KSTP November sweeps taxicab expose

KSTP has just done its November hyped expsose: "Who's At the Wheel of Metro Taxis?":

They should have labeled it "Minneapolis" instead of "Metro" since all the incidents they found were there, but there is certainly some truth in what they report.

They found a lot of unlicensed drivers in unlicensed cabs [unlicensed as least as far as the city was concerned] and a lot of undesirable criminal records for the drivers involved, driving violations and other crimes.

They probably could have done the same here, maybe on Grand Avenue or Seven Corners after an ice hockey game, and received similar results with one exception:

In Mpls. they actually have license inspectors and police trying to catch some of the scofflaws.

Two quick observations on our November 3rd exercises

1. Mayor Coleman the Second was reelected. It is certainly newsworthy and important. And I am sure that there are mandates in there some place and maybe somebody will correctly discern what they are and act accordingly.

In 2005 he unseated an incumbent mayor with thirty years of service in elective office and whatever personal machinery had been developed. In 2009, as an incumbent, he beat a non-incumbent with no political experience.

While that makes me question whether service as our mayor has helped Chris Coleman’s political future, it does indicate that he still has a present and we all need to respect that.

2. We approved IRV. It was close but the results did surprise me. It will be interesting to see how it develops when we choose councilmembers in 2011. It also leads me to question how we plan to pay for the 2011 school board primary.

Well, let's see if they pick this one up

I am not trying to be obsessed with death or the dead, but the paid and news obituaries we read do tell us a lot about ourselves, where we have been and where we are going, AND what a medium does or does not do with the news tells us a lot about the medium.

That was the motive behind yesterday’s post [“Who watches the news at the newspapers?”] was not so much to build up Dr. Sommerdorf as to question who at the DPP or the Mpls. paper has enough sense of history to remember people from more than a year or two ago.

Today I notice a paid DPP obit for Robert Sprafka, one of the old city councilmembers of a previous generation who was put by the wayside when the DFL took control of the city’s government structure in 1972. He later headed the Port Authority.

Let’s see if anybody picks up on this.

New business on Dayton's Bluff

It appears that Baldinger Bakery will be leaving the West Side and that Health East’s ambulance depot will be leaving the North End. Both will be moving to Dayton’s Bluff, the latter to part of the Minnesota Mining site and the former just east of it. I assume that the affected Dayton’s Bluff neighbors will be receiving more information and given a chance to address whatever concerns they may have.

Both moves will be heralded by all the right people as great steps forward in the economic development of our city. We will hear the gooey comments from Mayor Coleman the Second and Council President Lantry [into whose ward the moves are being made] and business association types. Yet both are just moving within the city, not into it.

I don’t know the details of either move, but on the surface the Health East one certainly seems to make sense. Storing ambulances indoors in Minnesota winters makes more sense than keeping them outdoors.

It seems reasonable to think that both moves indicate companies who are willing to make a long-term investment in the city and that has to be good. But the Port Authority and other development agencies need to start working with the North End and West Side communities to fill up the holes being created in their territories.

And all of us will have to watch what happens.

[Ironically, old timers will remember that until the mid 1980s that Health East had a hospital just a few blocks from where they used to operate a hospital. There’s a story there.]

Who watches the news at the newspapers?

Dr. Vernon Sommerdorf died on October 19. The paid obit in the newspaper mentions his age [88] and tells about much of his life and accomplishments – his navy service, medical career [including his Payne Avenue practice and work at Mounds Park Hospital], his community service including both his extensive work with foster children and his church work.

The paid obit notice did not note Dr. Sommerdorf’s six years [1967-73] of service representing local districts in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Of course, what is included is the family’s choice.

I met the Dr. Sommerdorf [he did some lecturing on public health at a class I took in college and he appeared at and hosted some political events] but I never knew him and this article is not really a RIP about him. It is instead an indictment of the inability of the local rag to recognize this as a news story.

I am being ciritical primarily of the local rag, but the Star[Journal- and] Tribune missed it too. Even if Dr. Sommerdorf’s career as mentioned in the obit [and I have to concede that sometimes the family-paid obits polish the resumes once in a while] it would seem that if the papers hired folks who know local history they would think it noteworthy that somebody who had represented the city at the Capitol had passed on.

