Yes, my good friend, it would seem you’ve been hitting some hard times.

I’m truly, truly sorry to hear that your car has broken down.  It can be a real hassle when cars break down. 

And it’s sad that your daughter is sick, and needs to get to Regions.  I’ve been there; trying to take care of family emergencies with a balky car can be harrowing, for sure. 

And it’s drastically bad luck that she’s in the car right now in her condition, with Mom over on a side street out of sight of this parking lot.  Gawd, that has to stink.

And I know – I know! – that you are under immense stress.  The tone of your voice truly says it all.  I feel your pain and your stress, on a level perhaps deeper than you might suspect.

And I know this is the kind of time that you could use a helping hand from a stranger – say, $100 to get your car towed and catch a cab down to Regions.  Christian charity is a powerful thing, and Minnesotans are rightly famous for it.

I do feel I should lend you the hand you need.  I feel it in the pit of my gut.

And I’d feel it a lot more if this weren’t the second time you, yourself, have tried this con on me in this self-same parking lot in the past year.

That is all.

Loyal Opposition’s sonar shack has detected a transient…

Ed Matthews – GOP-endorsed candidate for the Fourth CD – is debating Betty McCollum tonight. 

Get to Ed’s site, and get the details.

It’s not often that I find myself defending Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman. Indeed, I die a little inside at the thought.

But they say you can learn a little about a guy by his enemies.

So here goes; good job, Mayor Coleman.

A group of stalkers followed Coleman to a fundraiser last week:

About 30 demonstrators showed up outside a fundraiser for St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman on Friday, objecting to what the group saw as an overreaction by police during last week’s protests outside the Republican National Convention.

Carrying signs that read “I Am Ashamed” and “I Survived 9/1,” the group strolled the sidewalk in front of a St. Anthony Park residence where the event was being held, briefly confronting Coleman when he arrived.

Look, I don’t support government overreach; police overreach against legitimate protest is no better than, say, siccing the FCC on conservative talk radio under the guise of the “Fairness” Doctrine.

But look at what Coleman’s administration – which is of a relatively small city, remember – was facing:

• A movement that pledged to “shut down” Saint Paul and the convention
• Groups that were threatening to stalk and kidnap delegates and other people.
• Credible threats of violence and mayhem from groups that have carried it out in the past (see Seattle, 1999).
• Groups that did, in fact, commit violence against delegates on the first day – sandbag attacks on buses, bleach squirted at delegates and so on.

With that background, caution was hardly misplaced.

So did officers possibly use “excessive caution” on protesters who didn’t obey lawful orders to disperse – macing people excessively and so on?  Possible.

Did the police break up any protests that were legally permitted, and where the protesters were operating within the conditions of the permit?  I’ve been asking counterculture types for the past week, and heard nothing.

The protesters, I suspect, are upset – legitimately at what may have been instances of cops overapplying mace, and illegitimately at the overall approach, which seems not to have had any affect on legal, permitted protests.

And they’re upset because their protests, outside the echo chamber of the perennially-angry far left, had zero affect on the convention, on national policy, on the GOP, and – most galling to them, I suspect – the national press coverage of the convention.  Pissed off kids and ageing hippies throwing things in the streets?  Dog bites dog.  Sarah Palin sweeping all before her?  Pitbull bites lightworker.

The protesters barely qualified as a sideshow.  Unless you were a cop.

Anyway – good job, Mayor Coleman.

Feel free to keep the good will flowing, by the way, by reconsidering your property tax hikes.

Welcome to Saint Paul, all you delegates. This is my town.

Perhaps you’ve heard – we have a city council president who has an interesting opinion aobut Republicans and everything about us…:

…except maybe the tax money you bring in (because Dave Thune’s been known to raise a tax or two).

Oh, he originally said he was talking about “lobbyists” – but then, he clarified:

Finally, I may have unfairly sullied the reputation of lobbyists. My friend
[redacted, a lobbyist] pointed out that lobbyists don’t puke, they’re professionals who have experience holding their liquor. Its the amateurs who spew.

He may be right, but the particular lobbyists we’ll have in town that week
are the ones who have initiated this whole discussion.

And of course these are the lobbyists who brought us an illegal and tragic war, a recession, polluted water, expensive drugs, and even the moralists who preach family values but play “outside the box” themselves. They are enough to make me queasy without a snootful…

Enh.

Anyway – welcome to town, delegates!

It’s almost convention time – and for some of you in the GOP, this is a bit of a belated welcome; some of you have been plugging away for a long time, down at the various GOP convention offices in the (rumor has it) Endicott and Pioneer buildings along Robert Street.

But better late than never: Welcome to Saint Paul, Republicans. This is my town.

Well, not entirely mine; I share it with about a quarter of a million other people.

Many of you got posted here from places like DC and Virginia, from the party’s mothership; you’ve struggled through a (modest) winter, cranking out the hours, getting this convention up and running, in a city where you must feel like you’re surrounded by “the enemy”; this is a DFL town, or at least that’s what the polls say.

And yet the polls consistently show that even here – in a government and university town, a hothouse where all manner of left-wing perversion can bloom unfettered by common sense or the free market, a place where the lefty elite opened its hearts and pocketbooks for a former domestic terrorist – around 40% of us consistently vote for conservative candidates. One out of eight public school parents have pulled their kids out of the school system. Taxes are rising, services are falling, and the city unions just keep bellying up for more. A large faction of the local DFL – the part an old DFLer friend of mine called the “Pro-life, pro-assault rifle wing of the DFL” – is lying more or less dormant on the East Side, going to mass on Sunday and tinkering with their cars after work the rest of the week. They gave us three terms of mayors that started as DFLers, but saw the light; Norm Coleman – that’s Senator Coleman, thanks, and it will be for at least six more years – and Randy Kelly, as genuine a profile in political courage as exists in this rote, boring political state.

They represented a crowd of DFLers who might be a tad less enthralled with Barack Obama than the parts of the city west of 35E. Just saying; while McCain enthralls no conservative Republicans (as you’re well aware), he’s the kind of guy who could make a dent in that part of Saint Paul.

I hope you put on a great show, here. I hope you give us local Republicans a little something to work with. Above all, I hope that this show convinces a few people – the people who vote DFL because they really just haven’t thought about it that hard – to give their preconceptions another look.

And I hope you enjoy my city. As you meander around the town, you’ll find – and, being that you’re Republicans, probably not be surprised at all – that quite a few of the businessmen are a whole lot friendlier than some of the politicians are.

There’s a reason for that. Oh, Lordy, is there ever.

Give ’em a listen.

Anyway – welcome to my town. Hope you enjoy your stay!

