More about the jury system OR And justice for all -- the low-cost way

I wrote about our jury system a bit recently when I posted on the forthcoming reduction of pay for jurors in Minnesota District Courts.

We all know that the jury system is not perfect and I suppose that this reduction will not make it any more perfect.

I recently had the opportunity [??] of serving as a juror in the Second Judicial District [i.e., Ramsey County]. I was not selected to be on any jury.

I did get to fill out a questionnaire for the Foster case, but they managed to select a jury before they got around to interviewing me. It is probably just as well as I suspect that I knew [or at least thought I knew] too much before hand to be a fair and impartial juror.

Now a jury has been impaneled in Kandiyohi County to hear the case against Olga Franco for the accident with the school bus which killed four children and unleashed the expected bigotry from Governor Plenty and Marty Seifert. [Previous posts: first, second]

I wish them well.

When I was in college I studied both American History and American Government and we learned about the various checks and balances in our system. Two of the lesser mentioned ones are the executive pardon and jury nullification. The former usually does not get much mention until January 21 of presidential inauguration years [Scooter Libby, Alfredo Gonzalez and who else next year? Cheney?] and I would bet that many people had never heard of the latter before the O.J. Simpson case. But they are important.

A jury returned what probably was the only verdict it could in the Foster case. Those who are convinced that justice was served poorly can only hope that there will be a Higher Court later on.

Jim Ragsdale of the DPP wrote about the Foster case on Sunday’s editorial page. I commend it to your attention. As he noted,

Aaron Foster was found "not guilty" of third-degree, unintentional murder. That is not the verdict Barbara Winn's relatives wanted, and they understandably erupted after it was read in court. Nor did it fit the "cold-case" narrative the Winn-Foster matter had acquired in the media, including a moving program on "Dateline NBC" in May titled "Justice for Barbara."

But it was a reasonable verdict based on the remaining evidence of Winn's death in her Maplewood home in 1981. It was a splash of cold water on our faces, reminding us the courtroom has its own rules and ethics, chief among them that the prevailing narrative doesn't matter. What matters is the evidence; the presumption of innocence for anyone charged of a crime; and the need to prove a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt" before sending a defendant off to prison.

Those standards protect us all but do little to assuage the pain felt by children who lost a mother and who feel her killer got off.

Some people suspected that the whole matter was brought up so late as a result of Bill Finney challenging Lord Fletcher for sheriff two years ago. There is not doubt that Finney’s reputation has been smirched and this verdict will not clear that up. Ragsdale notes that Finney has said that he feels damaged and that he did nothing wrong.

The final paragraph of Ragsdale’s column seems a fair summary of the whole matter, at least as far as judicial matters are concerned,

That is where the story begins and ends — with the tragic death of Barbara Winn. The cold-case narrative did not end where the momentum was pushing it — to a conviction. But the jury was not part of a TV program. They made a tough call based on the facts presented to them, and that's why we stand when they walk past us.

We can only hope that the folks in Willmar can reach the right conclusion about Ms. Franco.

Of course they won’t be able to do that unless the lawyers on both sides give their best efforts and the judge keeps things fair.

And those $10/day jurors will be earning their pay.

Like a bridge over troubled ... -[or is it a troubled bridge over ...]

I found myself crossing the Kellogg Bridge eastbound a couple of weeks ago and had to wait for the semaphore at Mounds Boulevard about three cars back from the light. I found myself wondering how solid the bridge below me was and think I actually sighed when the light turned green.

We all cross so many bridges so many times that we seldom think about it. Some bridges come so close to street level and are so short that we often don’t even notice that we are on one. [For two geographically diverse examples, think Minnehaha over the Phalen Creek bed by where Hamm’s used to make malt beverages or Edgcumbe just east of Hamline.]

So when something like last year’s Mpls. bridge collapse happens we get generally horrified and feel thankful that we weren't there. And Saturday’s loss of a piece of concrete from Maryland Avenue over I-35E did not reassure us.

One of our big problems in public works is that government does not budget like companies do and there is no accounting for depreciation in the balance sheet. Another is that since we tie most roadwork to gasoline tax receipts rather than whether there is a public purpose associated with their construction and maintenance we often build things we don’t need and maintain some things without ever actually asking whether we still need them and don’t adequately maintain things which really need to be maintained.