And people wonder why newspaper sales are declining.


(A link to the DPP obit)

A song about our Supermayor

I discovered this link while looking for something else, but I suspect that may Capitol City Musings readers might appreciate this. It is from the days when Charles Patrick McCarty was our mayor, a song sung by Andy Roberts [and I have to admit that I do not know who he is/was] and the Galivanteers, the house band at Gallivan’s.

If you are old enough you can flash back to those wonderful days when a Lincoln Continental with flashing lights in the grille and license plate “4CM 100” roamed our city.

County Commissioner pay increases?

The Ramsey County Charter Commission will hold a hearing on November 2 [aka Election Eve] in City Council/ County Commission chambers in the City Hall/ Court House [6:30 p.m.] regarding public participation via referendum on the amount County Commissioners are to be paid.

There are two proposals. Both assume pay increases for commissioners. Apparently, nobody thinks that a pay decrease is in order.

The present salary is $82,400 per year. Let me suggest that our commissioners are already well paid. While it is true that they are indeed responsible for overseeing the budgeting and expenditures of large quantities of public moneys, that in itself does not seem to warrant a salary so large. How to spend much of the money is predetermined before the county receives it.

I am not trying to take an anti-tax position simply because I don’t like taxes. Actually, I would favor putting a little more money for the part of the second floor the commissioners inhabit. Watch a County Commission meeting, either in person [if you can get through the security at Lord Fletcher’s Castle] or on cable television. The commissioners seem way too dependent on what the staff [which is responsible to others and often operates from different agenda] can tell them and not enough on their own independent sources of information.

Why not take the money we might be willing to spend on commissioner pay increases and use it for development of independent staffs for the commissioners?

Just an idea.

Following the muser's lead on a dog park

It is nice knowing that once in a while an idea suggested here actually gets some consideration.

In a post dated 1/6/08 I suggested that the city might wish to “think outside the box” to alleviate some of its dog park shortage. [While I cannot agree with what some of the most rabid dog park enthusiasts say, that dogs deserve equal consideration with children in determining park policy, it is clear that there is a shortage of such facilities.] Arlington/Arkwright is a nice place, I guess, for dog lovers who want to use it [and I am well aware that some dog lovers do not cotton to the idea of dog parks – that’s why we in the neighborhood had to negotiate between the two factions when that park was established], but Arlington/Arkwright is dying from too much love.

Noting that Stillwater was considering using a location it owned in Wisconsin, I suggested that extra-container cogitation might suggest such a use for Lilydale Park.

An article by Dave Orrick in yesterday’s paper that consideration is being given to a dog park in Lilydale [The map the DPP used yesterday is vague about whether the site is indeed in Lilydale. It also does mislabels the river running by the park. It is a shame when the local rag does not even know what the Mississippi River is.] The Parks Commission has approved it and that the City Council will be considering the matter Wednesday.

It kind of makes me feel good, not only because I can say the idea started here, but because we really need another dog park available to our city’s dog-owning residents.

More thoughts on IRV

I have written before about Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] before. I am still uncertain what my final position will be, but I have been leaning against it for our local elections. Last year showed that many of us are confused about how to vote on our simple first-choice-only ballots.

I tend to support allowing open ballot access which allows a candidate to list all the parties endorsing him/her. If a candidate had a majority in the September primary, he/she would be declared elected. If no candidate had a majority, the top two candidates would face each other in November. Candidates and parties eliminated in September would be out of it.

However, that is not what we are being offered for consideration this year.

Now Joe Soucheray who has been railing against IRV for a while notes that his allies include Chuck Repke and Dave Thune. That gives me a bit of a chuckle, but it should only be momentary. Soucheray mistakenly thinks that IRV is a great leftist conspiracy, so having them as allies seems to arouse him a bit.

But there really is no reason to think that IRV will aid left more than right. It just depends on who the candidates are and who the voters are. Sometimes in some jurisdictions it will work wonders for the left, other times in other places it could work wonders for the right, and in many places many times it will work one way in the election for one office while working the other way in the election for a different office. In some racially divided areas it would likely mean that candidate[s] of the less preferred race[s] are rated last by those of differing race[s].

