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.

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.

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?

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

Remembering the Mpls. Trucker Strike

Freedom is not always free. We hear that every time that somebody in our military dies.

But being killed in military service is not the only time that people die to make the rest of us free. This week marks the 75th anniversary of the massacre at the Mpls. Truckers Strike should again remind us that the things we take as givens in life were not always there.

This is a link to last year’s Minnesota Independent article on the matter.

http://www.minnpost.com/iricnathanson/2008/07/22/2643/remembering_the_truckers_strike_of_1934#62-2643

A note on Capitol security

The Legislative Auditor [not the State Auditor as I heard on one of the midday television reports] is suggesting that there is inadequate security of the Capitol and nearby state buildings.

Sometimes I wonder whether everything we do in the name of “security” really helps and I won’t weigh in on the new observations, at least for now.

But whatever we have now, it used to be worse. For some perspective, you can scroll down the right side of this page to a miscellaneous link titled, “Story of a rifle delivery to the Capitol building” about a 1970 delivery of a rifle to the Lieutenant Governor’s office.

Noting a transition -- Tom Byrne

Today’s DPP mentions the death last night of Thomas Byrne. While they did publish it as a news obit, they apparently did not think the death of a former mayor was important enough to be placed on a news page.

That may be because in many ways Tom Byrne must have seemed to younger people at the paper as remnant to a day long gone [it is almost 39 years since he left the third floor of City Hall], when the city was used to having leaders who were Irish and Catholic and when the city and its news were important enough for the newspaper to cover.

Tom Byrne was not the last Irish mayor. We have one now. He was not the last Catholic mayor. That designation has to belong to Randy Kelly or Jim Scheibel. [I am sure that somebody knows.] But it seems that somehow there has not been a mayor so Catholic [he had been a seminarian before his military service and he was an archbishop’s brother] or so Irish, so connected with the city’s working and ethnic past. [For the record, I am neither Irish – at least not the green kind – nor am I Catholic.]

I realize that sometimes when we look back, we see things colored a bit, like early, color photographs left in the sun too long distort the colors we see, but it seems to me that the passing of Mayor Byrne in some ways illuminates that an era has changed.

The new Saint Paul has different people living here and different people in leadership. Let us just hope that as we move on the latter is adequate for the former.

Coming to a UHF channel near you

Joe Kimball of MinnPost notes a forthcoming KTCI documentary. His opening may seem a little smug, but it seems right.

A television documentary on Minnesota's progressive Republican tradition will air Dec. 20 on TPT-Channel 17.

It's obviously a history project.

Link to the full article

They are almost here

Well, the major party national conventions are almost upon us. This is the latest they have been. The strange mixing of early primaries and late conventions may be a sign of the way things will be in the future.

And in time for the conventions, MinnPost runs a story by Albert Eisele, former DPP Washington reporter and writer of a dual biography of Hubert Humphrey [the real one, not the guy who was our Attorney General] and Eugene McCarthy, Almost to the Presidency.

Most of the cases he cites might be familiar to those who have studied Minnesota history, stories involving some legendary names like Donnelly, Olson, Stassen, Burger, Humphrey, McCarthy, and Mondale. The story seems to have been included because of the prominence Governor Pawlenty may be having at this year’s GOP bash.

Some may think that Pawlenty is a long shot for VP, and a cynic might be musing over Pawlenty not being able to give his acceptance speech because he is looking for the convention in Mpls. but regardless of one’s take on this year’s confabs, Eisele’s post makes interesting reading which can be commended to all.

Don Boxmeyer

Don Boxmeyer passed away. That is not news now. If you have followed the local media you have read about his history at the DPP and his years as both reporter and columnist, how his health has not been good, and how his burial has been delayed because of a government snafu.

I determined earlier that I would save my eulogies for January of each year and I won’t change that now. But it would not be in order to not point out that although I respected his work and had read his stuff for years and exchanged some emails with him, that I am only aware of actually meeting him once, when I was in line with him at a book signing for Curt Milburn’s The Phalen Corridor. [Before signing, Milburn had to ask Boxmeyer who he was.]

I wrote about Don Boxmeyer last October. As I noted then,

Most of the time it seems it seems the people of whom he writes are people I don’t know or know only a bit, but are on subjects I find interesting and even if I don’t know the people being written about, it seems that I must know several people who do know them.