We should be grateful that nobody was killed and that we were able to put both the bridge and the freeway beneath it back into use so quickly. And we should be grateful that maybe, just maybe, somebody who can do something to prevent this kind of thing from happening again might actually do something.

We know that there will be political types who will run with this, but somehow I doubt that any of them will actually examine the weaknesses in our financing and planning schemes for our public infrastructures.

Getting spiffy for our visitors

I noted earlier today that some of the people one might expect for a GOP national convention won't be here. But there is an article in MinnPost about how both our city and Minneapolis are spiffying up for our new friends, the Republicans, whichever of them make it, when they come here in a few weeks.

There are new plantings in Rice and Smith [Mears] Parks and at the Saint Paul Hotel. There even was a big drug bust across the street.

I do wonder why we don’t get so concerned about dentists, plumbers, attorneys, Lutherans, Hibernians, software engineers, or others who come to town.

And I know that I will likely never receive an answer, certainly not a good and truthful one.

Who's coming to the show? and who's going to help put it on?

Per a McClatchy report, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, North Carolina’s Class II senator, will not come to our city for the Republican National Convention. She says she needs to be in North Carolina running for reelection. This is certainly a plausible possibility, but it is still pretty rare for somebody so high-ranking and who is presumably in good standing with both party and public to skip a party’s national convention.

Meantime, the man who would be third in line to the presidency were the Republicans still in the Senate’s majority, Alaska’s Ted Stevens is still expected to attend even though he faces legal problems.

And, although I don’t know that he won’t be here, Iowa’s Charles Grassley will not be in his state’s delegation. Even though his conservatism seems beyond challenge, his state party would not give him a seat, apparently deciding that, however politically and religiously conservative the senator is that his investigation of televangelists getting wealthy makes him unworthy.

Meanwhile, it appears that there may be less opportunity for our guests to enjoy themselves during the show. It has been reported that nobody has applied for a 4 o’clock liquor license. Everybody else has to sacrifice for the RNC. Why not the liquor license holders?

Strawberry returns

It did not get really large coverage, but what it did get was pretty much friendly coverage when Darryl Strawberry came back to town for Tuesday’s American Association All-Star Game.

The former Saint [as in baseball player Saint, not in the religious sense although I guess that is still possible] was a guest as his contributions to the team’s 1996 championship of another league was recognized. He was here as a part of an effort to play himself back into respectability after multiple episodes stemming from chemical dependency.

Recovery is tricky. I am not an expert, but that seems to be a consensus. A few only seem to need it once. Many need several tries and some never make it at all. Many people have put in a huge toll both emotionally and financially trying to help people facing these problems.

And while most of the people of good will that I have known generally wish people well in recovery [at least the first time or two] it is the uncertainty of whether any specific time trying for recovery will be successful is part of what has led to neighborhood concerns about “sober houses.”

There seem to be many ways to connect these things. I’ll leave them to you.

I should note that the recovery Mr. Strawberry was in in 1996 was not his last one. He has been clean for a few years, I guess, and I am sure that all wish him well.

And I am grateful that I got a chance to watch him swing a bat and hit some home runs. He made it look so easy with perhaps the smoothest swing I have ever seen.

If money is a reflection of our values, we need to get a better mirror

Maybe I do not have enough perspective since I just did my jury service this week [probably more on that later], but the announcement in this morning’s paper that we are going to slash juror pay in Minnesota in half starting in August really riles me.

Jury duty is a form of conscription. Like the draft, it is not administered fairly. And like military pay during the days of the draft, the compensation sucks.

This slashing of pay just makes things worse.

We all want to keep our society functioning democratically and fairly. Yet we seem to treat with contempt some of those folks who are especially necessary to keep things going.

We operate our society with minimum wage election judges and poor per diem jurors and while we may have a professional military now, we still treat our veterans like charity cases [which we indeed make many of them become].

Let’s keep that in mind when we vote in September or October or the next time we read of what we think is an errant jury.

Rondo Days

This weekend is Rondo Days. This marks the 25^th anniversary of what has become one of the city’s principal festivals.

Rondo Day[s] always hits a special point on my cranium. I never lived there and never saw the street. It was taken out in the late 1950s and I did not get here until the mid 1960s. But I grew up on top of a hill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where about ten years later the Iowa Highway Commission decided to build what became known as I-380. Like when Minnesota chose Rondo, Iowa chose our place because it provided for a nice, straight road without displacing any people of influence. It has been suggested that where freeways are straight, that they went through poor/working class neighborhoods. I think there is some truth to that.

