When you get a couple of drinks into some Saint Paul DFL activists, some of them like to get a poo-eating grin on their face and say, with the kind of force they don’t wind up putting into tooooooo much in their lives, “we own Saint Paul!”

As the new, excellent Saint Paul Republicans blog notes, it’s high time the rest of us agreed – and helped them realize exactly what that means:

And indeed they do. They own double digit percentage rates of unemployment and downtown vacancies, 2500 or so foreclosed homes, record deficits despite windfall tax profits from the housing boom, and a 40 point achievement gap between black students and white students in the public schools. They are completely and totally in charge- the lone republican in Saint Paul and Minneapolis resigned from the school board for greener pastures.

Let’s recall a little recent history:

1. When I moved to Saint Paul, George Latimer – a “liberal” in the two-generations-of-mildly-inbred-descent-from-Hubert-Humphrey model – was the mayor. The city was decaying slowly, a sleepy backwater that was feverishly investing in properties that, twenty-odd years later, are mostly white elephants on the city Port Authority’s books.
2. Jim Scheibel was next.  An idealistic noodler in the Jimmy Carter model, Saint Paul slipped further.
3. Then came two terms of Norm Coleman.  He started as a moderate DFLer – he even gave Paul Wellstone’s nomination speech at the 1996 DFL state convention! – but gradually the North Korean-influenced Saint Paul City DFL made his life such hell that he defected to the GOP in time for his second term.  Of course, this matters not an iota to an immigrant family with five kids trying to get by on three jobs; what matters to them (and me) is that taxes held steady, services improved, jobs came to the city (although we also got on the hook for projects like Rivercenter and the X; nobody said Norm was a movement conservative.  Just right on most of the issues).
4. Then followed Randy Kelly, a DFLer in the  model of Truman and JFK.  He continued Nahm’s line on taxes.  Between Norm Coleman and Kelly, Saint Paul had twelve great  years; lower taxes, the population held fairly steady…the place just felt like it was on the upswing.
5. And now, four years of Chris Coleman.  Taxes are up 42%.  The city bureaucracy isn’t just huge – it’s rapacious, seeking power like hungry tigers seek meat.  And the city feels like it’s dying; like it’s a Flint in the making.

Yep, DFL.  You own it.

They own the Coleman-Franken-ACORN recount disaster, the light rail boondoggle (they still insist that University and Snelling is not congested), the smoking ban that was the death of many many restaurants and bars, and they even own the over 300 million in debt-620 million in unfunded pension liability-and 380 million in deferred maintenance over at the Saint Paul Public Schools (with 608 million of regular revenue, not counting this years Stimulus Funds). The People of Saint Paul are literally crying for change- a new beginning- but on election days some strange compulsion sets in to vote for party, not for change and a better future.

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction out there, although not from the city’s dominant class, its’ phalanxes of public union employees, who seem to be perfectly fat ‘n happy. At the expense of the rest of us.
But if you’re a private sector homeowner, or a landlord, or a family?

What has the DFL’s “ownership” of this city done for you?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 7:31 am and is filed under St. Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.