Details, Details?
By Mitch Berg
Nick Coleman is a monkey for the local chamber of commerce.
He notes (at the behest of local car dealers) that Flatiron – the company building the new 35W River Bridge – has bought a bunch of new trucks.
In Colorado. With Colorado registrations.
A Flatiron spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, but permit me to sum up the situation here: Buying Colorado trucks for a high-profile project in Minnesota that still carries the emotional pangs of death and destruction? Dumb, Flatiron.
This is a company that was judged to have better public “outreach” than the local firms that lost out on the project, despite submitting lower bids. Would a Minnesota company buy a shiny new fleet for the project from, say, Colorado?
Depending on Minnesota’s business tax laws, or conditions of one deal or another the Minnesota company had cut with taxpayers?
I mean, the short answer is this; I have no idea why they’d buy and register their new fleet of trucks in Colorado. One might think that there must be some state tax-related reason to buy trucks there, in their home state and the state in which they are incorporated, rather than here.
And, by the way, while the bridge collapse was indeed an emotional cataclysm for Minnesota, I don’t care if the engineers and ironworkers involved in the reconstruction share those emotions or not. Indeed, I’d just as soon they kept emotion out of things.