As far as I know nobody has ever attempted to do any kind of festival for our neighborhood in Iowa. Maybe we didn’t have the organizers. Maybe too many have left the area. Maybe the lack of a central, defining ethnicity which felt displaced have never inspired anybody to try. [There were a lot of people of Czech and Slovak ancestry in the corridor, but there were a lot more elsewhere in the city.]

But I do wish the Rondo folks well every year and trust that everybody involved will have a good and happy festival. I envy their commitment.

SOS Ritchie expects "massive" voter turnout

MinnPost is reporting that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is predicting a “massive” voter turnout on November 4^th.

I suspect that we will have sufficient trained election personnel to avoid the perils that some states seem to have no end of such as trying to open polls in locked up buildings, failing to print enough ballots or have enough machines to handle them [which seems to happen especially often in neighborhoods where the ruling party thinks itself weakest], dangling chads, or names mysteriously left off the ballot [as happened on the absentee ballots of a black community in Ohio last time when a “printing error” just happened to forget to include the name “John Kerry”]. Even though my unscientific exposure to election judges suggests that they may not be as non-partisan as our judges [who always have been supposed to be affiliated with the political parties] were in an earlier generation, our judges do indeed do good work.

There is a lot of hypocrisy about big election returns. So many people think that big turnouts are a good thing. But, as I noted in an election day post last year, a big turnout just for the sake of a big turnout is not necessarily anything anybody wants because if the turnout might be coming from the wrong people.

And if you can get the day off and are affiliated with one of Minnesota's major party, you might want to call your county auditor to see if they need help that day.

Ohio is looking at us and Ohio need glasses

I have recently had a Cleveland Plain Dealer article called to my attention. It compares the potential of Cleveland’s Opportunity Corridor with the development of our Phalen Corridor and Phalen Boulevard.

I do not know Cleveland. I suspect that it has the problems of many older, northern cities, maybe worse than ours because it is an older city.

The article speaks well of Phalen Corridor and Dan Bostrom. That should not be too surprising since both have plenty of good things to be said about them.

It is in error, however, when it asserts that Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council had opposed the Boulevard’s construction. I surmise that the writer reached that conclusion from an incident in which the District Council opposed an off-road proposal, the one to remove all the housing between the Boulevard and Case, 35E and Edgerton to develop something more upscale.

I should know. I was chairing the Council’s Community Planning and Economic Development Committee at the time.

But I do find it refreshing that people from other cities are looking at our story and its successes and I do wish the people in Ohio well.

And the whole thing reminds us that obtaining and maintaining livable communities is an ongoing thing, like medicine, education, or barber work.

ECBD? What's that?

Does anybody remember something called the East Central Business District [ECBD] bypass?

No, you cannot remember the bypass itself. It never happened. But maybe somebody remembers people talking about constructing it.

Four bypasses around the city’s Central Business District were planned. These were never planned to be free-way type streets, but wider streets which would remove the need to actually drive through downtown for people whose destinations were on the other side. Three of the four have been [more or less] completed.

The North CBD bypass includes Pennsylvania Avenue. The West CBD bypass is Marion/Kellogg/Chestnut. I believe that this one did not develop the way originally planned, but it is close. The South CBD bypass is Shepard/Warner Roads.

The missing link is the bypass on the east. The East CBD bypass [which was later shortened even more to ECBD bypass] was to run from Warner Road from almost underneath the Lafayette Bridge to connect with I-35E at Pennsylvania.

Its forthcoming completion was supposed to be one of the reasons that the state accepted a truck ban for the Practice Freeway segment of I-35E. Trucks could use Shepard/Warner Road and the ECBD bypass as a routing instead. As it is now, they have to cross through downtown on Jackson/Sibley.

It has been over twenty years since I served on a city-established task force to advise on the preparation of the draft Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] for the realignment of Shepard east of Randolph, Warner Road west of Childs, and the ECBD bypass. I was serving as the representative of Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council and my purpose was primarily to make sure that whatever alignment for the ECBD bypass connection with I-35E did not make the connection for the road we now call Phalen Boulevard more difficult to obtain. Most of the people participating [besides the engineers and public works people and planners] were high-ranking shirts representing businesses [such as West Publishing and Anchor Hocking -- remember them?] with Shepard Road concerns. I did feel a bit out of place among such exalted company, but stuck to why I was there and nobody else seemed to oppose me in what I was there for.

