Saint Paul homeowner puts up a statue of Christ in his garden.

On his property.

Did I mention it was in Saint Paul?  Where there are no property rights?

Jesus is said to have walked on water, but according to the St. Paul City Council he can’t stand at the edge of a Mississippi River bluff.

On a 5-2 vote, the council Wednesday rejected Tuan Pham’s request for a zoning variance to keep his back-yard statue of Jesus in the current spot high up on the West Side bluffs.

Mind you, it’s a variance.  Not a change in the law.  A variance.  For a statue.  In a private garden.

Pham, 76 and a retired Frogtown grocer, erected the 7-foot Jesus on a 10-foot base at his home on the 200 block of Isabel Avenue, placing it closer to the edge of the bluff than city rules permit.

“Give me the gift of hope for the future,” Pham pleaded with the council before the evening vote.

Sorry, Mr. Pham.  It’ll take a miracle to bring hope to the future of Saint Paul – and the Saint Paul City Council has outlawed miracles.

Mr. Pham has been on the target of the Council’s contempt for private property before:

No one spoke against the variance and Mike “Sammy” Samuelson spoke of how Pham was a “pioneer” in the revitalization of University Avenue. He said Pham’s statue, “is more of a garden; I’d liken it to a gnome, it’s a big gnome.”

Pham’s Jesus is a replica of the Christ of Vung Tua, a 105-foot monument in Vietnam. Pham emigrated from Vietnam in 1980.

He was a pioneer in revitalizing a street that the City Council has spent a decade working overtime to destroy.

Council Members Dan Bostrom and Pat Harris argued that Pham be allowed to keep the statue in its spot, saying it didn’t violate zoning laws because it is a garden, not a “development.”

But Council President Kathy Lantry and Council Member Dave Thune said the ordinance is clear that in Mississippi River Corridor, a 40-foot setback from the bluff edge is required for any “material change in the use” of the land.

Lantry said the core legal question is: “Tell me why this property can’t be put to a reasonable use without this variance.” She said the variance isn’t needed for reasonable use.

So the City Council says decorating one’s garden, on one’s private property, is not a “reasonable use?”

UPDATE: According to Channel 9 news, the whole flap started as a neighbor complaint.  45 other neighbors petitioned the city to keep the statue.

Saint Paul – the city where your property rights are only as safe as  your best-connected neighbor wants you to be.

As you know – because I keep telling you – I’m volunteering for the Copeland for Senate campaign in the SD66 Special Election.

Which is coming up Tuesday.

Here’s the deal: the DFL isn’t doing any campaigning to speak of.  Indeed, I think they have to avoid campaigning; to have to actually work in a special election would mean they knew their claim “we own Saint Paul” was hollow.   Former sta. te representative Betty Jo McGuire seems to be running her “campaign” entirely behind the scenes

Which means this thing is winnable.  It won’t be easy – it’ll involve getting every single Republican in SD66 to turn out next Tuesday.

If you are a Republican in SD88 – or a Democrat who’s sick of the way your party is abusing our state – then your mission is clear; show up and vote Tuesday.

But wherever you live, you can help out.

The campaign is looking for volunteers, for door-knocking and especially for phone- banking, for Thursday through Monday.  If you can help, here’s how you can get involved.

And 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…

Yesterday, I told you that the League of Women Voters had scheduled a debate for tonight in the SD66 special election, between GOP-endorsed candidate Greg Copeland and DFL primary victor Mary Jo McGuire.

Yesterday? McGuire’s people told the LWV that McGuire was bailing on the debate.

Why can not a single CD4 DFLer ever face their critics and challengers?

What are they afraid of?

That anger over the dislocation over the Central Corridor will make the hot reception Betty McCollum got over Obamacare seem like a warm stroll in the park?

The League Of Women Voters is holding a debate between the candidates in the SD66 election.

It’s tomorrow at 6PM at the Hamline Midway Library.

Greg Copeland – the GOP-endorsed candidate running against DFL-and-union endorsed Professor Mary Jo McGuire – could use a cheering section!

Hope to see you there!

The DFL has said it in as many words; they “own” – or think they own – Saint Paul.

The vote results don’t seem to challenge ’em much.  I think the best Republican result in Saint Paul – a great year for the GOP – was in the high twenties.

But while it’s been over 25 years since a Republican represented any part of Saint Paul in the legislature, and over sixty since a Republican represented the district in Washington, it’s not entirely a matter of the DFL’s strength.  Fact is while the demographics (lots of government employees and clients) favor the DFL, there are Republicans, and conservatives, out there; in 2000, Dennis Newinski got 46% against Betty McCollum in the 4th CD election.  It can be done.

The DFL’s forgotten it, of course.

On April 12 – a week from Tuesday – there will be a special election in Senate District 66.

Now, you’d never know it from listening to the DFL.  They had their primary last Tuesday (former state rep Mary Jo McGuire beat Rep. John Lesch (66A) and some other hamster).  Their apparatchiks said “the election is over!  Congrats, Senator McGuire!”

Maybe they’re right.

But wouldn’t it be cool if their smug, entitled assumption were wrong?

You can help.  Money helps, of course – the Greg Copeland campaign has already raised vastly more money than any other legislative campaign in Saint Paul – but it could use more.

But the campaign also needs volunteers – especially for Thursday through Monday, the big push.   We need phone bankers and door-knockers to help get out every single Republican vote in SD66.  Every person that has ever voted GOP; every single person that has ever shown up at a caucus, every person who ever sang “America, F*** Yeah!”, whatever.

Is it an uphill fight?  But it’s one we can win.

And perhaps more importantly, it’s a way to build a 4th CD GOP that can make the DFL have to fight for the city.

