…nd are concerned about where your tax money goes (and that is, or should be, a non-partisan thing), then this is the time of the year you should be paying attention.

In Saint Paul, we have a de facto fifth layer of government, the “Community Councils”.  Each of Saint Pauls’ 17 historic neighborhoods has one.  They’re elected from “the community”; we’ll get back to that.

Here’s how they matter; the city’s planning and zoning gets carried out through these councils; they work with the Met Council to help develop the neighborhood components of the Council’s Regional Plan; they spend the city’s community development money.

And oy, what they spend it on.  Here in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood, they’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on “traffic calming”; rebuilding curbs to constrict traffic, building round abouts, and putting up quirky, “Sprockets”-caliber bits of art designed to confuse people into driving more slowly.  Dumb though that is, it’s merely a waste of money.  The Coalition’s other plan to “calm” traffic is, as part of the Central Corridor light rail plan, to cut University Avenue down to one lane of traffic in either direction along the light rail route – sort of like Minneapolis did along Fifth Street by Government Center.  This will make the booming (but unfashionably “big box”) Midway Center a nightmare to get into and out of; even worse, it’ll gut and flense the miles of small, largely Asian and afro-American businesses that’ve eked out a place along Uni over the past two decades.  The various community councils have long had a vision; to turn every unfashionably declasse district into a pedestrian-friendly faux French Quarter with Thai restaurants and (organic, free-trade) coffee shops and book stores where beret-clad Macalester-spawned Current-listening hipsters take the train or bus to shop, wander, and muse.

Also to make driving impossible.

At any rate, here’s where you come in.

Elections for many of Saint Pauls’ community councils are coming up in May.  If I recall correctly, most of the councils will have some open seats.

And it’s important that people of conscience – responsible, tax-paying, hard-working people who respect property rights and free enterprise and who don’t want to use petty political power to change society in their own stunted image – run for these boards.

Part of it’s for today; the councils’ current plans are bone-chillingly stupid.  And the means by which they secure these plans would make Rod Blagojevich blanche.  Some of the councils are mere potemkin shell organizations for small cliques of community organizers and activists who do all the actual decision making.  Others might as well be DFL front organizations, as the small group of Republican activists who won the Highland Park community council found in 2006 (along with all the incompetence they uncovered).

Part of it is for tomorrow.  These councils serve as training grounds and grooming schools for the DFL activists and future politicians that are choking the life from this city.

The hard part; community councils are pretty boring.

Boring, but important.  The worst possible combination for ADD sufferers like me.

But it’s vital that people of conscience – not exclusively a GOP trait – get out and run for these councils.  Just as important, it’s important that every person who favors responsible government (or pseudo-government) gets out and votes in these elections, and votes for the right people.  These elections are pretty sparsely attended; a couple of votes in every zone (most councils are divided into zones, each zone electing a board member) is more than enough to tip theelection.

There’ll be more on this later.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 7:41 am and is filed under St. Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.