Well, the draft EIS was done and it showed no reason to not build the bypass. But it never got done. Somehow it has never been funded.

Even though I never thought I would live long enough to see it, Phalen Boulevard is done, so we don’t have to wonder whether that connection can be established. Ironically, when I was serving on a task force considering Phalen Boulevard road design, including the bypass became a concern for building it.

And there is still no bypass. I am a bit ambivalent now about the whole matter now. I have no direct interest in how many trucks drive on Jackson or Sibley. But if I had an interest in Lowertown property or development I think I would like to know what’s up.

And I wonder if my posting this may double the number of the people [to ten] who even are aware of this thing.

L! E! F! July 14

On this date in 1789, mobs of the disenfranchised stormed the Bastille. This commemoration of this event has become the great national holiday of the Republic of France.

Franco-American relations have generally been good, although there have been rough spots. But France has given us a lot and we have given them a lot too. We probably could not have gotten the Brits out of here if not for the French and they might still be living under swastikas if it weren’t for Yanks at Normandy.

But if we see anybody French today maybe we wish him/her a happy holiday. And if you have a copy of ‘La Marseilles” on tape, IPod, CD, or whatever, you might want to play it. It really is a good piece to serve as a national anthem.

Jimmy Lee

I think I met Jimmy Lee once. It would not have been a personal meeting but I think he was introduced at a community meeting in the Summit-University area in the early 1970s. I do know that I was aware that he was involved in athletics and the teaching and officiating of sports and that he was the first black man to officiate at the levels he did, at least here in Minnesota. When the city decided to rename Oxford Recreation Center after him, it was easy to understand their thinking.

The overruns and continuing ongoing problems connected with building the new recreation center do not do anybody’s memory well, but it looks like the project is almost finished, even if there are fewer houses in the neighborhood to provide clients. And the reviews have been good.

I would hope in time that people forget about the costs and snafus and just enjoy and use the facility and appreciate people like the man for whom it was named and others like him who have gone on to another arena.

An article about Mr. Lee inspired this post and can be found here.

Can a Candidate Conquer by Creating Class Confusion?

Norm Coleman has a lot going for him that Al Franken does not. He lives in a city [ours] while Franken has demonstrated his enmity toward city people by living in a suburb. [I know, Al was raised that way, but city people who vote for suburbanites generally do themselves disfavors.] Coleman has experience that Franken lacks and has demonstrated that he can get big things done. [Whether they ever needed to be done is another matter. Think of Lawson Commons.] He has spent his adult life here. He did not move here specifically to seek office.

Of course, Franken has things going for him also. He’s smart and likely would be in the majority caucus. He is not a lawyer. These really should all be thought of as big plusses.

CCM is not endorsing a candidate yet and may not ever. But it should be noted that despite the advantages that he has that Coleman’s use of the intentionally misnamed “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace'” to slur Franken really cannot be justified. It is very misleading, although Coleman will claim that they are not the direct lies a viewer might reasonably infer and that they are “independent” spots. Remember, “legal ethics” is an oxymoron.]

If enacted, the Employee Free Choice Act would not take anybody’s secret ballot away. Although some observers doubt that it will be coming for a vote in the next Congress, Coleman and his management cronies have decided to pounce on this non-issue.

And using this issue as a wedge does Norm no glory.

A Minnpost article on the matter can be found here.
A labor-friendly description of the Employee Free Choice Act can be found here.

Police powers, anachronism, inertia, or reason? Liquor regulation

Federal courts have ruled that states have rights in alcohol-related matters that they do not have in other things. As a result, in addition to having minimum drinking age rules, we have regulations on days, hours, and means of distribution and sales; controls on advertising; bans on conduct in places where alcoholic beverage is served which would not apply elsewhere; we have “dry” jurisdictions and government-owned liquor stores; and we have distinctions between “strong” and “3.2” beer. Locally, we have some liquor stores who have the additional license clause that prevents selling small liquor bottles.

Some of these things come from the whole national trauma from the temperance/Prohibition era. Other matters come from our heritage of blue laws.
These regulations seem anachronistic. But I do wonder whether some of them do not serve a purpose.

Colorado recently allowed Sunday openings for liquor stores. Minnesota does not. According to a resent US News & World Report article, fourteen other states besides ours still have this prohibition.

The big controversy we seem to have in our state is whether grocery stores should be allowed to sell wine or liquors. Nobody seems to have thought of the Sunday ban.

