Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
Note to St. Paul city government: when people say St. Paul should be a Sanctuary City for Snowflakes, they mean a safe space for students at Macalester College where they will not be disturbed by unfamiliar thoughts, not actual, you know, snowflakes.
\nI was out of town for a few days, missed the big snow.\u00a0 From what I heard, St. Paul got about 12 inches of snow which is a lot in one go but come on, we live in the North, that can’t be enough to cripple the city.\u00a0 School buses stuck?\u00a0 Streets impassable?\u00a0 Mitch wrote about it the other day – drive across Larpenteur Avenue and look at the streets in Roseville.\u00a0 They managed.\u00a0 Why can’t St. Paul?
\nParking.\u00a0 St. Paul has narrow streets in the old residential districts and the hard-surface lot coverage ordinance leaves insufficient off-street parking.\u00a0 Plowing around parked cars is pointless so first we wait for the snow to stop, then we wait for people to move their cars, then we wait for cops to ticket the remaining cars so we can wait for tow trucks to tow them, then we plow.\u00a0 Meanwhile, everybody else is driving on the snow, packing it down, polishing the intersections with spinning tires . . . hopeless.
\nBan on-street parking from November 1 to April 30 and plow the streets While The Snow Is Falling, before it gets a chance to become unmanageable.\u00a0 Yes, it will cost a fortune.\u00a0 News flash:- that’s why we HAVE a city government, not for trendy developments or grandstanding resolutions.\u00a0 Safe drinking water.\u00a0 Sanitary sewer treatment.\u00a0 Police and fire protection.\u00a0 Passable transportation routes and that means plowing in winter and filling potholes in summer.
\nDone properly, city government isn’t sexy or exciting, it’s boring.\u00a0 Start boring me.\u00a0 Plow the damned streets.
\nJoe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI get the impression most of Saint Paul’s government – mayor, city council, bureaucracy – got into the politics business after spending their formative years playing Sim City.\u00a0 Where the fun part is building big, flashy toys – stadiums, business districts, the cool stuff.\u00a0 Not doing the dirty grind jobs that are the few reasons we’re supposed to try to tolerate city government in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Note to St. Paul city government: when people say St. Paul should be a Sanctuary City for Snowflakes, they mean a safe space for students at Macalester College where they will not be disturbed by unfamiliar thoughts, not actual, you know, snowflakes. I was out of town for a […]<\/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-65796","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\/65796","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=65796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65802,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65796\/revisions\/65802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}