Because if the GOP consistently gets over 40% of the vote in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the DFL will never win another statewide office in Minnezota. No DFL governors.  No Senators.  No Constitutional Officers.  Nothing.

The future starts this week in Saint Paul.   Hope you can help!

Disclosure: I am a volunteer on the Copeland campaign.

It’s the Minnesota left (and RINO-right)’s favorite club-over-the-head line; “if we don’t [fill in the desired spending proposal], the Twin Cities will become a cold Omaha”.

It’s kind of funny, really, since Omaha is thriving these days.

Steve Berg at the MinnPost takes a whack at analyzing the census data – and doesn’t like what he (and, more to the point, his various sources) see:

At first glance, the 2010 Census results seem satisfying and unremarkable. Only upon further review do they reveal unbalanced patterns of growth and wealth that spell trouble for Minneapolis-St. Paul as the metro economy tries to regain momentum.

The official count placed MSP’s 13-county metro population at 3,278,833, up 10.4 percent from a decade ago. That was enough for the Twin Cities to retain its rank as the nation’s 16th largest metro market. While the region grew 40 percent slower than during the go-go ’90s, it still outpaced the 9.7 percent national rate, and it grew faster than all other Midwestern and Northeastern metros in the top 20.

So far, so good.

But there’s “bad” news – or, as Republicans would see it, “reality” and “a changing market” – along with it:

How the region grew should deeply trouble Minnesota’s political, business and civic leaders. Virtually all growth was on the suburban edge, while the central cities and most inner suburbs lost both population and relative wealth. Not only did the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul fail to gain population, they are now fully 30 percent poorer than the metro region as a whole.

The important questions, of course, are “why?” and “what do we do about it?”

And the answers to both – at least as presented by Berg (no relation) are heavily dependent on ideology.

The Twin Cities metro is at a crossroads.  The suburbs – especially the commerce-heavy south and chock-full-of-business west – are thriving.  The latest census shows the Third and Sixth Congressional districts are booming, while Minneapolis and Saint Paul are stagnant at best – which is good news politically, as the DFL strangleholds on both congressional districts will be diluted, but bad news economically, as the urban areas require more and more life support from the parts of the state that actually work.

So what are the signs?  Is there hope?  Will Minneapolis and Saint Paul bounce back?  Or are they destined to become a cold Flint Michigan?

If you read Berg’s article – drawn from the state’s “urban planning” intelligentsia…:

That’s not a healthy trend. Unless a more balanced growth pattern emerges, one that also includes the metro area’s inner districts, and unless prosperity is shared more broadly, the MSP region will lag behind in competing for the young talent and high-quality jobs needed to keep pace as the economy recovers.

…the signs aren’t good.

More Monday.

I’ve been working with the Greg Copeland for Senate campaign, in the SD66 special election to replace Ellen Anderson.

This campaign is unlike any other Saint Paul GOP legislative campaign I’ve ever seen.  It’s raised money.  Lots of it.  And there are currently more volunteers than I have seen on every Saint Paul GOP legislative campaign combined for the past 15 years or so.

We need more, of course.  Mary Jo McGuire won the primary last Tuesday; she has the entire DFL machine behind her.  It’s David versus Goliath.

So we need more Davids.  An army of them, in fact.

If you’d be interested in volunteering for the Copeland campaign during these last one week and two critical weekends before the April 12 special election, here’s your information.

(And if you are more able to help in the money department, we can use that help right here).

I’ll be phonebanking, as well as my usual stuff.  I’ll hope to see you there!

That was  quote from a store owner in the Midway, on a Fox9 news piece on the closing of Porky’s this morning.

Porky’s, a drive-in burger joint that’s operated in the Midway since 1953, is closing up because of the light rail.  How can you run a drive-in with no cars?  Traffic is a burgeoning nightmare on University, and it’s going to get worse for the next three years, and then…it’ll stay bad.

The regional media, “urban studies” clacque and the DFL have been trying to paint a happy face on the destruction of the Midway – and the decay of the inner Twin Cities that it represents.

More on that starting either later today or Monday.

I’ve lived in the Midway – the part of Saint Paul halfway between the two downtowns – for 24 years, now.   It’s a nice area; leave our short-sighted spendthrift government out of it, and it’s really just about the nicest part of the Twin Cities; there’s nothing wrong with the Midway that a Republican administration couldn’t fix in a few years.

But the City, the state, and the Met Council have been doing their best to fix that.

The Central Corridor, as we discussed last week, will tear up University Avenue for the next 3-4 years, and that’s if it’s the rare government project that comes in on time; only the most entrenched pollyanna believes it’ll come in anywhere near the current, already-bloated $1.4 billion price tag.

And that’s just up-front costs.

Businesses are already floundering; before an inch of track is laid in the Midway, businesses on the west side of the neighborhood are reporting freefalling customer visits, as the parking and the street barriers strangle access to their stores.

Several businesses have already closed – perhaps not entirely attributable to the rail construction, yet, but at the very least businesses whose fates were sealed by the oncoming traffic, parking and pedestrian nightmares and decided to cut their losses short.

Others – like the venerable Porky’s, the ancient burger joint at Uni by Prior – have decided to sell out.  It’s gotta be hard to think about running a drive-in when nobody can drive in.

The big Borders store on Hamline closed because of Border’s ongoing financial meltdown – but given a choice between a store in a thriving area  like Rosedale and one that’s going to be operating with a tiny, clunky little entrance from a side street due to construction, what do you think the company is going to do?

And the latest rumor – that the Midway Rainbow, the neighborhood’s main grocery store – is going to shut down, ostensibly for the duration of the construction.