Do we keep these regulations because [with apologies to Mr. Soucheray] nothing is allowed here and we want to keep it that way? or do we keep these regulations because there are legitimate public health, safety, or welfare [the traditional "police powers"] reasons? or is it just inertia?

Bus moving backwards -- in fares at least

The wonderful folks who give us [at great public expense] those magnificent busses and trains known as Metro Transit are looking at raising fares.

We all know the increases in the price of hydrocarbons so it is hard to oppose increasing the fares of an already-subsidized transportation medium.

But it would seem that the price of diesel must not really motivation for this increase since the proposal is not based on distance. Instead of increasing the fare so that more would be charged for longer runs, all users would pay the same increase whether they were going from West Seventh to downtown or from Stillwater to Hopkins. The poor person wishing to go to/from work in his/her own city would be soaked as much as the economic colonialist who goes from Woodbury to Minneapolis.

A more fair fare system would set the basic minimum fee and then charge more for the distance covered. I suspect that we will hear that Transit is not set up to collect fares this way. It would be a disingenuous argument for Transit to make since they have set up the present apparatus, but that won’t stop them from making it.

Another option is to establish a flat rate for each municipality covered. I don’t know the amount, but a more fair number can be figured out without unduly increasing the burden on local people who travel locally.

Taxpayers are subsidizing the whole thing anyhow, but doesn't it seem that they are subsidizing the longer rider more?

But fairness and Transit have seldom been connected, so why would we expect differently now?

Franken as panderer

Al Franken want to forbid former congresspeople from ever becoming lobbyists and is spending a lot of money letting us know that. I question whether that is good policy, but really don’t need to write about my reservations, because it won’t happen. If you can believe that proposal has a chance of coming about, you probably could be led to believe that George Carlin was runner-up to Cardinal Ratzinger in the Sistine Chapel in 2005.

It won’t happen. It is so pathetically predictable that politicians will pander to us and Franken is just doing his part.

Politicians, especially non-incumbents, take on lobbyists and “special interests.” Other professions also have professionally-mandated positions to take which we also expect to hear.

Preachers rail against sin. Dentists advocate flossing. Librarians urge reading. Safety commissioners push seat belt usage. Aging sluggers who don’t have good legs anymore advocate the designated hitter rule. Teachers support learning, at least learning the right things.

We expect these things. But on these things, there is an outside chance that these some one’s actions might actually be changed. Some sins might not be committed when the exhortations of preachers are taken to mind. Some teeth may be flossed because of a dentist’s ongoing urgings. Some poor sap who otherwise is not scared by “buckle up” laws might actually click a seat belt together because his government suggests it so persistently. Sucker sports fans will continue to come and root for guys who really are no longer baseball players. Somebody may help their child or grandchild or neighbor with his/her lessons.

But there ain’t no way that Congresspeople and Senators are going to limit their future employment opportunities for the rest of their lives. It just ain’t a going to happen. Franken knows that. [And if he doesn’t he shouldn’t be in the position of being considered a serious candidate for any office, much less a major one.]

But people of any party can pander and Al Franken is demonstrating this well.

County Fair opens today

Well, the Ramsey County Fair starts today, out at the Maplewood fairgrounds. I sometimes wonder if anybody notices or cares. Every few years the subject of ending this event comes up.

If you have comments about the County Fair or this year’s visit there [or a previous year’s] or whether it should keep on, please be free to add a comment here.

More tenants for Sober Houses?

This item in MinnPost caught my attention. I do not know whether there is any direct connection with my earlier post on sober house zoning, but it does seem that if we fund places which offer treatment less that there may be more recovering [and possibly economically vulnerable] people who would become target tenants for sober house landlords.

Earlier posts:

What to do about Sober Houses? [7/6/08]

Sober Houses, Neighborhoods, and Planning [2/24/08]

Whither speakest thou, O John?

Until Franklin Roosevelt went to Chicago in 1932 to accept his party’s nomination for the same position no candidate had actually traveled to his party’s convention to accept the nomination. But after 1932 such a trip and speech became an unwritten requirement.

In 1960 Democrats from across the republic convened at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and held a convention, nominating John F. Kennedy as their presidential candidate.

The Democrats decided that it might be time to try something new, so they moved the last session of the convention where their nominee would deliver his acceptance speech to the Los Angeles Coliseum, home at the time to the Rams, Bruins, Trojans, and Dodgers. They calculated rather cleverly that more people can get into football stadia than in basketball arenas. That proved right.