Soucheray mentions a site which he attributes to Mr. Repke. I checked the site out and watched the videos there. I cannot agree that I follow them, because in an A-B-C election not everybody who chooses C will rank A and B in the same way, nor will all who choose A rank B and C the same way, and so on. While there may be cases in which the system seems to skew things incorrectly and I imagine that candidates and parties from all sides will check out the possibilities, it will be hard to pull those shenanigans. [If we really want to clean up our elections from shenanigans we might wish to address how anybody regardless of party can vote in any party’s primary in the even-year general elections.]

But it does seem likely that keeping all the candidates in the running until the last day will in many cases stifle meaningful debate and it does seem that many people who need enfranchisement the most will avoid voting because they cannot understand the process or will cast invalid ballots.

And I also think we would be better off deciding AFTER Minneapolis had had an IRV election or two under its belt.

My previous posts on IRV. link, link, link

RIP: Capitol City Cacophony?

When I left my job with District 2 Community Council in 1991 I decided to reclaim those first amendment rights which I had surrendered for my employment. So I started an irregularly published newsletter which I labeled Capitol City Cacophony. It was a one-man project using [at first] publishing software fit for a Commodore 64 which I personally financed, printed, and distributed to people who might have an interest in the topic[s] the newsletter was covering.

In 2001 I moved Capitol City Cacophony to a GeoCities web site. It was less expensive but allowed Yahoo to put ads on it. And I lost the ability to control the distribution.

Capitol City Cacophony went fine for a few years, but it seemed as if the software needed to use it kept becoming more averse to my computer and its dialup modem, so I replaced it with Capitol City Musings on Blogspot.

Yahoo will be eliminating all GeoCities sites in the next few days. While I have done little to maintain the site, there is still some stuff on the Capitol City Cacophony pages and it will be gone.

Some of the material will likely reappear here or in Ray’s Leaky Pen or someplace else, but I am not sure where or when. Most of the Jefferson Hill stuff has never made it even to CCC, but I do hope to have a lot of Jefferson Hill content up somewhere sometime.

If anybody wishes to see CCC content you might wish to do so this week.

Two years of Capitol City Musings

Today is the second anniversary of my first posting here at Capitol City Musings. I have posted at an average very close to one every other day and received a non-SPAM, usable comment on the average of one every three days, although the number seems to have dropped off quite a bit lately. [I have not had a comment in almost three months.] The first frequent commenter was somebody using the name “Midway Barb” and I have not heard from her in a year.

I have had comments come from some famous [?] people. Dick Tuck wrote me early on and I have heard from one legislator. The “Dick Tuck” who wrote me is likely not the real Dick Tuck. The legislator was verified as legitimate. I even received [with a quickness which amazed me] a stern lecture from somebody more knowledgeable about Roman Catholic procedures [a brother (in the religious sense, I think)] who corrected me on the difference between a feast day and a holy day.

I have done three “treasure hunts” with limited result. D.N. Berg won two, but the winner of the third chose to stay anonymous which gives some kind of message when the only award to the winner is the limited public recognition this forum can give. I might do a fourth this winter.

Recently I have added “The Muser’s shared items” which features my short comments on things for which I am not doing full posts and providing the URL to the article upon which I am commenting. I cannot say that I have heard much about this new feature whether good or ill.

It is good that this was never designed to be one of those places that people just had to visit, because it certainly has not been one. But I still run into people who tell me that they noted and maybe even liked something they saw in CCM. So I guess I will continue this longer. Feel free to continue reading or to tell your friends/enemies of this site and to send me comments as desired. [I really don’t censor much. I have probably deleted no more than half a dozen or so for objectionable – racist in every case, I believe – content and maybe a dozen or two for being SPAM.]

After all, your comments may make year three our best ever.

Former pol emerges as pine recycler

It was the DFL city convention of 1974. Delegates from around the city were meeting to re-endorse Larry Cohen for Mayor and select candidates for City Council and School Board.

Members of the City Council were elected city wide back then and this was to be the first election for which they all ran for specific seats [the “alley system”] and with party designation on the ballot. The party’s incumbents seeking re-election [Vic Tedesco, Leonard Levine, Ruby Hunt, Patrick Roedler] each had their alley already assigned, but the rules provided that the non-incumbents select the seat they would seek in the sequence they were endorsed.