I was interested in why the DPP had David Hawley writing the story of his death, since Hawley is one of the many people that no longer work there. Joe Kimball’s excellent MinnPost obit seems to tell us .

But the demise of Don Boxmeyer and the fact that the DPP went outside their own small roster of writers reminds us of how little we get for 25 cents these days. I might write more on that later, but this doesn’t seem like the right post.

Requiescat In Pacem

Soucheray on what to show Republicans

Joe Soucheray has written about what places we might wish to show visiting Republicans. After running through some of the obvious possibilities, he seems to summarize by suggesting a boat tour noting that the city was formed because of its location by a conveniently-place bend in the river and the ability of a man called “Pig’s Eye” to use this fact.

In particular, I liked two paragraphs from the column. I might have added that we work and raise and educate our children and attend our places of worship, but his summary is good.

After reminding us that the state f-word [Where have you gone Turi Rider? We miss you] approaches soon, he comments on how comfortable we are with our “third places” [although I suspect that he would foghorn that phrase]. [Cf. Cafes as disapearing third places, 5/5/08]

The truth of the matter might very well be that the Republican delegates are coming to a place that is quietly content and, civically, has nothing particularly glaring to show off or brag about except the most important thing of all, which is a historically strong sense of place, a continuity. Compared to folks in other cities in the country, we have remained remarkably strong and will, by the time the convention begins, have survived another Minnesota State Fair, our blockbuster gastronomical festival of fried foods, even candy bars, served on sticks.

We cut our grass and sweep our sidewalks and shovel our snow, which might be witnessed given that we are talking about a September visit. There is still an orderliness here that is hard to sell on a tourist brochure. We have our favorite bars and restaurants, but here again, they are our favorites because they are not places to be seen, they are places to be comfortable, at ease. I could recommend a dozen, but the visitor would be hard-pressed to understand the appeal because the visitor could not possibly understand the laying on of hands that makes each place significant to its regulars.

Maybe he should have been doing the cab driver education.

A sign of the times [past times, that is]

Remember Johnny’s Bar which sat at 2251 University for so long? Remember the big stein sign which adorned its front? Apparently this piece of nostalgia is available for purchase.

So if you are a historian with an interest in West Midway/ South St. Anthony matters or if you are a bar owner looking for new adornment there is a chance for you to obtain this piece of history.

More information

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.

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.

An Observation on City Planning [from a long, really long-term perspective]

Sometimes I wonder which crazies have been making the planning decisions for our city.

We have chased people out to allow more space for suburban scum [a redundancy, I know] to commute.

We have built handicap apartments and then closed the street which serves their building.

We have allowed railroads to wreak their own will pretty much anywhere they want to and have allowed polluters free use of so much property that we have later had to find a way to clean up that it is pathetic.

We have through zoning, funding sources, and enforcement allowed some areas to become disproportionately occupied by economically disadvantaged people and then wonder why we have schools and neighborhoods in stress.

Political, corporate, geographical, and social decisions from every level and numerous perspectives over many decades have brought us the city we have.

I have lived in two cities in my lifetime. The other is Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

We are dry. They aren’t – and won’t be for a long time.

When we have floods, we have to vacate some business properties, but downtown stays open and almost nobody has to leave his/her home. We have been smart or lucky enough to build on the bluffs and not at the river level. A repeat of 1965 or 1997 or 1969 [even a few more] or any of those good years cannot bring us the kind of distress happening there.

So let’s thank our geography and the planning which has happened since the mid-nineteenth century for the blessings we often overlook, even if we question the thinking or motivation of how it happened.

There will be pie some place bye and bye

A bit of local history:

On Tuesday, March 30, 1999 Robert Irwin Greenberg pressed/shoved a lemon pie into the face of a 65-year woman by a stairway at our Capitol building. Senator Carol Flynn, a Mpls. DFLer, was uninjured, although it is probable that her dignity and aplomb suffered. Greenberg purportedly did this as protest against a proposed routing [since implemented] of Highway 55 near Minnehaha Falls which Native Americans had opposed saying that it threatened a sacred spring. Being a man of conviction Greenberg even used a vegan pie which cost him or somebody $18.

He was sentenced to sixty days in the Ramsey County Workhouse during which the taxpayers fed him according to his special diet.

Senator Flynn later retired from the Senate.