It won’t leave the neighborhood without a big-box grocery store, of course; Midway Center has a SuperTarget, a not-s0-super WalMart, and a Cub between Snelling and Hamline, in addition to Rainbow.

But it’s telling that the market is responding to the external force – the imminent destruction of practical transportation into the area – by closing out one of four stores that have co-existed and thrived in that area for decades (the WalMart is the newest addition, replacing a K-Mart; between the two, they’ve been there for maybe ten years); we don’t yet know how Target and Cub will react to the construction, either.

We’ve been warning everyone for years that this rail line project is going to be a disaster for central Saint Paul.  It’s happening now.

Today is the DFL’s primary in Senate District 66.

The DFL declined to hold an endorsing convention this time, choosing to go straight to a primary.  Part of it may have been it was a good way to stir up some publicity for what, for the DFL, is a snoozer of a race.

(Of course, the GOP is running a serious candidate and, less normally, a serious campaign.  But more on that tomorrow).

The candidates are a guy named Marchese who I really don’t know (nor will I need to), former HD66B representative Mary Jo McGuire – who left office something like 16 years ago but has dialed in the “women’s vote”) and current 66A representative John Lesch.

Who to vote for, if you’re a DFLer?  Or perhaps someone who decides to become a DFLer?

Perhaps what you want is a genuine legislative leader?

If you’re a DFLer, you’ll be helping your party spin your wheels in its primary Tuesday night.

If you’re a Republican, or someone who’s just plain had enough of what the DFL brings to St. Paul, though, we can have some fun on Tuesday:

Greg Copeland for Senate Rally and Spaghetti Dinner

Tuesday March 29th, 2011

All-You-Can-Eat Spaghetti Dinner!

(with salad and bread included)

5:00 to 8:00 PM – Join us for Dinner Anytime

8:00 to 9:00 PM – DFL Primary Results

Yarusso Brother’s Italian Restaurant

637 Payne Avenue

Saint Paul, Minnesota 55130

(651) 776-4848

Special Guests from the Minnesota Senate GOP Majority

will be in attendance to support Greg Copeland’s election to

Minnesota Senate – District 66

Let’s elect Greg Copeland, your next Senator, who will have a seat at the Senate Majority’s Table to provide Saint Paul and Falcon Heights with a strong, independent, fiscally-conservative voice to support a $10,000 New Jobs Tax Credit and a 2-year property tax freeze!

Suggested Donation: $10.00 per person

Call the campaign or donations made at: (952) 250-7813

www.gregcopelandforsenate.com

Sounds like a lot more fun to me.  I’ll hope to see you all there.

I was watching the replay of Tuesday’s discussion on Marty Owings’ “Capitol Conversations” show, with Greg Copeland (the GOP-endorsed candidate in the SD66 special election) and Rep. John Lesch, one of three DFL contenders that’ll duke it out in the primary next Tuesday.

Toward the end of the interview, the subject of “what is there left to cut?” from the budget of the City of Saint Paul, Copeland brought up the $300K the city spent on a tiny fleet of electric cars.

Lesch responded “OK, that’s $300 thousand.  What else?”

Copeland, inconveniently, hadn’t brought a budget with  him; Marty had to disentangle that particular discussion.

But it just occurred to me; what a golden opportunity for an across-the-aisle discussion!

Rep. Lesch?  Candidate Copeland?  How about we get together with a copy of the Saint Paul City Budget, and go through it, line item by line item, and justify each one’s existence (or removal)?

This sounds like a fantastic idea!

Rep. Lesch (or whomever wins the DFL endorsement); have your people call Mr. Copeland’s people (note: I am Mr. Copeland’s people).  Let’s get this set up.

What a brilliant idea, Rep. Lesch!

Disclosure: I am a volunteer on Greg Copeland’s campaign staff.

So on Tuesday night I sat in on a broadcast of Marty Owings’ “Capitol Conversations” pitting the DFL candidate (Rep. John Lesch of HD66A) against Greg Copeland, the GOP’s endorsed candidate. Both are running for the Senate District 66 special election; Lesch faces a primary challenge from former HD66B representative Mary Jo McGuire in next week’s primary.

(Disclosure: I’m a volunteer on Copeland’s campaign).

Toward the end of the interview (you can see it here), Owings asked Lesch about a piece that appeared in Minnesota Democrats Exposed last week, questioning Lesch’s alleged campaigning in uniform.

I’m not really going to get involved in that issue.  I figure Lesch, a county prosecutor in his civilian life, knows the rules; both he and the US Army/MN National Guard can take care of themselves as re regulations; if it does turn out the county hired a prosecutor who’s too stupid to follow such basic rules – and I don’t believe that’s the case – then perhaps heads should roll there.

So it’s not the allegations of campaigning on Army time that bother me.

It’s Lesch’s reaction to the question.

Owings asked Lesch if he had a response to the MDE piece.

Lesch pointed out the Stars and Stripes tie and pin that Copeland wears.  Everywhere.  Every day.  Every time I’ve seen the guy, he’s wearing one, the other, or both.  (Unless he’s going all Irish on us) and said (I’m closely paraphrasing here; you can watch the video here and judge for yourself how accurate I’m being) he was within the rules (which, again, nobody on the set disputed, then or now), and it’s typical of Republicans to wrap themselves in the flag when it suits them, but to “crap on it” (I believe those were his words) when it didn’t.

Representative Lesch: it’s not “crapping on the flag” to question an elected representative.  We mere peasants get to do that in our society.  Even if we’re not government workers.  You don’t get immunity as a  prosecutor or as a legislator from questions or criticism.  You may see it as “crapping on John Lesch”; if you are correct about military regulations, you may even have a point.

But you are not The Flag.  You serve it – and, via various chains of command, us. The flag doesn’t immunize you any more than any other public servant or employee.