However, nobody has seemed to think the same way since then. Acceptance speeches in both parties are still given to the smaller crowds of partisans that arenas allow. [Actually, in 1988 the entire Republican convention which nominated George H.W. Bush was held in the New Orleans Superdome and there was some embarrassment caused by vacant seats.]

That is, until this year. Now for the Democratic National Convention in Denver Barack Obama will move his acceptance speech to a corporate-named football stadium.

The next question that might come locally is whether the GOP and McCain might try a similar stratagem.

The only football stadium around here large enough to accomplish the purpose would be the Humphreydome in Mpls. It looks like the Republicans will pass on the opportunity to go there. I am sure that this would make all those who have been working on logistics and security happy. Moving the show to Mpls. might give us a little more peace a day sooner, but they would still be clogging things up quite a bit.

I also imagine that Republicans fear exactly who would be in the audience at the Humphreydome. They might not all be cheering masses.

And they probably prefer the more intimate atmosphere of a corporate-named arena to that of a stadium named after Hubert Humphrey.

But let's keep our eyes open.

What to do about Sober Houses?

The City Council is about to pass an ordinance defining “sober houses” and establishing spacing and other requirements for some of the larger ones. There are a lot of them in our City. Merriam Park and West Seventh seem to be the most desired neighborhoods for sober house landlords to set up shop in. After pressure from District Councils and other community groups the city did authorize the Planning Commission to study the matter and submit suggestions. Simply speaking, that is why the Council is looking at this ordinance now.

The issue gets tricky for several reasons. Application of the Federal Fair Housing Act has stated that recovering alcoholics are protected from housing discrimination as disabled people. Nobody seems to know just how many of these places there are or how well the “clients” are doing in their recovery. Neither does anybody seem to know how many automobiles the residents need to park in the neighborhood and nobody seems to know what other problems the residents may have.

Local and/or state land use regulations and/or funding requirements control treatment facilities, but nobody receives any treatment at a sober house. These facilities have various requirements that they need to meet, including spacing requirements. One reason for spacing requirements is to avoid creating disability-concentrated, ghetto-like areas.

The advocates for this housing speak of creating new “families” of recovering people and seem to think that those who oppose them are either near-sighted, bigoted, or both.

But when a family lives in a house, they just sign one lease and send one check to the property owner. In other cases where each individual sends his/her own check to the landlord, they are covered under Boarding or Rooming House licenses. These are licensed by the city for safety, spacing, and consumer protection reasons.

The owners also use the analogy to housemates who share living units. This analogy breaks down for some of the same reason that the family argument does, that there is only one lease and one check. And the law specifically limits housing units in this city to four unrelated adults. Following this train it seems that the sober house advocates seem to feel that being a recovered alcoholic [or actually just a teetotaler] gives one rights that others do not have.

So it seems like under present rules and regulations that if I were a landowner that I could rent a large house to any number of unrelated adults at monthly rates of a few hundred dollars each. If the renters are willing, it may be free market capitalism, but exactly how free the market is is debatable, since many recovering people have seriously compromised financial situations as a result of their problem[s]. If I can get five or six people to pay $400 each it might beat having a group pay $1200-$1500. And if it turned out that one or more of the folks got tipsy and disruptive, it could be passed off as some poor soul who misstepped. I am not a treatment provider so it would not be my direct worry.

The proposed ordinance is pretty mild. It only affects larger houses and imposes minimal spacing and distancing requirements. The distance is 330 feet. For reference note that the spacing requirement for Community Residential facilities is 1320 feet [one-quarter of a mile] and the average city block is 330 feet by 660 feet [street rights-of-way included.] It also allows for some fire and safety codes and inspection thereof for the larger houses.

It is interesting that as I watched the replay of Wednesday’s City Council public hearing that I did not detect any testimony from doctors or treatment professionals saying that their clients needed this kind of housing. Testimony seemed to be primarily from landlords and people representing them.

I understand that the city is limited in what it can do and do suggest the Council pass what they have in front of them if they are afraid to be more aggressive in protecting both recovering clients and their neighbors, but seriously wonder why they cannot move the spacing requirements up and the minimum number of residents defined as a sober house down.

You may send your comments telling me how much of a bigot I am.

