Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
City of St. Paul takes responsibility for street plowing the way Obama’s IRS does – proclaim outrage, shuffle people around, make vague promises and hope the issue goes away.
A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and plow the streets. Since I moved here in 1998, streets have been a cruel insult.
Comparing St. Paul to Minneapolis sounds fair – both big cities with huge staff and monster budgets – but a better comparison is Roseville or Falcon Heights – a small city with small staff and small budget whose streets are plowed and sanded, clean and dry, weeks before St. Paul’s streets are done. If the little town can do it with tiny staff working for peanuts, why can’t giant St. Paul do it with all its union employees and LGA resources?
I suspect Mayor Chris Coleman doesn’t want to discuss the solution proven to work: contract it out. I vaguely recall the City did for a while back in the early 90’s – maybe during Mayor Norm Coleman’s time? I think they contracted to heavy equipment companies that did road construction in the Summer but sat idle all Winter. We could hire them again.
I want to say it was West or South Saint Paul, or maybe a trial program on the West Side. The city’s union employees claimed, unsurprisingly, that the private contractors were terrible at the job, and the program was ended. “Cauterized” might be a better term.
Plus, St. Paul never plows alleys – residents band together to hire some guy with a Western plow on his pickup, which is good Winter work for landscapers. They could each clean a few streets, too, and have them perfectly clean before the city crews even get to the shop.
A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a plow on every block: now there’s a campaign slogan I could love.
That’s my block; one of our neighbors does plowing. We each chip in $20 a winter – and he has to keep the alley plowed to get to work. I think during the big blizzard in 2010 he may have made one of the side streets passable too…
When I bought my last vehicle, I went shopping for a 4-wheel drive. My in-laws asked me “Why do you need a 4-wheel drive, you live in St. Paul?” and I replied “I need a 4-wheel drive BECAUSE I live in St. Paul.” Now that’s pathetic.
Joe Doakes
Saint Paul seems to be getting counterintuitively worse at clearing roads. While last year was the worst – with even high-traffic streets remaining impassible sheets of glare ice for days after big storms – we haven’t had a real donnybrook of a storm yet, either.
The roads, even after last week’s modest storm, are like goat paths in the Bolivian Andes.
“A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and plow the streets.”
That’s what you think. The people that run the city believe that their job is to “fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!”
That requires affirmative action, community organizers, an office of human rights, and, above all, $100,000 drinking fountains and trash can containers.
Simply providing tax payers the basic municipal services they want is no fun.
Same basic thing they see in Chicago. One wonders what the reaction would be if you told the board of aldermen (Chicago’s native criminal class of course) or the Pig’s Eye City Council that if they want to reduce global warming emissions, try plowing the streets in the winter so people don’t “need” that 3/4 ton pickup to get out of their driveway.
And get rid of the buses and the death train, too. But like Powhatan notes, good sense just isn’t as much fun as squandering billions of taxpayer money. Sigh.
Could it be they’re first concentrating their efforts on getting the bike paths, bus routes, and LRT rails cleared as a priority before they clean those dreaded roadways?
Rewrite: “good sense just isn’t as much fun as
squandering billions of taxpayer moneybuilding monuments to their own sapience”Now you’re onto something.
PowMing, I just received my city\county\school tax statement yesterday and it didn’t include any of those things. But then for $568.00 I guess a big bowl of rainbow stew would be asking for a bit much.
Scott:
Could it be they’re first concentrating their efforts on getting the bike paths, bus routes, and LRT rails cleared as a priority before they clean those dreaded roadways?
They’ll never admit it publicly, but I’d bet money on it.
<tinfoilhatmode:ON>
It’s all part of Agenda 21 and socially engineering people out of their cars and onto mass/green transit.
<tinfoilhatmode:OFF>
A dozen years ago, I became determined to move out of the large city that I lived in. I had lived there and other city’s that were run by one-party rule where the choice at election time was between a center left Democrat and a far left Democrat. The taxes were high and the level of service was low. Allowing your children to use the play equipment at the public park closest should have brought child endangerment charges and when a dozen cars parked on the street had windows smashed and contents ripped off, the cops took everyone’s report over the phone.
One thing about the suburbs that was a disappointment – I was told the suburbs were havens of spouse swapping key party’s by my city neighbors. Must have moved to the wrong suburb.
I grew up in the city and moved rural 30 years ago, best thing I ever did. The county plows the gravel and hard top roads, I plow my own driveway. I’m not in the jurisdiction of the Met Council so they can’t extort me directly. Life is good!
Swiftee-
I pay $840/yr.
But the nearest public school is 15 miles away, the nearest firestation and cop shop ditto, the nearest hospital is 25 miles away (with no critical care unit). We have no water and no trash pickup, and I pay the homeowners association for the local roads ($160/yr).
The state charges me $180/yr for tabs on my 12 year old ford ranger.
I attended a meeting on Monday that was held in the building that houses Metropolitan State University and the Minnesota Dep’t of Corrections. I made the mistake of driving down Snelling, which was like a washboard! The general consensus among the attendees at the meeting was “that’s St. Paul for ya’!”
Doh! Across from Merrill Corp on Energy Park Drive.