Well, hey, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, UPI, the NYTimes, WashPost, ChiTrib, LATimes, Denver Post, Bloomberg, BBC, NPR, NDW, AFP, Tass and the rest of the world’s media!  Welcome to Saint Paul, all you producers and reporters and anchors and you legions of APs and PAs . 

Welcome to Saint Paul.  This is my town.

Many of you will have come here from one of the news business’ bigger centers; New York, LA, Chicago, London, wherever.  You’ve been joking with your friends about the time you get to spend in “flyover land”. 

Here’s a couple of tips for you:

1. It’s Saint Paul.  Not Minneapolis.  While they share a border, the two downtowns are ten miles apart.
2. Get out of downtown once in a while.  Yeah, I know – that’s where the convention is, and I know your job is to cover it.  But the Twin Cities are a neat place, and Saint Paul – unbeknownst even to many who live in the area – is the best part of it all.  Mark Twain once said “Saint Paul is the last city of the East, and Minneapolis is the first city of the West”, and it’s still kinda true; parts of Saint Paul feel like Chicago or Boston or New York; Minneapolis feels more like Denver or Seattle or San Francisco.  It can be a fun place.
3. See those people out there holding “Support The Troops” signs?  Not everyone in this town has drunk the lefty koolaid.
4. Shaddap about Mondale and Humphrey and Orville Freeman already.  Yes, they were part of Minnesota’s political past, and a big past it was.  But in case you haven’t noticed, the people who are making a difference in Minnesota’s political present – Coleman, Pawlenty, David Strom, Marty Seifert – are all Republicans, and to one degree or another right of center (although that’s a discussion that’ll rage into the wee hours if you get some Minnesota conservatives talking this week). 
5. Please, dear lord, don’t interview Jesse Ventura.  Not once.  Ventura is to Minnesota politics what that drunk weekend back during your sophomore year in college was to you.  You don’t keep lording that miserable fiasco over us, we’ll make sure the photos are destroyed.  Deal?

Anyway – welcome to Saitn Paul, an I hope you enjoy it!

If there’s one thing I’m looking forward to having past us this political season, it is the leftymedia’s relentless comparison of every inconvenience thrown in the way of people who break the law en masse at the Denver and Saint Paul conventions as some sort of “Guantanamo” or another.

Pan over to David Brauer, doing his best to delegitimize regional law enforcement in a hack-job entitled “Gitmo on the Mississippi?”

Fox9’s Tom Lyden has a look at the St. Paul parking garage where Republican National Convention misdemeanor arrestees will be held.

Well, an exterior look anyway; officials wouldn’t let Lyden inside. Fox9’s camera shows a new air-conditioning unit and ductwork at the ramp’s street level.

I’d like to ask Brauer to put aside his tut-tutting for a moment to ask – what do he and the rest of this city’s bleeding hearts propose the city do with people who break the law, after over a year of committing to break the law?  Put them up at the Saint Paul Hotel until room opens up at the Ramco Jail?

Perhaps with a mint on their pillow?

Convention-site holding facilities have become an extremely hot topic since a Denver warehouse’s chain-link-laden…

wait for it……..wait for it……..

… “Gitmo on the Platte” was revealed.

Lyden says the garage is underneath the Ramsey County Emergency Operations Center. In the report, he notes, “If all goes well, those who have identification on them will be in and out with a ticket within four hours.”

So, bleeding hearts – where should they be held?  Or should the cops justs not arrest anyone at all, no matter what they do?

My original suggestion was to hold ’em in a couple of barges down by the Lafayette Bridge.  But if an underground garage isn’t good enough for them, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of volunteers to jam them, tokyo subway-style, into the existing holding cells.

Seriously, bleeding hearts – do you have an actual suggestion (beyond cutesy renamings?)  Or is deligitimizing law enforcement your only goal?

Discuss.

Saint Paul party venues aren’t booking up as fast as other venues around the metro area:

Yet there are still a healthy number of parties being planned. According to an incomplete list compiled by one Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, there are at least 370 parties scheduled at the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

However, just 70 of those were in St. Paul.

“Is it as great as everyone’s expectations? I guess we’re going to have to wait and see,” [Randy] Kelly [son of the eponymous former St. Paul mayor] said.

Hm.  Why would Republicans be overlooking Saint Paul venues and going elsewhere in the metro?

Why, oh why indeed would that be? 

I spent yesterday working at a Habitat for Humanity project.  It was fun; I hadn’t done contruction work of any sort (beyond the odd bit of inept homeowner handimannery) in over twenty years.  

Most of the day was wrapped up in building things (and I did finally get the whole “hanging drywall” thing straight, thank goodness). 

But the folks at Habitat – a non-profit – did carve out a bit of the day for “education”.  Over lunch hour, we heard a bit about the “affordable housing” mission.  We also learned that Habitat houses – always built to the absolute latest in current safety codes, and they are doozies – take a lot of money to build, above and beyond all the donated labor (from three Twin Cities corporations at our site yesterday, totalling around thirty people, some of whom knew what they were doing). 

Naturally, my mind wandered a bit.

I remebered a lecture I attended, starring former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel, the fellow who served the term before Norm Coleman was elected.  He’d been a dismal, malaise-prone mayor – but he had impeccable liberal credentials, so after he left office he went to work for one “affordable housing” group or another.  In the lecture, he stated his goal; that everyone in Saint Paul (and, naturally, elsewhere) have safe, attractive, up-to-code housing, convenient to mass transit and the amenities of city life, for less than 30-odd percent of their income.

I asked him where the money would come from for that vision.

I don’t think anyone needs me to tell them the answer, do they?

In pondering this, I thought back to the house we were living in when both of my kids were born (although we left when Zam was three months old).  It was drafty; the walls were made (it seemed) out of cardboard.  The carpet was dismal, the kitchen ancient, the windows leaky, the basement pungent.  Mice roamed the place like the buffalo herds in Dances with Wolves. 

But it was a three-bedroom house for $600, which at that time was about the ragged edge of what we could afford without government assistance (remember that last qualifier).  It was a dingy roof and four drafty walls and, most important of all, we could manage it on what we earned back then.  It was what you’d call a “fixer-upper” (and, indeed, someone bought the house from the landlord a few years back, and fixed it up; it looks nice today).  And when the opportunity came to find something better, we worked our butts off to make it happen. 

And that was a very good thing.

I thought, as I looked around the brand-new house taking shape in Frogtown, that this would be a much better way to be poor!  Of course, Habitat for Humanity gets about 500 applications a year; between new builds and renovations, they put about 50 units a year into commission.

Where does everyone else go?