(Watch for at least one “Berg is a chickenhawk” reference from the leftyblog loony bin in response to this.  Any bets on that?)

With no majority in either chamber, the DFL has resorted to chanting points.

The first one was “where is the GOP’s budget?  Huh?  Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Then the GOP released a budget – and demonstrated that the DFL really didn’t have one, since none of them supported Dayton’s budget proposal.

Then, it was “But you said it was going to be call cuts?  Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

That must not have tested well.  The meme died off in a week or so.

The latest?  “The GOP is attacking the cities”.

What they mean, of course, is “cutting Local Government Aid”, the program that started out as a state subsidizing small towns’ infrastructures, and has turned into a state subsidy of urban DFL profligacy.

The governments of Duluth, Saint Paul and Minneapolis have done a great job of inextricably tangling their budgets with the state, to the point where any discussion of reforming LGA is met, I think without any actual considered thought, with “we’re going to lay off firefighters and cops and teachers!”.

Not “we’ll have to cut back on lawn-mowing”.

Or “We’ll have police doing less non-essential stuff”, or “we’ll have to replace unionized staffers with lower-priced help for lower-profile jobs” or “maybe we don’t need to mow the grass in the parks quite as often” or “we can consolidate some summer rec programs” or “maybe spending $25,000 on dadaistic, incomprehensible “traffic calming art”…

…which may or may not “calm” traffic, but certainly had a lot of drivers meandering about holding their heads in mute incomprehension, which probably caused accidents, until all the “art” was stolen”, or “maybe our schools need to spend their resources on teachers, rather than administrators”, or “maybe if we stopped putting half the boys in special ed for being boys, we’d have a lower Special Ed budget” or “maybe we don’t need to bus kids who live half a mile from school; the obese little monsters could stand a good walk”, or “Maybe we don’t need $300,000 worth of politically-correct electric cars”, or “maybe fourth-coldest state capitol in the US doesn’t need three refrigerated ice rinks” or “maybe taking huge swathes of housing off the taxable rolls for “affordable” public housing that just isn’t “affordable”, and serves no purpose but to turn the cities into warehouses for the poor, primarily to create islands of utterly DFL-dependent voters”…

…or much of anything.

None of the above.  Because it’s traditionally been easier to scare people into submission by threatening to lay off cops, firemen and teachers (rather than meter maids, community organizers and administrators).

Attack on the cities?

Pfft.  The rest of the state has been getting attacked by the cities for a generation now.

What you’re seeing isn’t an “attack on the cities”.  It’s the rest of the state standing up to three big bullies.

And like big bullies, they’ll bluster and phumpher and fume and threaten.

And just like anyone who is responding to a bully, the important job is to stand firm, and not letting their bluster sway you.

Being a Republican in Saint Paul, there’s some things you never get much chance to get used to.

Winning elections – so far – has been one of them.  We’re working on that with the Copeland For Senate campaign (for which I am, in the interest of disclosure, a volunteer).

Another one?  Getting a big fund-raising goal on short notice, and hitting it with time to spare.

But the Copeland campaign did it; in its first big hurdle – attracting $3,000 in donations to get an $8,000-and-change state match, and doing it in seven days.  Five, actually – the campaign actually topped $3,000 on Saturday (not all the money got in to the campaign until today), with the total standing at $3,400 and still no word on contributions from the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh CD conventions this past weekend.

So this is big news; I don’t know that a St. Paul GOP campaign has ever hit this kind of a fundraising target; the Copeland for Senate campaign has more money already than some CD4 GOP congressional campaigns can muster.  And volunteers are getting involved from all over the place, to say nothing of those from among Saint Paul’s plucky GOP minority.

Speaking of which:  if you’d like to volunteer…:

Phone: (612) 242-8051

Or you can email at Elizabeth.e.Paulson, which is a Gmail dot com email address.  We need lit-droppers, door-knockers, phone-bankers, sign-pounders, and every other kind of help a campaign needs.

Greg Copeland is running for Minnesota State Senate in the District 66 special election on April 12.

A Republican? Running in Saint Paul?

Yep.  And he’s running to win.

He can’t do it without help, of course.  As we noted on the show yesterday, he needs to top $3,000 by Monday afternoon to get state matching money.  If you can contribute anything, we’d appreciate it.  And remember – once we get over $3,000 it’s not done.  Indeed, it’s just a start.  No contribution will be wasted.  Here’s where you can donate – and many thanks to those of you who have contributed already. Here’s the campaign’s contributions page.

Beyond money?  In a street-level campaign like this one, volunteers are everything.  And you don’t have to live in SD66 to help out!  Volunteer information is on this page.  The campaign needs help door-knocking, phone banking, placing campaign signs, and all the other jobs that a winning campaign needs done.

The Copeland For Senate site is right here.  He’s also on Facebook and Twitter.  Stay in touch – and please help out.  Minnesota – and Saint Paul, its capitol – don’t need another DFL ticket-puncher in the Senate.

Disclosure:  I’m a volunteer on the Copeland for Senate staff.

Full disclosure: I’m running media for Greg Copeland’s campaign in the Senate District 66 special election.

I tweeted that John Lesch – incumbent House rep from the 66A side of the district, and the likely front-runner among the three DFLers that are in the race, had gotten a zero rating in the 2010 session from the Taxpayers League, and a 16% from the Chamber of Commerce.

His tweeted response:

Let it ring from the hillsides of Saint Paul.

Indeed.

Let it ring down the bluffs along Davern, where US Bank abandoned the Riverbank office complex for better tax rates down the road in Bloomington.

Let it ring down the flat expanse of University Avenue, past the mom-and-pop stores that eke out a precarious living in Frogtown.

