{"id":20199,"date":"2011-05-23T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-05-23T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=20199"},"modified":"2011-05-23T06:49:03","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T12:49:03","slug":"it-was-mayor-colemans-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=20199","title":{"rendered":"It Was Mayor Coleman’s Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I\u00a0wrote about Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth’s problems <\/a> as it comes to money.<\/p>\n

And Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman was quoted:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the leadership of the Republican Party wants to come and look through my budget, tell me how many cops they want me to lay off, tell me how many fire stations they want me to close, tell me how many libraries I\u2019m supposed to close. The fact of the matter is they\u2019re governing in ignorance. They don\u2019t know what we do. They have a mythology of what cities do. They have a mythology of where we spend our money.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in the “debate” between Rep. John Lesch and candidate Greg Copeland on the Marty Owings “Capitol Conversations” show last March, Lesch asked for exactly the same thing – meaning that we’ve had requests up and down the entire DFL hierarchy <\/em>for Republicans to come in and give input on the city budget!<\/p>\n

Well, what a great place to reach across the aisle!<\/p>\n

I think it’d be a fine <\/em>idea to take some copies of the City’s operating budget, sit down with a bunch of businesspeople and taxpayers, and bang through it, line by line, and dig out all the waste. \u00a0Just so that we and <\/em>the Mayor could fully understand each others’ positions.<\/p>\n

I mean, I’m not talking “the leadership”, per se; I think some Saint Paul businesspeople and taxpayers would be just fine, although I wouldn’t mind having some of the legislative budget leadership there either.<\/p>\n

But I think getting 10-15 copies of the operating budget and some budget hawks together – say, at O’Gara’s some evening – with an eye toward educating each other, would be a fine idea.<\/p>\n

Hmmm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I\u00a0wrote about Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth’s problems as it comes to money. And Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman was quoted: \u201cIf the leadership of the Republican Party wants to come and look through my budget, tell me how many cops they want me to lay off, tell me how many fire stations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20202,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20199\/revisions\/20202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}