Until recently, they rented cheap houses; plain asphalt-sided frame houses in Frogtown; old railroad houses with three feet of clearance between buildings in the North End; dilapidated, past-their-prime but livable Edwardians up on Dayton’s Bluff.

But the mortgage craze of the past ten years took a lot of those places off the rental market; the popping of the bubble has left 2,000 of them vacant in Saint Paul, with more coming every day.

As I noted in my “Saint Paul Land Grab” series (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and more to come),  The City of Saint Paul is requiring all rgistered vacant homes to be brought up to current building codes before issuing them a Certificate of Occupancy, which will, depending on who  you ask, revitalize the city with block upon block of safe, modernized, renovated homes (that was Councilman Bostrom and Councilwoman Lantry’s tack on the issue), or create neighborhoods strewn full of vacant lots, all ready for the city to seize for one project or another (largely to house the vast numbers of people who won’t be able to afford to live in Saint Paul because the cheap housing is gone).  Until these properties’ owners bring them up to current code – meaning $50,000-$120,000 work for a house that might be worth $20,000, counting the land, today – they’re off the market.

No crappy homes equal no cheap places to live.  What are the options for the poor if there are no cheap places to live? 

Liberal governments have long declared war against things that are crappy; crappy jobs, crappy houses, crappy apartments.  “Living Wage” ordinances and minimum wage hikes decrease the supply of entry-level and subsistence jobs – meaning people can’t enter the market or subsist.  Have you seen the teenage unemployment rate lately? 

“Rent Control”, like New York’s infamous rent caps, dry up the supply of rental housing (which is why even twenty years ago it was impossible to find an inexpensive apartment in Manhattan even as huge swathes of the city were covered in slums).  Other cities that try to artificially spiff up the market – San Francisco, Portland – have similar results.

If the Saint Paul City Council’s latest bit of economic jiggerypokery continues as I predict, it’ll soon be impossible to get an “affordable” house in Saint Paul.  Without government assistance, anyway.

There is value to crappy things; jobs, houses, whatever.  They’re a place to start.  They’re a place to fall back to.  They’re something to fix, or to strive to get out of.

And when crappy jobs, houses and apartments are outlawed – what will be the alternatives?

I’m going to interrupt my narrative (although rest assured, it’s going to continue) to announce a fascinating experiment.

Bob Johnson, of the A Democracy blog – which focuses on housing and city council issues in Saint Paul – is hosting a round table discussion featuring, as this is written, Saint Paul City Council member Kathy Lantry.

They’re talking about a number of housing-related issues, including the vacant home ordinance we talked about in the rest of this series (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V), as well as some I haven’t talked about much; a RICO suit against the city by a number of landlords, questions about code enforcement abuses, and the future of housing in the city.

I’m honored to have been asked to help moderate the discussion, along with Bill Cullen, a Saint Paul landlord and activist. (Bill will let me know if that’s not a fair description!).
So go over to the thread on A Democracy and leave a (polite, reasonable) question; Bill and I will be picking the ones we forward to Councilperson Lantry and any other city officials that agree to participate.

This should be an interesting exercise.

UPDATE: Bumped up to today, so everyone hopefully sees it.

Joe Kimball has long has a reputation for impeccable ethics and credibility.

Now?  Pfft:

People are asking: How can we, Dick and Jane Public, get a ticket to attend the Republican National Convention in St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center?

Oh, really, Joe Kimball?

Name them.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at  Saint Paul ordinance07-1194 4 (”Green Sheet” number 3046791), which the City Council adopted unanimously at its June 25 meeting. The law would require owners of vacant homes listed in Category II (needs a bunch of work) and Category III (almost tear-down material) to get a city-determined laundry-list of improvements, to get buildings of whatever age up to current building codes before they could get a Certificate of Occupancy.  These repairs would add between $20,000 and $100,000 and more to the cost of houses before they could be occupied. These buildings are largely owned by mortgage holders – banks, investment firms, debt traders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 

They are largely “upside down” – they were largely foreclosed with loan balances much higher than the houses’ current values.  In some cases, the discrepancy is immense. 

Dan Bostrom represents the Sixth Ward – the upper-half of Saint Paul’s East Side.  We spoke on the phone last week. 

“It’s not unusual to see houses with $200,000 balances that aren’t worth $30,000”, said Bostrom. 

And the problem – at least in Saint Paul’s worst-affected neighborhoods, Frogtown and the North End and the lower East Side – is serious.  “There’s one block”, Bostrom notes, citing a block just off Payne Avenue, on the lower East Side, “with 23 houses on it.  12 are vacant”. 

The ordinance is intended to compel banks and other lenders owning foreclosed property in Saint Paul to bring foreclosed property up to current building codes before they can be re-sold.  “The outcome we’re looking for”, said Kathy Lantry, who represents Ward Seven, which includes the hard-hit Payne-Phalen and Dayton’s Bluff neighborhoods as well as the placid proto-suburban expanse of Battle Creek, “is a city with liveable houses, that people can afford to live in”. 

Which is, of course, what everyone wants; it’s the means to the end that are the question.  I wondered if this strategy – putting intensely difficult conditions on selling foreclosed and vacant properties – had been thought through; how likely were institutional mortgage-holders to comply with this ordinance?  Had there been any “market research” done on the percentage of compliance expected?

“No”, said Lantry.  “We did this just for the fun of it”, she quipped sarcastically.  She quickly added that the ordinance was not a hasty decision; “We went over this ordinance with any number of bankers, the St. Paul Association of Realtors”, and other local financing bodies to sanity-check the proposal.

“…there was a fair amount of give and take with local community banks in helping to improve upon earlier drafts of the ordinance, and a local representative of an association of community banks in the area has said that they are relatively comfortable with the final ordinance”, added Ward 4’s Russ Stark in an emailed response.

OK – so there was some buy-in (and I plan on following up with some of the industry sources named in the interviews) from the local financial-services community.  We’ll come back to that (I plan on interviewing some of the industry sources named in my interviews, later this or early next weeks). 

But what if, at the end of the day, the lender doesn’t comply?  If the price to get the house – especially a detriorating, vacant one – saleable in the near future is just too high?  Will they have to sell at a huge loss?

“The goal”, added Lantry, “is to get these companies to negotiate workouts with homeowners, rather than foreclosing”. 

“We have provided a cattle prod to try to get them to negotiate”. 

OK, good – but what if they don’t?  What if the prospect of a huge loss is just not acceptable, for whatever reason?  More to the point – what about the houses in which there’s nobody to negotiate, the city’s huge stockpile of vacant homes (which topped a total of 2003 buildings earlier this week – 80% of which would be affected by the terms of this ordinance)?  

