{"id":2719,"date":"2008-06-16T11:59:35","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T16:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2719"},"modified":"2008-06-16T12:16:25","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T17:16:25","slug":"rust-on-his-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2719","title":{"rendered":"Rust On His Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

I talked about this Strib <\/em>story<\/a> on the NARN last weekend; the chorus of calumny over the state of the Minnesota Department of Transportation seems to stop, like one of those mediaval maps of the world, at the edge of…the Pawlenty Administration.\u00a0 To hear the left’s howling and baying, you’d think that MNDoT was an elite body with a decades-long record of excellence at transportation engineering that was only interrupted by Tim Pawlenty and David Strom.<\/p>\n

Not so, of course.\u00a0 Minnesota’s transportation system bears clogged, congested, poorly-engineered witness to decades of MNDoT’s dubious command of its subject.\u00a0 The urban highway system funnels into several “commons” areas, where freeways merge and cross in arrangements that seem designed to create <\/em>road rage (94\/35W in downtown Minneapolis; 35W and Crosstown 62 in Richfield; 35E and 94 in downtown Saint Paul; 35E and 694 in Little Canada).\u00a0 Many freeways were built with “forced exit” lanes – lanes with the dreaded yellow “exit only” signs, which force traffic to merge in on itself for no real reason (and which MNDoT has been trying to un-build, at dizzying cost,\u00a0for decades).\u00a0<\/p>\n

And of course, the bridges in Saint Cloud and Winona and of course downtown Minneapolis?\u00a0 They didn’t start rusting until Inauguration Day, 2003, to hear the local left.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prominent among them was Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, a DFLer who was Jesse Ventura’s Transportation Commissioner until 2002.\u00a0 Last August 1, as the last of the girders were still falling into the Mississippi River, he went on WCCO with DFLer Alice Hausman to blame the “No New Taxes” pledge<\/a> for the collapse – likely before the NTSB investigators had even booked their tickets to Minneapolis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why was he yelling so loudly?\u00a0 Why so early?<\/p>\n

Andy Aplikowski at RezFor covered it this morning as well<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let the media gloss over the fact that El Tinklenberg, who is running for Congress against Rep. Michele Bachmann (R MN6), was the MNDOT Commissioner under Gov. Jesse Ventura. Yes, he was in charge of Minnesota\u2019s transportation system, including the 35W bridge. No Carol Molnau has not been the only person ever to hold that position, and see reports on the critical nature of the bridge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(STRIB)<\/font><\/strong><\/a> Seven years before the Interstate 35W bridge fell,<\/span> a consulting firm sent Minnesota officials a proposal to shore up the aging structure that included examining its gusset plates \u2014 the connections that federal investigators now believe likely played a role in the collapse.<\/p>\n

The preliminary plan from HNTB Corp. of Kansas City, which was buried among hundreds of documents released at a recent legislative hearing, has gone largely unnoticed in the debate over the disaster. The company did its study at no cost in an attempt to gain a state contract for the bridge work but, in the end, wasn\u2019t hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation<\/span> (MnDOT).<\/p>\n

A series of follow-up memos in 2000 and 2001 featured drawings of how HNTB planned to strengthen areas immediately surrounding the gusset plates and included renderings of \u201csupplemental plates\u201d and a \u201cnew oversize gusset.<\/span>\u201d Other drawings called for adding supplemental supports in the vicinity of the gusset plates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

El Tinklenberg, was MNDOT Commissioner at the time this proposal was denied.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So let me get this straight; E-Tink presided over transportation in an administration that governed for four mostly-prosperous years – indeed, one that squandered billions in surpluses on new spending – and yet built almost no new roads, did very little bridge maintenance work, and whizzed $700,000,000 down a rathole building a train from the Mall to downtown.\u00a0 Tinklenberg, indeed, did almost nothing<\/em> in office…<\/p>\n

…but was on the air while rescuers were still pulling people from the river to blame Pawlenty?<\/p>\n

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

I talked about this Strib story on the NARN last weekend; the chorus of calumny over the state of the Minnesota Department of Transportation seems to stop, like one of those mediaval maps of the world, at the edge of…the Pawlenty Administration.\u00a0 To hear the left’s howling and baying, you’d think that MNDoT was an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,20,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bridge-collapse","category-democrats","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719","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=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}