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.
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