“Unfortunately, many of the properties in question, prior to the ordinance, were already ‘falling through the cracks” and deteriorating to the point of needing to demolished”, said Ward 4’s Stark, referring (I presume) to the 300-odd Category III properties on the vacancy list.

“If the mortgage holders walk away, the house is probably beyond saving”, said Lantry.  “Look – you need to remember that these lenders are not unsophisticated, mom-and-pop lenders.  These are big companies…they have a fiduciary responsibility to their trustees…their responsibility is to maintain [these assets] for their trustees”. 

But what if the lenders did abandon these properties?  And remember, there’s a time limit for properties on the vacancy list.  Hypothetically, let’s assume the worst: that most of the banks involved decline to comply with the ordinance.  They also stop paying property taxes, allowing the properties to go tax-forfeit.  The land forfeits to the State, obviously – but the State then assigns it to the city/county to dispose of.  Assuming the hypothetical “worst case” scenario, what does the city intend to do with all of this new property?

Bostrom denied any interest in this; “We don’t want to own a bunch of houses”.  But how about the land the houses are on?  Bostrom vigorously denied any city plant to gobble up property. 

Russ Stark:  “We’re trying to use this and several other tools at our disposal to avoid the problems that all of us are concerned about — and yes, there is some risk that these tools will not be effective.”

“Remember”, added Lantry, “you have two years to sell a house that’s Category II…if they can build a bridge across the Mississippi in 24 months, they can sell a house in two years.”

Of course, bridges that carry 140,000 cars a day are a bull market.  Houses, these days?  Not so much.

More Friday.

UPDATE:  Of course, it’s Russ Stark.  Matt was an ACLU lawyer.  In 1986.  Blah.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

Last week, I sent this email (with a few subtle variations, depending on the recipient) to every Saint Paul City Councilperson (and each of their Legislative Assistants, just for good measure).

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m a twenty-year Saint Paul resident.  I live in the Fourth Ward. 

I also write a blog (Shot In The Dark) and host a radio talk show (“The Northern Alliance Radio Network”). 

I have a few questions about a recent City Council decision.

At the June 25 meeting, the City Council passed Ordinance 07-1194 4 (”Green Sheet” number 3046791).  This ordinance amends Legislative Code 33.03, and states that vacant homes (in Category I and II – the most saleable homes) can only be sold if all vacant building fees are paid, and if the owner posts a performance bond or escrow equal to the estimated amount needed to bring the structure up to code.

I have several questions about this ordinance, and I’d appreciate your answers.

1) It seems, on its face, that this ordinance is intended to compel banks and other lenders owning foreclosed property in Saint Paul to bring foreclosed property up to current building codes before they can be re-sold.  Is this accurate?

2) Has the City Council gotten an estimate as to the likelihood of institutional mortgage-holders (banks) complying with this ordinance?  Has there been any “market research” done on the percentage of compliance expected?

3) If a mortgage holder does *not* comply – fails to post the performance bond or escrow, or bring the building up to code – then as I read it, this ordinance means the property remains in limbo, a deteriorating vacant structure.  Is this accurate?

4) Given that the reason most of these homes were foreclosed in the first place was that the amounts owing were greater than their market values, and that it can *easily* cost between $30,000 and $50,000 (or more) to bring an older home up to current code standards, on properties that are already “upside down” (worth less than the bank has lent for them), what percentage of institutional owners (banks) do you expect to comply with the terms of this ordinance? 

5) Did the City Council seriously discuss this scenario?  If so, why did they decide to take the action they did in approving the ordinance?

6) In the event that a large percentage of institutional mortgage holders that own foreclosed, vacant properties in Saint Paul *do not* comply with the ordinance, what is the city’s “fallback plan” for dealing with the large number of vacant, deteriorating properties that would result?  And for the additional drag on the values of *neighboring* properties that will result from having huge numbers of vacant, distressed buildings as neighbors?

Finally, a few questions that deal with the consequences of the ordinance:

7) Hypothetically, let’s assume the worst: that most of the banks involved decline to comply with the ordinance.  They also stop paying property taxes, allowing the properties to go tax-forfeit.  The land forfeits to the State, obviously – but the State then assigns it to the city/county to dispose of.  Assuming the hypothetical “worst case” scenario, what does the city intend to do with all of this new property?

8) Again assuming the “worst case” above – is it the city’s intention to use the epidemic of tax-forfeit property to…:
   a) drag down property values in these distressed neighborhoods
      to make eminent domain settlements against the remaining
      homeowners cheaper, to enable the city to…
   b) redevelop the land according to its own plans, on the relative
      cheap?

9) Finally – what do you, and the Council, *believe* the consequences of making properties much more expensive than they are worth to their owners will be?

Again, when you get a moment, I’d be very interested in your answers to the above.  If email is less convenient for you, feel free to call my cell phone: [redacted].

Respectfully,

Mitch Berg
The Midway

Wednesday, the responses.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

So let’s recap what we have so far:

On June 25th, 2008, the Saint Paul City Council passed ordinance 07-1194 4 (“Green Sheet” number 3046791). You can read it for yourself – but in essence, it amends the city’s legislative code to say the following (I’m summarizing below):

To sell a vacant (or “dangerous” or “nuisance”) house, you need a Certificate of Occupancy.

To get a Certificate of Occupancy, you need to…:

1. Pay all vacant building fees (Category I properties – the ones in the best shape. There are about 300 Cat I properties among the 2,000 vacant houses in Saint Paul).
2. Get A Truth In Housing Report (again, for Cat I houses)
3. Post a Performance Bond or Escrow amount to cover the estimated amount of repairs to bring the structure up to code (all categories).

Now, let’s posit a hypothetical; say you’re a bank. You’ve had to foreclose on a ton of properties, because your CEO’s dimbulb nutslap of a nephew went to a bunch of sleazy brokers and bought a ton of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) that were going to adjust to eleventy-billion percent, and went and spent it all on jet-skis and tipping waitresses at Hooters. Naturally, when the ARMs adjusted the owners defaulted; as housing values sagged, the owners came up “upside down”; they owed you more than the house could sell for.

So you foreclosed on ’em. Business is business, right?

Ordinarily, you’d wait out the market and sell the place when you could get a good enough price to make it worth selling. In the meantime, you are the owner; you and your bank are responsible for the property taxes and – to keep it saleable and keep the city’s code enforcement people off your back – enough maintenance to keep it ready for some approach to the market.

You grab a file at random from the pile of “foreclosure” files on your desk. You open it up. It’s a house on the North End of Saint Paul.

Eventually – I don’t think this is irrationally exuberant – the market’ll rebound. Right?