The first non-incumbent endorsed was a young blond-haired man who had run a good campaign two years previously in the only run-in-a-pack for seven seats election. He approached the podium to announce his choice. He could have chosen the seat currently being held by Rosalie Butler who was vacating her seat to run against the DFL for Cohen’s spot, but instead with seeming bravery told the enthusiastic and partisan cloud that he would take on Dean Meredith, the long-time Republican [“call me an independent”] Dean Meredith, who had always had enough personal attraction to be able to maintain a seat running against the field.

The hall was filled with joyful enthusiasm as a young David Hozza made the announcement. Dean Meredith decided not to seek reelection, but to make his own ill-fated attempt to become Mayor, running as an independent against Cohen who won the DFL primary and Hugo Hagstrom, the official GOP candidate who really wasn’t running. [Maybe I will write about the Hugo Hagstrom matter some other time. It is a good story, although there are those who have better insights into than I do and is another reminder of the shenanigans which can happen when parties are not allowed control over their own labels and trademarks.]

History tells us that the DFL reelected Larry Cohen and won all seven Council seats that year with Hozza, Jack Christensen, and Bob Sylvester joining Tedesco, Levine, Hunt, and Roedler.

Dave Hozza seved three terms for six years [remember those were two-year terms back then] and, for reasons I never understood, decided to retire in 1980 when he was still in his mid-30s. When one considers some of the folks who have come onto and off of our city political stage since then, it can be interesting to wonder what might have happened had he decided to become a career politician.

He ran a bakery on West Seventh Street for a while several years ago, but I am not sure what he has been doing for the last 29 years. I knew he had been involved in banking, but it is the DFL’s dirty not-so-secret that many of its people participate in things like that.

But he resurfaced this week, in the major, front-page article in Monday’s paper about his enterprise to salvage millions of board feet of white pine from an old grain elevator in Superior, Wisconsin, an enterprise he got himself into as a result of his banking activity.

I am not sure that this venture is leftist-green or whether it may instead be capitalist chic or maybe something else. Maybe it’s a mixture. But it does seem like a good idea to preserve so much wood and it seems like such upper-class wood to save.

I guess my sentiment is to wish Dave Hozza luck on the venture. According to the article he is 64 years old now and thinks he might have five more years to go on the project. Who knows what his next venture will be?

1977 murder suspect charged

Mark Shemukenas was murdered in 1977. It was a particularly brutal crime which received sensationalistic coverage and I am old enough to remember. There were those in the gay community at the time that law enforcement was not as concerned about the crime as they should have been.

While I doubt that, they may well have been right. But regardless, the crime seems to have been solved and Richard Hubert Ireland jr. is now in custody awaiting prosecution.

The victim’s sister was quoted in the Mpls. paper as saying, “[I]t is the family's hope that justice will prevail in the end."

When these long ago murderers are brought to trial there is always somebody saying that somebody is finally being brought to justice. But are they?

Richard Hubert Ireland, jr. is 59. In 1977 he would have been about 37. The sentence for the offense is life imprisonment. Even if conviction for the maximum charge is still possible [and we always hear about how much harder it is to prosecute old cases] the sentence Ireland will receive is 32 years less than it would have been had he been immediately caught and prosecuted. In other words, it might be 15 years instead of 47.

It seems that justice cannot be done, at least not completely. Time has made that so.

But [assuming of course, that they have arrested the right person] we still need to extend kudos to the Saint Paul Police and its Cold Crimes Unit and the BCA people involved and all others involved in cracking this case.

Is there a racial bias being used against President Obama?

Is there a racial bias being used against President Obama by these “birthers”?

Does anybody think that if our President were named Herman Hermann, to a German-born father and a white American mother and had a Certificate of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii that we would have all these “birthers” running around?

Some IRV considerations on a slow election day

The debate on Instant Runoff Voting should be heating up locally shortly. I am still trying to keep an open mind. Some critics [think Joe Soucheray, for one] seem so sense partisan [or at least ideological] agenda behind the effort. Based on who seems to be supporting the move in this region, it is easy to see how he has reached that conclusion. But it seems to me that there are plenty of places where IRV, if adopted, could work for different ideologies differing from the ones that Soucheray suspects.

Full disclosure: IRV is not my favored way of addressing our ongoing situation of minority winners. I favor a two-step process, but nobody else seems to favor the process I do.