Let it echo between cavernous, empty office buildings downtown.

Let it bounce among the empty storefronts of Payne Avenue, surrounded by foreclosed houses and city bulldozers.

Let it roll like a foetid tumbleweed past the businesses in the Midway, who are already reeling from the light rail construction that is barely starting, and which the city and past legislatures – both choked with DFLers that ooze/oozed the same kind of blithe arrogance – did nothing to mitigate in their naive glee over a rail system the city doesn’t need and the state and feds can’t afford.

Yes, John Lesch.  Let it roll.

If you know a businessperson in Senate District 66 – or anywhere in Saint Paul – please tell ’em what Representative John Lesch thinks about their future.

Being part of the ruling party in a one-party system means never having to say “oops, I screwed up” – because what are your citizens subjects going to do?  Complain to government?

Saint Paul is a one-party town.

And people are certainly trying to complain to government.

There may be no more beleaguered person in America – short of a Detroit mortgage broker – than a Saint Paul business owner.  As bad as property taxes are in Minnesota’s capitol city, business taxes (glopped onto the state’s already high rates) are even worse.  And the city’s bureaucracy is legendarily hostile to small entrepreneurs.

And it shows.  Downtown’s occupancy rate (after you leave out all the buildings government is leasing) is up from its already-high rates; the warehouse district isn’t housing a lot of wares; Saint Paul’s Fortune 500s have been doing all their growing elsewhere, from Ecolab’s big R and D facility in Eagan to 3M’s shadow headquarters in Austin TX to USBank moving its Riverbank operations to Bloomington.

Still, people take a whack at it.  In the past 25 years, two generations of immigrant businesspeople, Viet and H’mong and Somali and Eritrean, have turned University from Lexington to the Capitol into a gritty, scrappy, but bustling little strip of restaurants, hair and nail salons, grocery stories and all the other little businesses that a self-contained community will spawn.  It’s not Rodeo Drive, but it’s not the dismal, vacant blotch it was in the 1980s.

Not yet, anyway.  Give it time.

Saint Paul businesses are outraged that the city, the Met Council and the State apparently figure that they can either ride out the building of the Central Corridor on their own, or…

…well, nobody knows:

The owner of AxMan Surplus wondered Wednesday whether the troubled actor Charlie Sheen was somehow involved in the writing of a report on the construction impacts of the Central Corridor light rail line on small businesses along its 11-mile route.

AxMan’s owner, Jim Segal, was among owners of businesses along University Avenue in St. Paul who took sharp aim at the Metropolitan Council and the LRT project at a public hearing Wednesday.

I originally wrote “the report was a whitewash”, but the US Whitewash Council threatened to sue me for defamation.

“Did Charlie Sheen help with that report?” said Segal, whose business is on University just west of Snelling Avenue. “That figure is absolutely unrealistic. It does nothing to address the potential loss of revenue faced by businesses on University Avenue.”

Segal, who estimated that AxMan would lose $100,000 in revenue over the first six months of construction, maintained that the $957 million project’s effects would be felt by businesses long after trains start running in 2014. “The pedestrian environment is going to be terrible while construction is ongoing, and there will be a permanent change to people’s driving and parking patterns. That wasn’t discussed in this report.”

At one point, he said the report, the “Draft Supplemental Environmental Assessment Construction-Related Potential Impacts to Business Revenue,” would be more useful as toilet paper, and he held up a roll to make the point.

The street is going to be torn up for years – and it doesn’t end there:

“The big problem is the major loss of parking,” said Mike Baca, the owner of Impressive Print, located just east of Fairview Avenue.

Baca ridiculed a business mitigation fund support program outlined in the Met Council’s assessment that would provide low- or no-interest loans of up to $10,000 for retail businesses expecting construction-related disruptions. “Who wants a $10,000 loan when you’re losing between 30 and 60 percent of your revenue?” he asked. “This project is going to destroy businesses.”

This blog will be documenting the casualties.

As [Met Council bureaucrats] [“]listened[“], along with Federal Transit Administration representative Maya Ray and Shoua Lee of the Central Corridor Project Office, one business owner after another laid out the damage the project is causing them and condemned what they see as a lack of cooperation from the Met Council and city and state government entities.

If you read this blog, you know that “hamfisted and stupid” and “Government construction effort” are more or less synonyms.  Still, this project just beggars the imagination so far:

Holden estimated that since the beginning of March, when construction began in the area, his business has lost $7,300 in revenue. Baca said he had to hire a driver to deliver print projects because customers are unwilling to drive to his store. Steve Bernick, the owner of Milbern Clothing, said he was promised that Aldine Street, the cross street near his business, would remain a through street during construction. Instead, it was designated right-turn only, forcing drivers to make an illegal U-turn to reach his store.

Diane Pietro, the owner of the Twin Cities Photography Group near Highway 280, said construction workers came into her business without identifying themselves and started tearing up a newly renovated hallway to install water pipes. She also said they were dismissive when she complained.

“This project is ruining my service,” she said. “Families don’t want to come in and sit for a portrait when there are workers walking in and out. I’ve gotten two parking tickets for trying to park in front of my own business. Both of our entrances are blocked and the sidewalks are closed.”

You gotta break eggs to make an omelet.

Jack McCann, the president of the University Avenue Betterment Association, sharply criticized what he saw as “a level of incompetence” in how the assessment was prepared. “It’s unfortunate that we’re even here today,” he said. “The amenities of University Avenue have always been great for businesses, and it already has good mass transit – the 16A bus line.”

McCann, whose Update Co. owns several properties near University and Raymond avenues, said renters are already asking him for a reduction of $1 per square foot for 2011 and 2012 to make up for anticipated lost revenue.

