Saint Paul.<\/p>\n
I’ve lived here for most of the past 24 years.\u00a0 I’ve owned a home here for 17 of them.<\/p>\n
The population is shrinking.\u00a0 Businesses are fleeing town.\u00a0 The business occupancy rate downtown is around 20% <\/a>– and that’s down a few points only because Metro Square is now government space.\u00a0 That’s the only “business” growing in Saint Paul.<\/p>\n Business is ailing badly.<\/p>\n The DFL’s front-runners to replace Ellen Anderson in District 66 seat are Representative Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, who earned a 14% <\/a>from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and Representative John Lesch, who swung waaaaay to the center with a 16<\/a>%.<\/p>\n Saint Paul, like all of Minnesota, doesn’t need another DFL extremist in the Senate.<\/p>\n One bit of business they do <\/em>favor is the Central Corridor, the $1.4 billion-and-counting boondoggle that is going to shred <\/em>the gritty but thriving immigrant business corridor down University Avenue.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The Central Corridor will change all that, immediately driving many of these scrappy entrepreneurs out of business, and, if all goes according to plan<\/em>, 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).<\/p>\n Alice Hausman and John Lesch support this.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>of the failure.<\/p>\n One of them – Hausman or Lesch, or one of three other DFL challengers – wants to replace Ellen Anderson in the Senate.<\/p>\n Does Saint Paul need another extremist in office?\u00a0 Yet another DFLer who answers only to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” and the public employee unions? \u00a0\u00a0 Yet another DFLer who has never run a business or balanced a budget?\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Or is it time for real change?<\/p>\n