Need a cop? Call a pol?

We are having cuts in LGA and other challenges to keeping enough police and other public servants working for us.

But we seem to have found a new source of public safety employment: Elected officials.

Yesterday’s paper told how Councilmember Melvin Carter III helped make a bust on an alleged pimp. Mayor Coleman the Second did a stint as a traffic cop a three years ago and Dan Bostrom [who is a retired cop] helped with an apprehension of a gun-toter a couple of years ago. And the late Councilmember Jim Reiter rode around in a retired police car looking to help out.

And today we learn how Senator Ellen Anderson became a bicycle theft detective.

Mayors used to have badge #1 and councilmembers also carried badges. Charlie McCarty used his enough to break up fights in the downtown White Castle and interfere [help?] in a hostage situation in the Hamline-Midway area [the same incident for which retired officer James Mann was belatedly honored earlier this year].

I don’t think councilmember are allowed to carry badges anymore and I don’t know if our mayor does.

But maybe we should look into it.

Followup on the Obama school name choice

As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.

I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:

Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.

The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.

And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??

School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.

Want to go to Mpls in 2015? Good luck!

I have railed quite a bit about how transit is based on bad premises and in particular on the destruction that the Central Corridor “light” rail will bring to University Avenue, the Midway, Summit-University, and Frogtown neighborhoods.

I don’t go to Minneapolis often. It’s not a bad city, but it’s not my city and I seldom have any reason to go there. But I know that a whole lot of people do need to go there [and to get here] so keeping the routes to and from Minneapolis usable is important.

Our MnDOT people know that too, so one has to be especially cynical when now we learn that in addition to screwing up University Avenue they want to make us pay to use I-94 [or at least any lane that is moving].

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Hooking up Pierce Butler

I never thought I would live long enough to see the completion of Phalen Boulevard, but somehow I did.

And at the dedication ceremony for the boulevard’s completion, Mayor Kelly stated that the job was not really done, that the connection west of 35E for Pierce Butler really needed to be made to allow for the whole strip through the city to be made accessible for development.

That is what I had always thought and it encouraged me to hear a sitting Mayor say so. Of course, three months later Randy Kelly was no longer mayor.

Maybe it was partly because of that and almost certainly partly because of the staggering economy the connection to Pierce Butler has not seemed to progress much.

But the lead story in this week’s East Side Review seems to indicate that it may well be finished during the lifetimes of many who are alive today.

Well, you know what they say about hope.

for some historical perspective, see ECBD? what's that? [7/14/08]