You have to hope so – because until then, the house that your bank is into for, say, $200,000 (plus fees and whatever maintenance it takes), would fetch $175,000, as is, if you tried to sell it today (and could find a buyer). Maybe less, since there are more and more foreclosures popping up in the neighborhood.

But the City has just passed a law saying:

To sell the property to anyone, you need a Certificate of Occupancy.

To get a Certificate of Occupancy, you need to…:

1. Pay all outstanding fees.
2. Get A Truth In Housing Report
3. Pony up whatever it takes to bring the structure up to code. And by “to code”, we mean “the current code, not the code when the building was built. For the sake of this hypothetical, let’s say the house was built when a lot of the houses in the St. Paul neighborhoods worst-affected by the foreclosure epidemic were built – say, 1920.

“Hm”, sez you, the banker and accidental owner of the property. “We have to pony up a bond, and get all the work done, to current codes, before we can even try to sell this house”.

“What would that mean?”

So you get an inspection. And you get the following letter back from the City (with marginal notes in blue:

(The letter below is an actual letter, to the owner of an actual vacant property, forwarded to me by a contact in Ramsey County’s government who wishes to remain anonymous. It is by no means atypical of a punch list for repairs to an older house – in this case, a 90-something-year-old home on the North End, not far off Rice Street, an area heavily beset by the foreclosure epidemic. I’ve redacted personal information and the address. I can scan and post the original, if needed)

[NAME REDACTED]
STATE OF MN TRUST [Department Redacted]
50 KELLOGG BOULEVARD WEST SUITE [redacted]
SAINT PAUL, MN 55102-1657

Re: [Your property’s address]

File#: 04 215708 VB2

Dear Property Owner

Pursuant to your request the above-reference property was inspected and the following report is submitted:

BUILDING

1. Replace or sister all damaged floorjoist on first and second floor per Code with proper supports and hangers.
2. Remove all exterior wall covering and insulate and frame to Code.
3. Replace first floor and basement stairs to Code. (Catch this? You need to remove all the siding and not only insulate, but make sure the framing complies with current standards – which means massive, expensive structural rework).
4. Install rear, exterior stairs and landing to second floor to Code with frost footings or close up and stucco.
5. Remove covering from first floor ceiling and add floor joist to support second floor. (Cha-chingggg!)
6. Install ventilation for bathroom per Code.
7. Insure sill plates are in good condition.
8. Exterior to be weather proof. (Not cheap!)
9. Insure basement cellar floor is even, is cleanable, and hall holes are filled. (Which, with an older place, can mean a ton of money!)
10. Install Provide hand and guardrails on all stairways and steps as per attachment.
11. Strap or support top of stair stringers.
12. Install floor covering in the bathroom and kitchen that is impervious to water.
13. Provide thumb type dead bolts for all entry doors. Remove any surface bolts.
14. Repair or replace any deteriorated window sash, broken glass, sash holders, re-putty etc as necessary.
15. Provide storms and screens complete and in good repair for all door and window openings.
16. Provide fire block construction as necessary.
17. Re-level structure as much as is practical.
18. Where wall and ceiling covering is removed, attic, replace doors and windows, (insulation, glass, weather stripping, etc.) shall meet new energy code standards.
19. Prepare and paint interior and exterior as necessary (take the necessary precautions if lead base paint is present).
20. Any framing members that do not meet code (where wall and ceiling covering is removed, members that are over-spanned, over-spaced, not being carried properly, door and window openings that are not headered, etc.) are to be reconstructed as per code. (Jeezus H. Christ On A Harley! That means the framing – which could be spaced pretty haphazardly in structures more than 30-odd years old – has to be re-done to current standards. After you remove the siding!)
21. Habitable rooms with new usage, replaced windows shall have glass area equal to 8% of floor area, or a minimum of 8 sq. fet., one-half of which shall operate and all bedroom windows shall meet emergency egress requirements (20″ wide minimum, 24″ high minimum but not less tan 5.7 sq. ft. overall). (In other words – egress rooms even on upper floors!)
22. Provide general clean-up of premise.
23. Provide smoke detectors as per the Minnesota State Bullding Code.
24. Repair soffit, fascia trim, etc. as necessary.
25. Provide proper draininge around house to direct water away from foundation. (Cha-chingggg!)
26. Install downspouts and a complete gutter system.

ELECTRICAL

1. Rewire all exposed areas to Code.
2. Install front entry light.
3. Wire basement to Code.
4. Rewire service grounding to Code.
5. Insure proper fuses or breakers for all conductors.
6. Repair or replace all broken, missing or loose ficxtures, devides, covers and plates.
7. Check all 3-wire outlets for proper polarity and ground.
8. Throughout building, install outlets and fixtures as per Bulletin 80-1. (In other words, you need to re-wire the place…)
9. Install smoke detectors as per Bulletin 80-1 and I.R.C.
10. Electrical work requires a Permit and inspections. (…and get a licensed electrician to do it!)

PLUMBING

1. All plumbing work requires permit(s) and must be done by a plumbing contractor licensed in Saint Paul. (Cha-chingggg!)
2. Expose all plumbing that has been covered with concrete on [sic] sheetrock so it can be test [sic] and inspected. (Not cheap!)
3. Finish all waste and vent, water and gas piping for a complete plumbing system to Code. (Major work!)

HEATING

1. Install heating system to Code. (You know what furnaces, and their support infrastructure done to code, cost these days?)
2. Install gas piping to Code.
3. Recommend installing approved lever handle manual gas shutoff valve on gas appliances.
4. Install chimney liner.
5. Replace furnace/boiler flue venting and provide proper switch for gas appliance venting.
6. Tie furnace/boiler and water heater venting into chimney liner.
7. Recommend adequate combustion air.
8. Provide support for gas lines to Code. Plug, cap and/or remove all disconnected gas lines.
9. Provide heat in every habitable room and bathrooms.

ZONING

1. This property was inspected as being a single-family dwelling.

NOTES

1. See attachment for permit requirements.
2. VACANT BUILDING REGISTRATION FEES MUST BE PAID AT NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING AND PROPERTY IMPROVEMENT (NHPI) FOR PERMITS TO BE ISSUED ON THIS PROPERTY. For further information call, NHPI at 651-266-1900, located at 1600 White Bear Avenue.
3. Provide plans and specifications for any portion of the building that is to be rebuilt.
4. Most of the roof covering could not be properly inspected from grade. Recommend this be done before rehabilitation is attempted.
5. There was considerable storage/clutter within property at the time of the inspection. All to meet appropriate Codes when complete.
6. All items noted as recommended do not have to be completed for code compliance but should be completed at a later date. Possible purchasers of property should be made aware of these items.

