Democrat-NPL (that’s NoDak talk for “Democrat”) legislative candidates in the central part of the state.  She told me to meet her at her office, and we’d go out for a drink.

I met her at her office, behind a vacant burger joint on the East Business Loop.   She was wearing sweatpants and an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt stained with ketchup.  It was 11:30AM and she reeked of cheap vodka.

“Um, hey, Fee”, I said.  “How ya doing”.

It almost looked like tears were going to well up in her eyes.  “How the f**k do you think, Mitch?”   She fished in her desk and picked out a half-empty bottle of Phillips vodka and two much-used styrofoam cups.  “I am a Democrat in…” she paused, filling both cups to the rim “…North Dakota”.   She handed me the first cup.  “We lose every election by 80-to-30 or even worse…”, she said, stopping to take a swig, “and that was in 2008, when we could get all twenty-teen Demcorats in town to actually come to the polls”. she slurred.

She poured another as I furtively emptied my cup into a long-dead potted plant.  “So”, I started, “how’d your campaign go?”

A bit of animation flashed across her worn face as she lurched forward in her chair to grab a folder. “Here’s my big drop piece”, she said, talking about a piece of literature volunteers drop at peoples’ doors.  A plain white piece of paper, obviously printed on a cheap printer that needed a new toner cartridge, read ”

“Vote for Steinkampf-Bjornson, so our campaign manager doesn’t take an overdose and choose the sweet release of death over managing turd campaigns that have no chance in hell of winning in North Dakota, you f****ng rubes“.

“Seems a little…”, I started, waving the bottle away as Fee tried to refill my cup “…downbeat, maybe?”

“Hah!”, she blurted as she tried and failed to stifle a fume-rich belch.  “It worked, didn’t it?  I didn’t f*****g kill myself, did I?  Huh?  Anyway – nobody saw it, because we had no volunteers to hand ’em out…”

“It must be hard to be a Democrat in North Dakota”.

“Oh, God, Mitch”, she said, a tear welling up and she slouched on the side of the desk facing me, putting both hands on my arms in that too-familiar way drunks do.  “My next campaign slogan may be “Vote Dem-NPL.  I mean, F**k it, why not?”  I mean, I can at least keep people on message!”.

We went to the Wonder Bar, just off main street – an old railroad bar that hadn’t changed much in the past sixty years or so.  I had a beer.  She banged through five or six boilermakers.  I ended up dropping her off at her mom’s house, where she lives, because being a full-time campaign organizer for the D-NPL in North Dakota pays about as well as being a paper boy.

And as I drove away, I thought “it is totally fitting that she runs hopeless campaigns with an air of hopelessness.  Why should she act like she’s doing anything that will ever affect politics?

And I smiled.  It’s good to be king.  Of another place, anyway.

———-

Twin Cities “progressive” blogger “Phoenix Woman” – who probably isn’t from Phoenix, and I’ve got suspicions about the other bit – tweeted the other day, for not much reason:

@mitchpberg So Mitch, how was the @CopelandFor66 victory party? #ohwaithelostto #maryjomcguire http://goo.gl/M3i3B #p2 #MNGOP

Which struck me as a bit of a reach.  I mean, no kidding – the Senate District 66 Special Election was not a victory!  Far from it – Mary Jo McGuire held one of the safest DFL seats in the state by an 80-20% margin.  Which, if you think about it, isn’t exactlty “man bites dog”.  It’s not even “dog bites man”.  It’s a “dog licks dog” story.  The DFL elected another career apparatchik, and the GOP had a lousy result.  Not exactly shocking.

Now, I’ve written about this in the past – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the GOP in Saint Paul, as in Minneapolis, faces an uphill battle.  Not only is the DFL powerful – it really is their only power base in Minnesota – but decades of getting trounced in local, legislative and 4th CD Congressional elections means that Republicans really only turn out at all for Senate, Gubernatorial and Presidential elections; there, you can see as much as 30-odd percent of Saint Paul voting GOP; for local elections, where conservative-leaners are used to their vote not really counting for anything, the numbers are lower.  In Senate District 66, 8,000 people voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and over 7,000 for Tom Emmer; just under 1,000 turned out to vote for Copeland.