“What are (business owners) expected to do when they rely on on-street parking? That hasn’t been addressed,” he said. “If business owners knew there would be parking near their businesses (during construction), they wouldn’t need mitigation. But people mistrust the Met Council.”

Not without reason.

The comment period for the impact assessment will end March 31, after which the Met Council and the FTA will respond to comments as part of a final supplemental assessment document.

Saint Paul.

I’ve lived here for most of the past 24 years.  I’ve owned a home here for 17 of them.

The population is shrinking.  Businesses are fleeing town.  The business occupancy rate downtown is around 20% – and that’s down a few points only because Metro Square is now government space.  That’s the only “business” growing in Saint Paul.

Business is ailing badly.

The DFL’s front-runners to replace Ellen Anderson in District 66 seat are Representative Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, who earned a 14% from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and Representative John Lesch, who swung waaaaay to the center with a 16%.

Saint Paul, like all of Minnesota, doesn’t need another DFL extremist in the Senate.

One bit of business they do favor is the Central Corridor, the $1.4 billion-and-counting boondoggle that is going to shred the gritty but thriving immigrant business corridor down University Avenue.  The revival – almost entirely the result of Asian and African immigrant business people, and having almost nothing to do with the city’s dominant DFL culture – has taken what was a blighted street and turned it into a colorful, busy strip very much unlike the rest of the sleepy, underperforming city.

The Central Corridor will change all that, immediately driving many of these scrappy entrepreneurs out of business, and, if all goes according to plan, gentrifying the survivors out of the few neighborhoods that actually wind up prospering (other than the neighborhoods where the lucky construction worker live – everywhere from St. Cloud to River Falls).

Alice Hausman and John Lesch support this.

Minnesota as a whole said “enough!” last fall – putting the DFL into the minority in the Senate for the first time since Senate elections became partisan, almost 40 years ago.

So Saint Paul is “represented” by a group of people who are hostile to business – small and big – who actively seek the destruction of the American dream for one gritty, scrappy street full of immigrants; reps whose only response to challenge is to raise taxes, or to echo Mayor Coleman’s whining that the citizens of Bemidji and Owatonna will be forced to subsidize less of the failure.

One of them – Hausman or Lesch, or one of three other DFL challengers – wants to replace Ellen Anderson in the Senate.

Does Saint Paul need another extremist in office?  Yet another DFLer who answers only to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” and the public employee unions?    Yet another DFLer who has never run a business or balanced a budget?  Yet another DFLer who wants to keep shoveling money into a failing school system while killing off the charter schools that offer so many of our kids the only hope they have of a decent education?

Yet another DFLer who believes that the Eritrean hair salon owner must be required to work until she’s 70 so the city’s unionized bill collector can retire at 55?

Or is it time for real change?

I’m asking you to support Greg Copeland; if you live in Senate District 66, I’m asking for your vote for Copeland on April 12.  If you live outside SD66, I’m asking for money (donate here to help Greg meet the goal of overtopping $3,000 by Monday to get state matching funds), and time to help with the race.

Saint Paul deserves better than the choice of two (five, whatever) big-spending, union sock-puppets/career politicians.

Yes, we can.

You can follow the Copeland campaign in many, many places:

Twitter – “@CopelandFor66”

Facebook: Greg Copeland for Senate

And the campaign website (which will be expanding soon).

Republicans endorsed Greg Copeland to run in the April 12 special election to replace Ellen Anderson in Senate District 66.

Copeland is the former manager of the city of Maplewood.  He has a long record of improving city services and cutting spending.

Here’s the press release:

Republicans in Saint Paul’s Senate District 66 have endorsed Greg Copeland to run in the April 12 special election. Ellen Anderson is vacating the district after nearly two decades in office.

“We are running this race to win”, says Copeland, former manager of the City of Maplewood.

“Last fall’s elections show that people across all party lines are concerned about the economy, the efficiency of our government, and this nation’s future”, Copeland said. Copeland is running on a platform of job creation and property tax reform. “I’m running to protect families and businesses from job-killing

taxes and ballooning government spending. The people of this district deserve a representative in the Minnesota Senate who will work on their behalf over the next two years as part of the majority”.

Here’s the deal; Greg needs to raise $3,000 in $50 increments  to qualify for state matching funds (you can donate more, but only the first $50 count toward the $3K threshold).  If you can spare a buck or two, please help out!

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans cant’ win in the city.  Conventional wisdom exists to be skewered.

He’ll be appearing on the Northern Alliance on Saturday at 2PM, and on the Sue Jeffers show Saturday at 5:30ish.

It’s not often that I find anything to agree with over at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, Joe Bodell and Eric Pusey’s make-work project for bloggers with, let’s just say, opportunities for improvement.

But every so often, one sees the faintest glimmer of recognition; the idea that someone over there has a working pilot light.

First, it was Grace Kelly joining with pro-Second Amendment conservatives in supporting Bostrom for Ramsey County Sheriff.

And now, “Blue Collar Daughter” (who I don’t know, but judging by her handle would seem to be the style reporter) attacks the same Saint Paul School District “reorganization” proposal that, if you recall, I attacked last month.

When St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva posted the district’s new Strong Schools, Strong Communities plan on the SPPS website February 1st, the immediate reaction was strong parental and public outcry. While Silva defends the proposal as a pro-student, community-building endeavor:

We believe, the changes we are making will reconnect many students to the communities where they live – truly making the schools the heart of our community.

~Silva

in reality it is a budget-trimming maneuver that ends access to or slates closure of many district magnate and charter schools for students city-wide, as well as effectively ends true open enrollment options in St. Paul, particularly for students in low-income neighborhoods of the city (where “neighborhood school” performances tend to be low and choices limited).