On May 22, 2001 Payne Phalen District Five Planning Council voted 7 to 6 to hire to hire Greenberg as Executive Director [ED]. Although the hiring committee had neglected to mention this detail of the applicant’s history, some directors [including this writer and future Maplewood City Manager Greg Copeland who had learned that there was still a restraining order keeping the candidate for ED from the Capitol Complex] had already learned of the history and raised questions. The minutes note that Directors Copeland, Sammons, and Wilson requested that their votes against be made part of the record. I really wondered back then how well somebody with such a history could work with elected leaders the way that people who work for District Councils need to. I did suspect that there were organizations for which Mr. Greenberg could provide excellent leadership, but District Councils cannot be so confrontational. To borrow religious metaphor, they are more pastors than evangelists, more priests than prophets.

Despite the closeness of the vote Mr. Greenberg indicated that he would accept the job offer.

On May 23, 2001 the Saint Paul City Council, on motion of Councilmember Chris Coleman [himself the son of a state Senator], suspended the rules and revoked all city funding for the District Council. It is my belief that this action, coming late in a meeting under suspension of the rules and without notice given to anybody, is likely the biggest singe assault on our Citizen Participation system by the City Council in the 30-plus-year history of the CP system, bigger than the defunding of Greater East Side Community Council in 1985 [which did come through the committee process with public testimony accepted and grounds given – albeit the grounds given were ridiculous and disingenuous -- or the recent force merger in District 13. Others may disagree and are welcome to comment.

Within a short time, the offer to hire Greenberg was withdrawn and with the help of the late Councilmember Jim Reiter city funding restored. The late Paul Gilliland was hired shortly after as interim Executive Director.

I do not know what happened to either Senator Flynn or Robert Greenberg. Councilmember Coleman now has a different city job. I do wish them both well.

So what brought all of this up?

Well, it is really tangential, but it does involve a pie. From Alison Go of US News and World Report:

A Tom Friedman pie-in-the-face update: One of the Brown University students who hurled green whipped cream at the New York Times columnist last month has been suspended for the fall semester, the Brown Daily Herald reports.

According to the student, the university found her actions to be in violation of its standards of student conduct, which say that protest is not acceptable "when it obstructs the basic exchange of ideas" and which prohibit "directly or indirectly preventing a speaker from speaking—even for a brief period of time—(and) seizing control of a public forum for one's own purposes."

Although both incident show sanction taken against the one making the assault, it is not much of a connection, but it got me thinking about the Greenberg-Flynn incident and the District Council incident which followed.

I haven’t posted much on our Citizen Participation [CP] system even though I have been involved in it for a long time. Maybe that is why I haven’t posted much on it, since I cannot claim an unaffected perspective.

But I do invite your comments on our CP system or on pie-throwing or pie-planting as means of communication. And do the pies need to meet the dietary restrictions of thrower or target or both?

History note: Greenberg was probably supporting the right side when he assaulted Senator Flynn, but there were problems with the way he did it. I remember posting somewhere probably in 1999 or 2000 about the ridiculousness of a federal judge ruling on whether the springs about to be destroyed for Highway 55 were sacred to the Mendota Mdewakanton. The ruling [simplified by a law layperson] was that since nobody was still living when the spring became sacred that nobody could prove that the springs were sacred. I compared it to a judge in Israel looking at a highway that would remove the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and having to make a ruling on whether the site was sacred to Christians. We need to be very careful when we try to evaluate somebody else’s religious ideas. It’s kind of like draft boards attempting to prove whether somebody was a religious conscientious objector or not. I don’t know if that post is available anywhere now or not. It is probably lost in cyberspace someplace.

LINKS:

The US News article can be found at

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2008/5/22/at-brown-friedman-pie-thrower-suspended.html

I have to admit that looking at the grammar of this post that there might have been another reason not to hire him. Robert Greenberg’s account of the pie incident can be found at

http://members.aol.com/noreroute/bobsay.htm

Capitol City Cacophony contemporary comment on the District Five- Greenberg matter can be found by scrolling down about two-thirds of the way at

http://www.geocities.com/minnmusic/boosandbravos.html

Who's watching the store? OR A Bridge between them?

I had never heard of 24-hour, no-frills, unstaffed health clubs before this morning. I suppose I can see possible problems. After all, seeing possible problems is something I seem to have a knack for. And, according to at least one Administrative Law Judge, present city code does require that staff be on premises at all times.

