{"id":29451,"date":"2012-08-07T06:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29451"},"modified":"2012-08-07T11:30:19","modified_gmt":"2012-08-07T16:30:19","slug":"the-potemkin-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29451","title":{"rendered":"The Potemkin Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Doakes wrote to alert me to Saint Paul&#8217;s city government springing into action:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I realize [St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman is] a busy guy, too busy to personally visit every Mom and Pop operation he\u2019s putting out of business; still, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twincities.com\/stpaul\/ci_21247293\/central-corridor-coleman-tour-business-district-hit-by\">you\u2019d think he could have found his way down there before this<\/a>. It\u2019s been two years.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if he\u2019ll take the bus?<\/p>\n<p>Joe Doakes<\/p>\n<p>Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Joe linked to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.twincities.com\/stpaul\/ci_21247293\/central-corridor-coleman-tour-business-district-hit-by\">h this piece in the <em>PiPress<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Business owners along Central Corridor Light Rail construction on University Avenue will have a chance to voice their opinions and concerns to St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman this afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>The Asian Economic Development Association is hosting the Little Mekong Walking Tour at 2 p.m., Aug. 6, starting in front of 88 Oriental at 291 University Ave.<\/p>\n<p>Topics of discussion include the impact of construction on current and future businesses in the area. A number of businesses have expressed their concerns with dramatic drops in business as the light rail construction has tied up traffic and limited access to their shops.<\/p>\n<p>The tour will visit businesses in Little Mekong, an Asian culture and business district on University Avenue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>How many of those same businesspeople do you suppose attended the Met Council&#8217;s rounds of perfunctory &#8220;public meetings&#8221;, held over the past decade to gather public &#8220;feedback&#8221; about the project, to be recorded and shelved while the Met Council went ahead and built the same precise misconceived project they&#8217;d always intended to?<\/p>\n<p>And I wonder how many of them even <em>thought <\/em>about voting for someone other than a DFLer &#8211; the party that regards them as interchangeable reliable votes, and their businesses as chattel &#8211; at the time?<\/p>\n<p>Time to think about it, guys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Doakes wrote to alert me to Saint Paul&#8217;s city government springing into action: I realize [St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman is] a busy guy, too busy to personally visit every Mom and Pop operation he\u2019s putting out of business; still, you\u2019d think he could have found his way down there before this. It\u2019s been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trains-and-automobiles","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29451","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=29451"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29472,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29451\/revisions\/29472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}