Sincerely,

[Name redacted]
[Title redacted]

Remember – all of these have to be done (save for the two “recommended” items) before anyone can live in the place.

Any builders out there wanna take a whack at estimating this? I am going to take a very ill-informed whack at this, and say $20,000. I think I’m being conservative. Remember – you have a bank to run; no sweat equity here; you need to hire the work done.

And until your bank ponies up for all of this work, nobody can occupy it – hence, almost nobody will buy it (because they’ll just inherit the same problem!)

So, Mr. Banker – what do you do with the property? Remember – it’s already upside down. Its value is falling, since the rest of the block is slowly going vacant. You’re paying property taxes on it. So to sell this house, by the time you are ready you’ll have (counting the original loan liability, my conservative estimate of repairs, and property taxes, and vacancy fees) well over $225,000 on a house that, maybe, will be worth $165,000 for the foreseeable future.

That’s a $60,000 bath.

For one house.

And the one in the next file? And the next one? And the next one?

Repeat this process for most of the 2,000 currently vacant properties in Saint Paul. And for the dozens coming up vacant every month (my estimate; the five Twin Cities law firms that specialize in foreclosures say there are 500 foreclosures a month in the Twin Cities, today, and they are disproportionally focused in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

So what does this mean for Saint Paul?

Good question.

We’ll look at it from a couple of sides – from the mortgage lender side, and the City of Saint Paul’s as well – on Monday.

UPDATE:  I floated this scenario past Dan Bostrom, City Councilman for Ward Six, the north-east part of Saint Paul. 

He got a chuckle out of it.  It doesn’t go far enough.  I am, indeed, too conservative in many cases.  “There are houses out there with $200,000 mortgages that aren’t worth $30,000”, he said, “And it’ll take $100,000 to bring them up to code”.   More from Bostrom – and a couple of other City Council reps – next week.

At any rate – put yourself back in the banker’s shoes, and plug those numbers in; you’ve foreclosed on $200,000 in loan, you’ll have over $300,000 in by the time it can be occupied, and by then you might – might – get back half of that when the market starts to tilt toward some kind of equilibrium.

More next week.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

Has it really been 12 years since Darryl Strawberry played for the Saints?

So much has happened to Darryl Strawberry in the 12 years since he resurrected his baseball career with the independent St. Paul Saints. Success. Addiction. Recurring cancer. Divorce. Jail.

I remember seeing Strawberry – and Jack Morris, for that matter – at Midway Stadium, during the Saints’ “antique resurrection” season back in 2003.

No, wait. It says here it was 1996. Again, I think someone screwed up.

Strawberry said he tries not to think about the worst, all the chances he wasted, all the things that could have killed him long before Tuesday’s event, when he sat on a riser at the Crowne Plaza hotel in St. Paul as the honored guest at the American Association All-Star Game luncheon.

“I was spared for a reason,” Strawberry said near the end of a question-and-answer session with KSTP Radio’s Kris Atteberry. “All the things I had to deal with, there was something which I was called for. I used to think it was about baseball. It’s not. It’s about who I can help.”

Read the whole thing.

Last week, I wrote two pieces on a new Saint Paul ordinance (here and here).

I’m going to delay the last part – partly because I’ve been buried at work, but largely because it’s now two or three parts.

More on Friday.

Hard set upon by an oppressive tyranny, the people dutifully pulled their burdens.  At times, it seemed there was no hope; the overlords would work you to death and their pleasure, living off the fruit of our labors and the sweat of our brow, as it pleased them.

There were occasional whispers – kept silent, for fear of retribution from the overlords – of a liberator.  But most of the people kept it firmly in the realm of legend – as much for their own protection as out of lack of faith.  Some of the people even acquiesced with their oppressors; “truely, it’s better to go along than to resist”, they said, weary of the battle. 

But then, one day…

…in the middle of yet another dark, dismal year in the dank, oppressed land…

…the first glimmer of sanity broke over the rancid murk.

And a few of The People began to whisper under their breath.  Soon. 

Soon.

Sort of like “Secession Diaries” and Minnesota 2050. 

Really.

The harassment of delegates came as organized protests continued to draw thousands of people. The Still We Rise march by advocates for social issues was peaceful, and a Poor People’s March, a column several blocks long, proceeded from the United Nations to the Madison Square Garden yesterday after the police decided to let it go ahead without a permit.

When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.

…

The heavy police presence at the Garden apparently inspired the coordinated plan by anarchists and other radicals to strike out at the delegates at their hotels, breakfasts, parties, and on the streets.

The incidents are the result of months of planning by opposition groups, who report that they have obtained copies of plans and addresses for delegates’ parties, caucuses and other gatherings outside the Garden.

OK, I’m not making it up.  It’s what happened in 2004 in New York.  With all the talk about all the arrests that were dismissed over allegedly-excessive zeal on the part of the NYPD, you’d have a hard time realizing that there really was any low-level, non-lethal (hey, the cop on the scooter lived!) domestic terrorism going on at the last RNC.

The Twin Cities’ police are officially fairly sanguine; they’re taking a fairly low-key approach (which isn’t a bad thing; there’s no need to feed the anarkids’ need for drama). 

Anyway, no need to worry; “Scottsdale Woman” assures us that it’s really the GOP delgates and their sympathizers that’ll be causing the problems.

More later.

As we noted yesterday, there’s a bit of a foreclosure and vacant home crisis in Saint Paul. And while having 1993 registered vacant homes in a stock of about 115,000 residential buildings is a crisis by any measure, the fact that they are (so far) so heavily concentrated in some of the city’s lower-income neighborhoods – Frogtown and the North End, as well as the East Side’s Dayton’s Bluff, Swede Hollow and Payne-Phalen neighborhoods – is its most visible consequence so far. And that’s just the registered ones. It’s likely there are hundreds more that aren’t in the system yet.
A bus ride down Thomas Avenue in Frogtown, or a bike ride down Front Street between Western and Rice, takes you past rows of blue “Vacant Building” placards taped to front doors. It’s depressing.

So how does the city plan to respond?

It went past pretty much without notice. The Saint Paul City Council adopted ordinance 07-1194 4 (“Green Sheet” number 3046791) at its June 25 meeting. It passed unanimously. It went pretty nearly un-covered in the media, and escaped notice elsewhere.

Including by me. While I live in Saint Paul, and am among the thin film of Republicans who tries to keep the hard-left City Council  honest, it’s one never-ending job among many.

But I got an email last week about this. I cited the writer yesterday – he’ll remain anonymous for now, as the information comes from his wife, and she’d like to remain under the radar.

