A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and plow the streets.\u00a0 Since I moved here in 1998, streets have been a cruel insult.<\/p>\n
Comparing St. Paul to Minneapolis sounds fair \u2013 both big cities with huge staff and monster budgets \u2013 but a better comparison is Roseville or Falcon Heights \u2013 a small city with small staff and small budget whose streets are plowed and sanded, clean and dry, weeks before St. Paul\u2019s streets are done.\u00a0 If the little town can do it with tiny\u00a0staff working for peanuts, why can\u2019t giant St. Paul do it with all its union employees and LGA resources?<\/p>\n
I suspect Mayor Chris Coleman doesn’t want to discuss the solution proven to work:\u00a0 contract it out.\u00a0 I vaguely recall the City did for a while back in the early 90’s \u2013 maybe during Mayor Norm Coleman\u2019s time?\u00a0 I think they contracted to heavy equipment companies that did road construction in the Summer but sat idle all Winter.\u00a0 We could hire them again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I want to say it was West or South Saint Paul, or maybe a trial program on the West Side. \u00a0The city’s union employees claimed, unsurprisingly, that the private contractors were terrible at the job, and the program was ended. \u00a0“Cauterized” might be a better term.<\/p>\n
Plus, St. Paul never plows alleys \u2013 residents band together to hire some guy with a Western plow on his pickup, which is good Winter work for landscapers.\u00a0 They could each clean a few streets, too, and have them perfectly clean before the city crews even get to the shop.<\/span><\/p>\nA chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a plow on every block: now there\u2019s a campaign slogan I could love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s my block; one of our neighbors does plowing. \u00a0We each chip in $20 a winter – and he\u00a0has\u00a0<\/em>to keep the alley plowed to get to work. \u00a0I think during the big blizzard in 2010 he may have made one of the side streets passable too…<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>When I bought my last vehicle, I went shopping for a 4-wheel drive.\u00a0 My in-laws asked me “Why do you need a 4-wheel drive, you live in St. Paul?” and I replied “I need a 4-wheel drive BECAUSE I live in St. Paul.”\u00a0 Now that\u2019s pathetic.<\/span><\/p>\nJoe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Saint Paul seems to be getting counterintuitively worse at clearing roads. \u00a0While last year was the worst – with even high-traffic streets remaining impassible sheets of glare ice for days after big storms – we haven’t had a real donnybrook of a storm yet, either.<\/p>\n
The roads, even after last week’s modest storm, are like goat paths in the Bolivian Andes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: City of St. Paul\u00a0takes responsibility for street plowing\u00a0the way Obama\u2019s IRS does \u2013 proclaim outrage, shuffle people around, make vague promises and hope the issue goes away. A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40508"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40510,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40508\/revisions\/40510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}