If I read this morning’s newspaper story correctly, David Thune, current and past councilmember from City Council District [often called “Ward”] Two is against them and wants the law to stay the way the ALJ is interpreting it. I am surmising that if the ALJ opinion is not upheld that he would want an ordinance adopted to require that they be staffed whenever they are open.

Another former councilmember from that same district, Mayor Coleman the Second, is quoted in the DPP as saying, "It can't be OK everywhere else and be somehow more risky in St. [sic] Paul." [Note to the Mayor’s fans, of whom there must be some: “Sic” is inserted because that is what is done here at CCM when we find the name of our city unnecessarily abbreviated. However, I suspect that His Honor made the statement orally and it is just the paper’s defective, penny-pinching style sheet which instituted the abbreviation. So save the letters, or at least send them on other things.]

This is quite a choice, having to choose between these two men, who usually seem to only be separated by the High Bridge.

It has been traditional in our culture to recognize that problems are possible in a lot of businesses and to adopt codes to protect the public from unscrupulous or incompetent operators. We license, charter, or regulate restaurants and bars, building contractors, motor vehicles and drivers, pawn shops, utilities, and scores of other things.

Sometimes [probably most of the time] we regulate well or at least “pretty good”. Other times we fail. And sometimes we forget why we license and legislate or enforce from outdated models.

Old timers may remember [probably 25 or 30 years ago] when Sister Rosalind wanted to open her first massage center in the city. She had to face a lot of legislative hostility because we had several places which had been known as “massage parlors” in town which had been serving as fronts for prostitution and for whom the city had adopted some drastic regulations. [Regulations don’t always work as they are intended. By the time Sister Rosalind was applying for her licenses, all or almost all of the former “massage parlors” had quit offering massages and were no longer affected by them. They were still open, just weren’t “massage parlors” anymore.]

I sometimes have wondered if her fight might have been too difficult to pursue had she not been a middle-aged Catholic nun, but she got changes made after telling our city leaders that she resented the proposition that she and her employees were in the prostitution business and were entitled for more dignified treatment. Ordinances were altered, but they still worked from the anti-prostitution perspective for several more years, including requiring that masseur/masseuse licenses be issued by the City Council and that the licensee’s name be on the City Council agenda and minutes.

And I would be remiss if I forget to mention that having regulations guarantees the public that they will be enforced. For one thing, government bureaucrats seem to find it easier to hassle those with licenses than those who operate without them. Any licensed taxicab driver or owner in our city knows that

Thune says that the new style health clubs present a neighborhood issue and threatens to enlist the support of neighborhood organizations, especially District Councils. Maybe he will indeed get such help, but I suspect that while they may give him some lip service that most neighborhood organizations are already so deeply committed to fighting more obvious crime and the decay in our housing situations and developing stable business and social environments to jump on that bandwagon really hard.

Boats coming back

The river made this city.

Now that our railroad and trucking industries have largely forgotten us and moved pretty much anything they can away, we sometimes forget that the river [or more accurately the boats that moved upon it] made our city and helped establish the city as a major transportation hub.

Most years this gets little notice, but the first towboat with barges is expected today and we need every sign of spring we can get this year. Thanks to global warming or something this year’s date will be a record late date, breaking the previous record by four days and the average by almost three weeks.

And we need all the vernal thoughts we can get right now.

Fuel for the Mill

Somebody wrote me a while back wondering why I had not written about the Rock Tenn [If you are over forty think Champion or Hoerner Waldorf or Waldorf] burner proposal. I guess that one reason is I just don’t know enough about the matter. [I know, I know, that doesn’t usually stop me.]

I guess that Mayor Coleman the Second did note at a recent meeting burning fuel oil there negated the improvements made by getting Xcel [NSP] to change from burning coal to natural gas by the high bridge.

Gee. What a surprise.

I can remember driving on the Short Line Road [what the yuppies and Dakota County trespassers now call “Ayd Mill Road”] a few years ago and seeing the steam pipes being installed along the Milwaukee Railroad [now Queen Elizabeth’s Canadian Pacific] line and reading articles [no, not while I was actually driving] whooping it up that this new energy source would allow whatever the paper plant was being called to stay in business for a long time.

And I remember our city leaders exulting while telling us that they had gotten NSP to switch from coal to gas. Since it never occurred to me that burning gas would not produce steam, I never made the connection.

But couldn’t somebody downtown?