BCD is correct.  While I’ve long held that “Neighborhood Schools” are a key part of reviving public education (because the evidence shows that, while class sizes matter little to student performance, school size has a big effect), Silva’s plan doesn’t really create them.   Rather, it does less busing of kids across the city to big-box schools, making them go to big-box schools closer to their home.

And it’s the big-box schools that are a huge part of the problem for urban school districts from coast to coast, especially Saint Paul.

BCD:

A top priority of the plan is to cut transportation outside narrowly-defined “neighborhood school zones,” leaving an island of poor students trapped at less-desirable schools near their housing. Silva and SPPS also hope to transplant quality schools from their current locations to alternative facilities where the highest percentage of enrolled students live-this often means pulling a high-quality charter or magnet school from the transportation zone of a low-income neighborhood thus making it inaccessible to students who tend to have less options for mobility.

BCD is partly wrong: the Saint Paul School Board doesn’t get to tell Charter schools where to go.  They have their own boards and superintendants.  It’s one of the reasons charter school parents love them; they are insulated from the madness and myopia of the Saint Paul district’s out-of-touch, DFL-and-union-controlled board.

But as to the school the SPPS does control?  BCD is correct; last Saturday on the Northern Alliance, we talked with Krysia Weidel, a Saint Paul parent from the East Side who’s looking at having to haul her kid all the way to Highland Park if they want to stay in “L’Etoil Du Nord”, the city’s very effective, successful French-immersion school.  One of the district’s precious few success stories, the school is currently located in the East Side’s Phalen neighborhood, but is largely attended by kids from Highland Park,  Merriam Park, and other, tonier parts of town where parents have the time and bandwidth to bone up on the latest educational theories.  (Disclosure:  I am a huge proponent of language-immersion education.  It works, and works well, across class and racial divides, not “merely” as a tony humanity, but at helping kids wire their brains, ironically, for science and math).

It makes sense, in a sense; it will save the district’s transportation office all kinds of money, putting the school in the heart of its prime attendance area.

MPR news put this question to its online readers today: Should cash-strapped schools end mandatory busing?, citing Chuck Marohn’s Strong Towns Blog, in which Marohn calls for the abolition of Minnesota’s mandatory busing statute. What Marohn doesn’t address is that public school busing is about much more than, as he calls it, “door to door” service and provisions for isolated rural farm kids. It’s also about providing equal opportunity to students across the educational spectrum, and granting true access to the pioneering Open Enrollment program that Minnesota schools trail-blazed.

And let’s be clear on this: the schools, as I understand, will still be open-enrollment.  Any parent can still enroll the kids in any of ’em; they’ll just have to transport them themselves.  Parents do it all the time; hundreds of Saint Paul parents have pulled their kids out of their assigned schools and bundle them off to charter schools (which don’t provide transportation) or even schools in other districts; many Saint Paul parents haul their kids to Roseville, Woodbury and Eagan.  And in turn, there are parents in Forest Lake, Elko and Prior Lake that haul their kids to charter schools and even a few of Saint Paul’s more successful district programs.

Which is not, in and of itself, unreasonable – unless you’re a parent who has to be at work early, or has kids going to schools all over town, or you don’t have a car, or one that’ll support that kind of commitment to transportation.

Which means, currently, that your only option is to go to the school that the District – and its sclerotic, terminally-irritating Placement Office – assigns your kids to.  And if you live in Frogtown, the lower East Side or the North End, it means a huge, crime-ridden warehouse school.

And here, at last, we get to the part where BCD and I part ways:

And if the heated debate at St. Paul school board meetings, the parental protest at work on local Facebook pages and community groups, or the crummy precedent of other U.S. school districts attempting the same sort of penny-pinching school shuffle are indicators, the answer is: No. We should not end mandatory busing. Find the cash to fund quality public education for everyone-in the classroom and on the bus.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent a school district from providing a quality education, and one at an affordable price.  And when I say “absolutely nothing”, I mean nothing but…:

1. …school districts’ mania for building huge factory schools,
2. the idiotic fixation with requiring kids to be kept in school until age 16, whatever the cost – not only in terms of education, but in perverting “special education” into a form of shadow juvenile justice system
3. Administrations – driven by the Teachers Union, via the DFL – and their hatred for charter schools, which largely already achieve the ideal of the neighborhood school – and do it on a budget, and
4. those same Administrators, and the Educational Academy and the other metastasizations of the Educational/Industrial complex – and their fixation with creating “equality” by jiggering the numbers of students in schools so that the headcounts by race all even up, rather than by addressing how to actually teach kids.

That the big, overpopulated factory school is a failure is obvious to anyone that’s not on the Saint Paul School Board; parents are voting with their feet.

The answer isn’t in where you bus kids.  It’s in what kind of school they walk into when they get there.

The Saint Paul City GOP is having its annual caucus tomorrow morning:

Saint Paul Republican City Committee

Saint Paul Republican Caucus Call

By Greg Copeland, Chairperson, St. Paul City Committee

Saturday, January 29, 2011

8:00 a.m. Registration, bagels and coffee

Registration fee: $5

9:00 a.m. Meeting

262 West University Ave.

Saint Paul, MN 55103

(former Saxon building)

Keynote Speakers: Tony Sutton, Chair and Michael Brodkorb, Deputy Chair, MNGOP

Work for real change in Saint Paul!

Help us elect a Republican City Council and School Board

that will keep spending in line, reduce regulation and create jobs.

Sponsors

American Majority

Minnesotans for Limited Government

Photo ID

Internet Tax Freedom Act

Capitol Republican Women

Citizens Council of Health Freedom

Check the city party out on Facebook.