Ordinance 07-1194 4 is the city’s response to the vacant building crisis. My emailer writes:

There are three categories of buildings: cat 1 is pretty good shape (350 of them); cat 2 needs work (1400 of them); cat 3 is pretty tough (200 of them).

None of these houses can be occupied without City permission. Cat 1 is simple – pay a fee and you’re in business. Cat 2 and 3 is tougher – pay a fee, develop a rehab plan, make a deposit to cover inspections, develop a timetable to get the work done. Oh, and you can’t live there while you work on it, the place has no Certificate of Occupancy.

What does this mean?

So it’s not clear that you, as owner, can do the work since you’re not the owner-occupant. You certainly have to pay to live somewhere else while you work on the place, you may have to hire contractors who have the special City-issued licenses to work in St. Paul and yes, that means they charge more.

You might be thinking “no biggie”. You’d be thinking wrong. We’re not talking a coat of paint and and some Murphy Soap here:

Here’s where the new ordinance comes in. When the City says it wants you to bring your vacant building up to code, they mean ALL codes. Building code for wall stud spacing (rip off the siding to add studs, then replace siding). Energy code (rip open the walls to insulate, replace windows and appliances). Wiring code (replace old wires with new plastic-coated wires pulled through the walls to the outlets). Plumbing code: replace lead or galvanized plumbing with copper or PVC. Building code: tear off shingles and lay new plywood to cover gaps in roof boards before reshingling. Jackup the floors to level them. Re-landscape for drainage.

Expensive?

I’ve seen the work order – it’s more expensive than building a new house because you have all the demo work first.

You might be thinking “So what? We make sure we have decent housing stock”.

Well, perhaps not so much.

If the city seriously makes all the Cat 2 and 3 houses go through this, who’s going to pay for it? The foreclosing lenders? They’re not stupid. They already know they’re upside down on those houses, that’s why they took them back in foreclosure. Throw in another $50,000 of repairs before the lenders can sell the foreclosed houses, and the lenders would be complete fools to bother.

So what is the motivation behind the new ordinance?  I mean, everyone can agree on sticking it to the lenders that got us into this mess in the first place – right?
More on Monday.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

Last week, I wrote about the mood change I see in Saint Paul since the Coleman (Chris) Administration took over, and since the ultraliberal Gang of Four consolidated their power and expanded to Five. 

To sum it up – things seem gloomy in Saint Paul lately. 

Now, I’ve lived in some gloomy places.  I grew up in North Dakota, during the farm depression of the seventies and eighties.  The family farm, in those pre-ethanol days, was in deep trouble.  A decade of profligate farm lending (and borrowing) ran smack-dab into huge surpluses and lower prices.  This, combined with government interference in the market both chronic (the various farm subsidy programs) and acute (the 1980 grain embargo of the USSR), made independent farms dry up and blow away faster than Al Franken’s political future.  Some farmers (and the rural businesses that supported and depended on them) adjusted; they sold the land and left the business; others diversified crops and, in many cases, careers.  Others reacted less rationally.  And quite a few just hunkered down and rode it out.

Which, if you’re not on the federal reserve board or Warren Buffet, is about all you can do.

Unless, of course, government seems hell-bent on making things much, much worse.

———-

I got an email last week from a Saint Paul resident, from the Como Park neighborhood.  He’ll remain nameless for now, since his wife is closely-enough connected to this issue that it’d be poor form for her name to be floating around.

She got a copy of this new St. Paul city ordinance from her trade association.  If they’re correct that this ordinance was adopted, it could be historic.  We could see huge swaths of Frogtown and the East Side disappear in the next three years.

That got my attention.

Saint Paul has a foreclosure problem – and that leads to a vacant building problem.  As of yesterday, the city listed 1993 vacant properties in Saint Paul.  The number is big enough when you put it up against the total number of houses (115,713 as of the 2000 census); it’s worse when you see how those vacant properties are concentrated.   While real estate values throughout the city have suffered, a big part of the problem is concentrated in some of the city’s most “challenged” neighborhoods.  You can walk some blocks in the North End, the East Side and Frogtown and see more houses with blue “Vacant Building” signs on them than without; I walked a block near one of my kids’ schools, in the North End, last spring and counted five vacant, foreclosed homes out of six on a block just west of Rice Street.

Now, you can attribute this to any cause you want.  Some will point to greedy, unethical lenders – and they are certainly a part of the problem. 

Of course, free markets are usually pretty good at preventing bad behavior on their own – and when you see unethical behavior on a wholesale basis, it’s often useful to look for openings for that behavior, created by government interference in the market. 

The Community Reinvestment Act, and its various amendments, is a good place to start looking; the CRA impelled lenders to get into the subprime business on a wholesale level in the first place.  This wasn’t a bad thing in and of itself; home ownership can, in and of itself, be a very good thing for communities.  Twenty years ago, “absentee landlords” were the crisis du jour in exactly the same neighborhoods that are awash in foreclosures and vacancies today. 

Of course, combining a regulatory compulsion to do assume riskier loans and the “get rich quick” impulse on the part of many lenders to fill that compulsion during the housing bubble meant that, in a lot of cases, money was moving faster than information; a lot of new home-buyers didn’t know the questions to ask.  The lenders (or, to be fair, the brokers that originated the loans that the big lenders then bought to collect on the debt) didn’t, by law, need to care; they were doing their job, as mandated under the CRA.

But this posting isn’t about why we have a foreclosure crisis in Saint Paul.  It’s about how we – as a city – react to it.

And that’s where the really bad news kicks in.  Not only are many of the city’s oldest – and, as it happens, most historic – neighborhoods in immediate jeopardy, but so is the notion of actually being able to buy a home, if the plan goes through.

More on Thursday.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past twenty years. I have no intention of changing that.

I love this city; its neighborhoods, its attitude, its architecture, its down-to-earth feel.

I love its contradictions.  Mark Twain once said, “Saint Paul is the last city of the east, and Minneapolis is the first city of the West”), and as you go through the neighborhoods, you can see why.  The great playwright August Wilson lived on Cathedral Hill because more than anyplace he’d seen, it reminded him of the Brooklyn he’d grown up in.  Highland Park feels like parts of Chicago; the West End reminds me of Cleveland, Toledo, even parts of Boston; the East Side, parts of Chicago or Baltimore or Camden, New Jersey, depending on the area.  My Midway?  Well, it could be anywhere.  And yet the old saying “Saint Paul is fifteen small towns with one mayor” still resonates; each neighborhood is, in many ways, its own stand-alone city.  And with all that, it’s still a ten minute drive from the hustle and bustle and thrum of Minneapolis (and yet you can duck back across the river and escape the crime rate pretty much at will). 