After finding out this last year how many people could screw up something like ballot marking using our present system, I have found myself wondering whether we might just be asking for a whole lot more problems with the necessarily more complicated IRV ballot. I guess that before adopting it here, it would be nice to see how Minneapolis handles it, but since we are making our decision simultaneously to their beginning their IRV experiment, we will not have that chance. And, with this year’s decision out of the way, we will probably lose whatever opportunity to make a decision on what system to use with their experience to consider.

In my precinct where 1124 people voted for electors for President of the United States, I was voter number 21 at approximately three in the afternoon today.

It would seem that our community is not committed to our two-stage election process. I just wonder how IRV might change that.

D. J. Tice writes and the President will speak -- health care some more

While I still think the most important thing for health care reform is to get the matter taken completely away from employment. It seems to me that access should be a matter of citizenship instead of employment and, as a function of employment, it helps us price ourselves out of the market in too many things.

But it appears that in his speech tonight that President Obama is unlikely to go that way. Every bill which has been introduced still works off that employment model.

But whatever we hear tonight, it seems to me that D.J. Tice of the Mpls. paper is raising questions that we haven’t been hearing, by noting that most of the people who oppose a “public option” in health care [an idea to which I admit warmness] oppose education vouchers for K-12 students [to which I concede coolness], while most of the voucher-haters seem to want the public option in health care.

As I have said before, we are all pro-choice. We just aren’t all pro-choice on the same things.

There are various fields of enterprise in which there are public sector competes with private sector. K-12 education is one, but there is also higher education, package delivery, commuter trains [in some places], weather forecasting for starters. The results of these competitions vary and are certainly judged differently by different people and factions.

Public option health care and public education seem to work well in many countries, but they aren’t the only way to do things. As we consider what works for our country, maybe we should read Tice’s article and think a bit.

The Senator's plane has crashed

Albert Eisele who in past lives worked for the Pioneer Press Washington Bureau and wrote a dual biography of Hubert Humphrey [the real one] and Eugene McCarthy wrote about the death of Senator Ernest Lundeen.

Like Paul Wellstone, Lundeen died in an airplane crash, but I had never realized that there was so much mystery about the 1940 crash in Virginia. Lundeen was an isolationist, something we never seem to see much of any more. And he was the last major office holder the Farmer-Labor Party had, so it is probably in order if somebody speculates on what might have been.

Link

Why the uproar on Obama speaking to our children?

I find the hoop-de-do over President Obama’s speech to our country’s schoolchildren even more amazing to the presumptuousness of the White House decision to interrupt what for many is the usually chaotic enough already first day of school at what is lunch time in much of the country.

I have vague memories of hearing President Eisenhower when I was a child in grade school. My memory says it was during the national hysteria that we weren’t teaching our children enough science which came after the Soviet Union had launched the first. My memory is of a radio being brought into our classroom and a speech coming over WSUI radio [University of Iowa radio] from Iowa City. Because we would have been listening to a single house-sized radio with the limited sound projection that three- or four-inch speakers provided over a low-power station in the next county and having to hear it over whatever sounds even an attentive audience of thirty or so would have been making I don’t remember hearing much, but I think all the leader of the free world was saying was that America’s children needed to study more because the other country’s children were. It probably took no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

This might not have been a national address and it may not have been especially aimed at children, but I don’t remember hearing of any parents or politicians objecting. And, since I had not even thought about this for half a century, I may be a bit off on what I remember.

Post office update

Both of the post offices in our city which were being threatened with closure are being saved. We need to thank whomever led the USPS to think twice should be commended.

I have no inside knowledge but suspect that our Congressional delegation is due thanks.

Earlier post: http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2009/08/post-offices-not-big-enough-not-to-fail.html [8/4/09]

The grass is always greener

The field of the Twins’ new stadium in Mpls. is now being covered with Colorado-grown Kentucky blue grass. Although they expect this imported grass to grow in Minnesota, Minnesota grass wouldn’t work there. Local grass growers are up in arms.

While it would make good PR sense for the team to look for local or regional products to fill its needs, nobody has ever suggested that only Minnesota-grown players should be on the team. And they do use Hormel hot dogs even though many, if not most, people in the state who remember 1986 would prefer not to do business with those folks.