Now, I volunteered on Copeland’s campaign.  And as someone who did a lot of work for Copeland, I put the best spin I could on the campaign while it was in progress.

For whatever reason, “Phoenix” “Woman” – and the other liberal bloggers and tweeters whose autonomic bleating she’s recycling – apparently believes that, because it’s an uphill fight, ‘Saint Paul Republicans should have moped around like my friend Fee, up above.  That we, the urban conservatived, should gliumpf around like Cure fans and wallow in doom.  Even more…bizarre, “she” seems to think that the fact I projected optimism about the campaign I was working on somehow discredits me.

Well, sorry, logical leprechauns – but the campaign was a victory.

Oh, not in the sense that Greg Copeland is in the Senate – we didn’t come close to pulling that off.

But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.  The Copeland for Senate campaign was just the first step in a long, long – as in, maybe ten years – effort to make the 4th CD competitive.   And it was a decent start, at least behind the scenes; we had more volunteers than we’ve had in the last five campaigns combined.  The campaign raised a lot of money – and more importantly, the campaign raised money!    We knocked on doors that hadn’t been knocked by a Republican since George HW Bush was President.

There’s a long way to go – doy – but hey, what choice is there?  Mope around like some kind of Oberstar supporter?

I got this from a member of the Copeland volunteer team yesterday a current constituent of House District 66A representative John Lesch, reporting about the aftermath of the DFL primary in 66a, which happened two weeks ago and pitted  Lesch against now-Senator-elect Mary Jo McGuire:

Doing the door knocking and yard signs I was aware of where the [DFL] had their signs. [Lesch] had his sign out but when he lost he took his down but didn’t put Mary’s up.

Well, it is the middle of the session and all…

NOTE: This blog doesn’t condone stalking.  The emailer sent in a casual observation gathered while making his campaigning rounds; he or she did not “stake out” Rep. Lesch’s house.

It’s election day in Senate District 66.

If you’re a Republican – or a black parent sick of the racism of low intentions your kids get from the school system, or a Latino family tired of having the DFL take your vote and repudiate your beliefs, or an Asian family tired of having your votes harvested and then having your businesses regulated out of business and your neighborhoods destroyed by the Central Corridor, or a Democrat who works a day job and is sick of seeing how your taxes rise even as your property values plummet – then you need to vote for Greg Copeland.

If you’re a Democrat?  Well, you own this city.  Your leadership is giggling and saying there are no Republicans in Saint Paul and Greg’s got no chance.  Seriously, you do have better things to do, don’t you?

Here’s the SOS polling-station finder site.

Disclosure – I’m a volunteer on the Copeland campaign.

Tuesday is the special election in SD66.

Greg Copeland is running against former DFL Rep Mary Jo McGuire.

What’s at stake?

If McGuire wins, not much will change; Saint Paul will go from being represented by a whackdoodle liberal to an arguably less whackdoodle liberal.  There’ll be a net/net zero change in the minority caucus.

But some of the things McGuire stands for deserve scrutiny – especially in the wake of the Wisconsin situation.

McGuire introduced a bill that would have made state judgeships appointed, rather than elected, positions:

McGuire was Chief Author in 1997 of HF 1077 which  Proposed  a Constitutional Amendment Requiring that ALL Minnesota Judges To Be APPOINTED by the Governor!

Why is this a bad thing?

Of course, if you’re worried about special interests dominating judicial elections, the OSI/JAS alternative is even worse. That’s because state bar associations and legal groups are dominated by trial lawyers. Lawyers and law firms are the seventh biggest political donors of “all time,” according to Opensecrets.org, and dominate state politics in parts of the country.