Earlier postSober Houses, Neighborhoods, and Planning [2/24/08]

Keeping the Priorities straight

Interesting sequence. Our President, in his Excellent Wisdom, removed North Korea from the “axis of evil.”

A week later he removed Nelson Mandela from the Terrorist Watch List.

Somehow we get the message, don’t we? Or do we?

I guess Dr. Mandela must not have any nukes.

Cf. Daily Planet article

North End Community Fireworks Display

This happened all over the city, I assume, but I had the special opportunity of observing part of the North End’s unofficial fireworks display last night. This Fourth of July celebration was going on concurrent to the Taste of Minnesota demonstration. Neighbors on both sides of Rice Street were lighting the sky with an amazing collection glaring rockets and other works of pyrotechnical art. More seemed to come from west of Rice than east, but that is likely because the inhabitants of the condominiums between Jackson and Sylvan south of Magnolia don’t participate much. One of the disadvantages of this kind of varied-site display is that one does not know where the next blast is coming from and misses the upgoing parabola of the display.

And, as far as I can tell, this whole display neither received any public subsidy nor charged admission.

Treasure Hunt 3 is over

We have had a winner for Treasure Hunt 3 who prefers to remain anonymous. Congratulations to whomever, anyway. The site is, as he/she suggests, the tall tree at Sue's Park at Payne and Rose

This whole Treasure Hunt thing has had a mixed and slow reception. I am not sure if I will continue it. I am thinking of maybe doing something with a fixed time line [one month, maybe] or maybe running two hunts simultaneously, one thought to be simple and one thought to be so obvious that nobody would ever want to be identified as the winner.

I am willing to accept suggestions on the hunt itself as either a comment here or as an email to minnmusic at yahoo. Of course, if you wish to suggest a site, it might be better to use the latter method.

Regardless, it will probably be August at least before I start another hunt.

The clues for Treasure Hunt 3 and their explanations are below.

And congratulations again to our anonymous winner.

Clue Number 1: The Man in Black knew that life was not always easy for everybody.

Johnny Cash sang that “Life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.”

Clue Number 2 [4/3/08]: Once there were 3 R’s amid a street of bars.

“3 R’s” refers to the Phalen Park elementary school formerly located at the site. “A street of bars” is an allusion to one of the more unfortunate historical perspectives people have had of Payne Avenue.

Clue Number 3 [4/11/08]:

Hammerstein met Rogers, Gamble met Proctor, Bigelow met Brown Bringing culture and soap and telling about it in places all around. Pastor meets social worker meets mortician meets town.

Can somebody please give us the real lowdown?

This first line refers to famous partnerships. The second mentions what they did. The third line refers to the Payne/Maryland Partnership of Arlington Hills Lutheran Church, Merrick Community Services and Bradshaw Mortuary, who along with the City of Saint Paul [Parks Department and Library Agency] are looking at a development which seems to threaten at least some of Sue’s Park. And all the "visioners" that are hired cannot or will not give the straight answer of how much of the Park they want to devour.

Clue Number 4 [4/19/08]: Think of a Catholic haven.
Think of a Lutheran church.
Think of children playin’.
Remember where it hurts.

Maryland was established as a haven for Catholics. Maryland Avenue is nearby. East Immanuel Lutheran Church is cater-corner. “Children playin” alludes to the Arlington Recreation Center across Rose Avenue. The allusion to hurts is a bad pun on Payne.

Clue Number 6 [5/6/08]

A Bluff has both up and down.
And don’t think about a department store.
Forget that street across town
Or a Senator from yore.

None of them matters here.
Put them out of your mind.
Don’t shed for them a tear
And maybe the prize you will find.

Sue’s Park is named for a woman named Dayton, but not one of the Lyman Dayton for whom Dayton’s Bluff and Dayton Avenue were named, nor the departed Dayton’s store or its heir, Senator Mark Dayton. Mourning any of them will not help you find the treasure.

Clue Number 7 [5/18/08]

This is the top of a tree [Surprised?], a threatened tree. Regular readers of this site [both of you] might have extra insights about why this tree was chosen to be placed here.

Sue’s Park is threatened and the tree with it. It has been written about here.

Clue Number 8 [5/29/08]

You don't really think that I could go more than two hunts without having an East Side site, do you?

This verifies that the site is on the East Side.

Clue Number 9 [6/29/08]
Think about Phalen Park.
It’s not in Phalen Park, but that first line is relevant, anyway.

This is an allusion to the Phalen Park School which used to be on the site.