This story is from the saintpaulrepublicans.us website. This is a different writer than the normal Publius Jr writer. Written on FEBRUARY 23, 2013 AT 1:53 AM by
ADMIN
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I don’t often make it out of town. With family and children, and all the work small children entail, travelling outside the metro is a rare occasion, especially when school is in session.
But that’s what we did. We got away up north. Not up north Minnesota, but up north Wisconsin.
It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. It’s a 20 mile drive to shop for essentials, but there are good shops and plenty of amenities too in the 70 square mile town we enjoyed this past week.
The strangest thing, though. The twenty miles in every direction we would travel up here, no matter how much it snowed, the streets were plowed to the pavement.
Then it was time to traverse the two lane country highways back home in a snowstorm. I wondered how bad it would be, how much longer it would take to get home. Would it be like the three hour commute from the Midway to the East-Side I’ve endured on more than one occasion because of the total idiocy of Mayor Chris Coleman and his inability to manage the basic essentials of city government?
On the contrary, the plows were out. The thousands of miles of roadway were cleared by the crack of dawn. No snow emergency. No towing of vehicles to collect revenue for the city. Just Clean and Safe winter roads.
Not one time did I see dangerous ruts on residential streets or highways. Not once.
I didn’t really think about how bad a job Chris Coleman does as Mayor when it comes to providing the essentials of government service to good people, many of them poor families, that rent their homes for thousands of dollars a year from Mayor Coleman in the form of 4, 5, or 6 thousand dollar tax bills, while also paying a mortgage, utilities, and maintenance.
Sure enough, though I really for some reason already forgot what a bad job the City of Saint Paul does, and all the lame excuses they give for doing such a rotten job, I rode into town to hit roads that could only be described as death traps.
DEATH TRAPS!
Huge ruts in the main arterial routes caused cars to spin out and become stuck. Then there were the two- not one, but two- busses that were stuck in the ruts and the poorly managed corners so that they couldn’t safely navigate turns and streets.
I thought to myself, families all over the city are carrying precious ”cargo” in the back seats of their car, children we live for and would die for. Hundreds of Bus Drivers, likewise, have in their care the children of others and would sacrifice themselves for the safety of their passengers.
But Mayor Chris Coleman doens’t give a damn. He doesn’t have little ones he drives around. He’s got a Limo. He’s got a driver. He makes sure his streets are plowed first.
When streets and highways in rural Wisconsin Counties and cities are pristinely plowed in what seems to be the most efficient work I’ve ever seen on plow budgets 1/20th the size of Saint Paul for 20 times the miles of pavement, it becomes all too clear that St. Paul, under Coleman’s leadershp these last few years, is a total embarrassment to the entire state of Minnesota.
Yes, I’ve heard all the tired excuses, all the explanations, all the talking points that come from the pock nosed Mayor’s desk in between rounds of Martinis, but if Chris Coleman cared about the lives of the citizens he was elected to represent in elections bought and paid for, he would spend more time focusing on the basic essential functions of government, and less time planning his next sculpture garden.
The thing is, in Saint Paul, Chris Coleman talks about why the streets aren’t plowed (and we at least deserve plowed streets for the amount of taxes we pay him), in most other places, the streets just get plowed. The people are safe. Cars aren’t stuck in snowbanks. Children don’t have to switch busses while the one they are on continues to slide down a hill.
It wasn’t just the frustration of turning onto the mangled and impassable roads of Saint Paul today that scared and frustrated me after an iddyllic vacation, it was the fact that we are being ruled by fools who hold the balance of life and death in their hands by how they allocate their resources, putting non-essential governmental fiddle faddle at the top of the Mayor’s list, and the safety of our babies and our grandmothers at the bottom of the list.
It’s time for Chris Coleman to change his mind about running for another term, and time for him to fire the high school BUDdy he hired to head his wholly inadequate and inept St. Paul Streets and Sanitation department- even if he is only acting solely on the direction of the Mayor. After all, it is “mn nice” Saint Paul politics to fire the guy who is trying to do his job rather than vote out of office the guy who does all he can to make it impossible to do the job.