The judicial system should maintain a necessary degree of impartiality, but America’s founders certainly didn’t intend for judges to be unmoored from democracy. About 95 percent of America’s civil disputes end up in state courts. That’s an enormous amount of power, which needs checks and balances. There’s a reason why 87 percent of America’s judges are elected.

There are so many reasons to vote for Copeland next Tuesday; he opposes the Central Corridor (even now!) and public taxes for the Vikings; he’ll push for a $10K/jerb tax credit, and advocate a two year property tax freeze.

But perhaps the best reason is that the DFL elite, which treat Saint Paul like they do all of their other special interests – as a milk cow for votes and support – deserves the setback.  They think they own Saint Paul – it’s their own words.  This sort of arrogance shouldn’t be rewarded.

So please help Greg out.  Money’s good (donations page), although it’s getting late for that.  What the campaign needs right now – today through the election – is volunteers.  Volunteers on the phone bank, and out door-knocking.  If you can spare an hour or two, please check in.

Every campaign says they can win.  Every campaign must believe it on some level, or nobody would try to run at all (as, in some parts of Saint Paul, indeed, no Republican does; we’re working on changing that).

This special election race is going to be a tough one.  But if every Republican turns out, it’s doable.  So if you’re a Republican – or a Democrat who is sick of the way your party is abusing the taxpayer – and you live in SD66…

…please come out on Tuesday.  And if you know someone in SD66 who should be voting, make sure they turn out on Tuesday!

We can do this!

I am, of course, a volunteer on the Copeland campaign.

Tuesday is special election time in Senate District 66.  If the name “Ellen Anderson” rings a bell as your Senator, and you would like to see some productive change to the way our state runs, you need to turn up at the polls on Tuesday.

If you live in the light-gray area on this map…

…or know of a conservative, or potential conservative, who does?  You need to get yourself, or those people, to the polls on Tuesday to vote for Greg Copeland.

(If you thought Anderson was just hunky dory – well, don’t worry.   It is your DFL leadership’s position that they “own Saint Paul”.  Their candidate, Mary Jo McGuire, has had the measurements for the office drapes handed down to her as a matter of party policy.  Showing up at the polls would not only be a waste of time – it’d be a confession that you lack faith in the DFL.  Just stay home).

Anyway – the special election is Tuesday.

Now, if you’re a conservative and/or Republican in Saint Paul, you’re used to feeling crushing discouragement as we put up good candidates – sometimes, as in the last CD4 US House race, great candidates – and lose to mindless hamsters like Betty McCollum by absurd margins.

It’s a fact.  I’ve been there.  And I’ve felt it.  The Fourth CD Republican Party has been in the wilderness for close to sixty years; there is not currently an elected GOP candidate anywhere in Ramsey County, and relatively few in the Fourth CD.

But we can change that next week.  There are Republicans out there.  More importantly, there are conservatives out there – some don’t know it yet, and some have given up on going to the polls after decades living under Saint Paul’s idiot machine.

And if we can reach them, we can shock the world.  Or the city, anyway.

So the Greg Copeland for Senate campaign needs volunteers for door-knocking and, especially, phone-banking.  The campaign has had unbelievable turnout so far – but we need more than unbelievable to win this race.  We need miraculous.

And as We The People found out last fall, we can do miracles.

And naturally, fighting the DFL machine costs money; if you can spare a few bucks, the campaign appreciates every nickel; if Greg wins, you’ll make it back in tax savings…

Disclosure: I’m a volunteer for the Copeland for Senate campaign in the SD66 Special Election.

Businesses along the Central Corridor are already suffering terribly – and not a single inch of track has been laid in Saint Paul.

But fear not; the city springs to the rescue with…a discount card.

As a business owner from University and Raymond told me, “Light Rail scares away customers, so we have to lose more money to lure them back”.

No word if the discount card will find you a place to park.