Superintendent Silva S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools yesterday.  And all I can say is, I’m glad my kids are done with the SPPS.

The plan involves some ideas that are, frankly, perfectly good and drawn from common sense:

The decades-old option for St. Paul parents to bus their children to virtually any school in the city would be largely dismantled as part of a three-year plan laid out Tuesday by Superintendent Valeria Silva that also pledges cost-savings, higher student achievement and greater consistency among schools.

Saint Paul switched to a school-choice system back in the eighties, in the wake of an epochal federal lawsuit against the Kansas City schools that required the district to offer the same choices to every student that were available in the wealthiest district – a requirement that was translated into a plethora of magnet programs, and massive busing to get students to the programs.

The plan has its ups and downs:

Neighborhood Schools:  I’ve advocated for neighborhood schools – small, geographic schools located near where the kids live – for a long time.

The plan gets the “Geography” part, more or less.  But the keys to making small neighborhood schools work are

• They’ve gotta be small
• They have to be places parents feel good sending the kids.

The problem is, a lot of these “neighborhood” schools will be the same big warehouses we have today, only drawing their students from a different blotch on a map.

The Good Effort After Bad?: Among my biggest concerns: reading between the lines of Silva’s statements, it looks as if she’s looking to focus her efforts on improving district test scores.  Speaking of the magnet system, Silva notes…:

…it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color and thus not making a dent in the “significant achievement gap in St. Paul Public Schools.”

And so the high achiever is going to have to plunk down into a seat and plod along until their less-school-oriented classmates decide to catch up?

This is, of course, one of the great dangers of the factory-model public school system; the idea that you have a one-size-fits-all “model” of education that has to work for every student.  But that’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had before.

And one we’ll have again soon – because it’s  another of the “features” of Silva’s plan:

The Home Office:  Silva wants the school’s programs to be more…alike:

Overall, Silva pledged to implement more centralized control over the way material is taught in classrooms and money is used by schools, as a way to ensure a consistent experience from school to school.

The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city’s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.

Magnets:  It seems to be a big rollback of the idea of the Magnet school.  Conservatives bag on the magnet schools, largely for the wrong reasons.  It’s a simple fact that not every kid is wired to respond to the same program.  Different peoples’ brains – and kids are people, let’s remember – respond to different subjects.  Every brain is different- and trying to force them all to be the same just makes the different-enough ones that don’t have the support or compulsion to “make it” check out of the idea of “education”, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Speaking for myself, junior high was a complete wasteland except for languages and music. Some kids’ brains get cranked up by working with their hands, some by science, some by reading, some by just getting outside and running, for crying out loud.  The one-size-fits-all cookie cutter school is a good way to make sure most of the kids we just describe think of school as a gruelling duty to plod through (at best).

Unfortunately, in my experience the Saint Paul schools didn’t do magnets especially well.  Most of the  magnets did double duty as “neighborhood” schools; the “magnet” program in art or science had to also account for not a few kids who weren’t there to learn art or science!

One of Silva’s motivations is to reverse the slide of students and families from the district schools; while the district is losing students slower than Minneapols, it’s still lost 1/8 of its enrollment in recent years.

We’ll see.ite.

The news sounded so, so good to start out.  After enduring six years of knife-to-the-throat tax increases under Chris Coleman, it almost looked as if Saint Paul was going to finally wake up, smell the anti-spending coffee, and get real…

…but only if you don’t read too closely.

No, it does start promisingly:

The St. Paul City Council on Wednesday passed a 2011 budget without an increase in the property tax levy for the first time since Mayor Chris Coleman took office five years ago.

The adopted budget, after accounting adjustments, is about $473 million, an increase of about $4.2 million from 2010.

Coleman hailed the passage, calling it a victory for property taxpayers in St. Paul.

OK.  So far so good.  As long as there are no hidden whammies.

But when DFLers talk about being fiscally responsible, there is always  a hidden whammy.  Emphasis added:

Still, he and officials in local governments across the state are bracing for what will happen at the Legislature as lawmakers look for solutions to solve a $6.2 billion hole in the state budget.

“As we head into the new year, we are eager to work with Gov. Dayton and the Legislature on a budget solution for the state that allows local governments the resources necessary to do what we’ve done in St. Paul — to craft a budget that invests in public safety and other critical services without increasing the burden on property tax payers,” Coleman said in a statement.

Coleman built his budget assuming the city would receive $62.5 million in local government aid from the state. The city has had its allocations cut in recent years, though.

 Whammy.

Coleman and the Gang of Seven are holding the City of Saint Paul hostage, to coerce the new legislature to give them their way.

Joe Doakes – a fellow Saint Paul hostage – writes:

So the Council intentionally adopted a budget based on getting a subsidy from the State, a subsidy that we all know doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of happening in a Republican-dominated legislature. The only possible rationale for that is to gain political negotiating advantage. If the Republicans don’t raise state taxes to fund St. Paul’s budget, we’ll have to lay off cops and firefighters. And it’ll all be the Republican’s fault! Because they hate Minorities! And children! And kittens! If Republicans don’t pony up, we’ll make St. Paul residents suffer! And it’ll be their fault!

 In other words, the St. Paul City Council just took its own citizens hostage.

 Yep.  Because it’s for sure it won’t be the Mayor’s two dozen staff offices that get cut.  It won’t be the massively-redundant Park and Rec effort, or Kathy Lantry’s Landlord Harassment program.  It’ll be the cops and firemen that get laid off first.  

Seems St. Paul hasn’t changed so much since Dillinger hid out here in the 1930’s, the crooks just moved to nicer offices.

At least when Dillinger roamed the streets, the law-abiding citizens knew who the crooks were, and didn’t keep returning them to office.