But things feel different lately. 

Back during the Latimer and Scheibel administrations, Saint Paul felt tired and spent.  While the neighborhoods throve, downtown was deteriorating as you watched; the Saint Paul Port Authority committed the city to a series of ruinous boondoggles, Town Square and Galtier Plaza and the World Trade Center, all of which stand mostly unoccupied, or occupied by government and non-profit offices; renting to government is the closest thing developers have to a “get out of jail free card” in Saint Paul, but even the state’s appetite can’t consume all the spare office space in downtown.  Saint Paul, especially the downtown, turned into a ghetto of official space and a few stalwart local companies.

During the Coleman and Kelly administrations, things felt like they picked up.  I’ll allow in advance that part of it is my projection of good thoughts onto more-conservative administrations.  But the fact that Coleman and Kelly held the line on property taxes and spending was huge; people started buying houses in the city again; the plague of absentee landlords abated as people started choosing to invest in living in Saint Paul.  The crime rate, always much lower than Minneapolis, subsided as Selby-Dale, Frogtown and the Lower East Side’s crime waves abated.  It wasn’t all roses; profligate Tax Increment Financing lured a few companies – most notably USBank – out of downtown and into the huge, and for the next several years TIF-subsidized – West Side Flats complex, leaving several downtown office buildings vacant and strewn with tumbleweeds.  But for the most part, Saint Paul during those 12 years had a “let’s do it” attitude. 

But since Chris Coleman was elected mayor, and the ultra-left wing of the DFL took prohibitive control of the City Council with five far-left council members, the city just feels different. 

Again, I’ll allow that part of it is projection.  And the foreclosure crisis, especially on the East Side, North End and Frogtown, doesn’t help. 

But a huge part of this intangible, subjective change is the attitude behind the flip in course in the Mayor’s office.  The bulk of Chris Coleman’s campaign, and the reason a fair chunk of his supporters voted for him, was retribution for Randy Kelly’s endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004.  They rode into office with a promise to raise taxes, not endorse Republicans…

…and not a whole lot else.  It was pure negativity.  And negativity is a response, not a direction.

The city feels devoid of real leadership these days.  It feels rudderless, drifting in a dyspeptic sea of bile.  And I don’t mean from Dave Thune’s mythical puking Republicans.

Oh, the city is putting its best face forward for the Convention (when clowns like Thune aren’t slandering the GOP from their bully pulpit); downtown will be in its Sunday best, and I have no doubt that Grand Avenue, Saint Anthony Park, Ford Parkway, Concord Cesar Chavez, West Seventh northeast of Saint Clair, and that strip of downtown from Eagle Street to Wabasha between Kellogg and Ninth will be great places to see, be seen, and take the whole event in.

But elsewhere? 

The twelve years of vitality the city experienced under Norm and Randy seem to have dissipated.    Rice and Payne and Arcade, after years of slow recovery, seem to have stopped – partly due to the foreclosure epidemic that has hammered the North End and lower East Sides, leaving some streets on some blocks with more blue “Vacant” tags than without.  The Midway is riding out the economy better, but University Avenue is on death watch, waiting for the light rail to come through and smother twenty years of largely organic, grass-roots-driven progress.  And downtown?  The rebirth of the west end of Downtown, from Five Corners up through Wabasha, while gratifying to those of us who remember the Scheibel years, has stalled cold, but for convention preparations.

Comme ci, comme ca.  Business has cycles.  Cities ebb and flow over time. 

Except that it’s about to get a lot worse in Saint Paul.  Government negligence is one thing – a good conservative expects it, especially from a bunch of bobbleheads like the Saint Paul City Council. 

But there’s a difference between negligence and active connivance in a plan that’s going to gut the city – and the Saint Paul City Council is about to drive across that line with a bulldozer.

And they’re going to do it for the children.

More on Monday.

MaryW, writing at the new District 66B GOP blog, notes an event that an awful lot of Republicans should oughtta attend:

Minnesotans for Limited Government (MNLG) is a newly established political action committee dedicated to promoting the idea that individual and economic freedom be the first consideration of any government.

We are having a kick-off picnic to celebrate MNLG and the summer! We will be grilling burgers, brats and hot dogs along with serving an assortment of other goodies.

Politics and cookout food?  It gets no better!  The party is going to feature healthcare privace expert Twila Brase, CD5 Congressional candidate Barb Davis White, gadfly Sue Jeffers, and my own candidate in the Fourth, Ed Matthews!

Of course, political and economic freedom must be joined by one other key factor; security.  Without judicious security, there is no freedom.

But that’s what picnics are for! 

I am going to try to get there!

I’ve long been convinced that 90% of leftybloggers crib most of their writing from about a dozen original “proto-leftyposts” that appeared on Daily Kos, Atrios and RushLimbaughtomy maybe five years ago. 

If not the entire post, certainly the headline. 

And while that does mean the leftyblogger can dash past the whole “writing a catchy headline” bit – it’s all been done for you, by Kos, back in ’03! – it sometimes leads to some comical lapses.

The other day, I wrote a post about how Republicans in “safe” congressional districts – like Michele Bachmanns’ CD6 and John Kline’s CD2 – should oughtta think about diverting a buck or two to the long (very, very long) term goal of contesting CD4 and 5 (to say nothing of winning the First back).  The reason, of course, is that, whatever Tic nominee Steve Sarvi’s pluses (he’s an Iraq and Kosovo vet, is the former mayor of Watertown, and is not Colleen Rowley), barring a major “oops”, there’s just not that much to worry about at this point.

In other words; nobody’s scared of Steve Sarvi.

So I read “Blue Man in a Red District” this morning, and my first instinct was…

…to call 911.  The guy’s blue.  Obviously a cardiopulmonary problem.

But with that out of the way, his top post this morning was slugged:

Why are the right wing bloggers scared of Sergeant Sarvi?

And I thought “Good question.  After pointing out quite clearly that this right wing blogger – the only one cited in his post – is not scared of Sarvi, why am I?”

It’s a puzzle.

Blue actually does go on to post some information that isn’t the inverse of factual:

CD 5 has not elected a Republican to Congress in 45 years. The last 4 elections, a GOP candidate has garnered no more than 26%.

CD 4 had not gone red since 1949 and no one has come closer than 25% of Betty McCollum in years.

That’s right, Blue.  That’s one of the things you’re supposed to do in politics – change peoples’ minds.  It’s  tall order in my town, but if Brett Schundler could do it in Jersey City, we can do it here.

Bear in mind, I said “change minds”; not merely write a headline; with a nod to Blue, “Why Is The Fourth District Really Republican?”

It’s harder than that.