Buck up, St. Paul supporters of light rail. Gov. Tim Pawlenty may have stomped on the dimmer switch, but he didn’t kick the lights out.
On Monday, Pawlenty vetoed the $70 million in state bonding money that he had budgeted to help build a light-rail line from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis. That provoked wailing, gnashing of teeth and a few less-reasonable responses from people who thought they had done everything the governor had asked in regard to Central Corridor transit. (It didn’t help that the governor also vetoed about everything else St. Paul-related in the bonding bill, while approving other projects of equal or lesser merit.)
We’re for the Central Corridor light-rail line. We don’t imagine it will cure all that ails the world, but we see it as good for St. Paul, important for the east metro and a solid, smart piece of a modern urban transportation system that includes busways, bike trails and many billions of dollars’ worth of public roads.
And, despite the governor’s veto and the logistical challenges associated with it, Central Corridor LRT is far from dead. For one thing, it’s been in the preliminary engineering phase since last year, with professionals working night and day to propel it toward the next phase. For another, it has strong, deep, enthusiastic support from much of the metro business community.
And, finally, for Pawlenty to throw the train off the train after having budgeted for it and laid down conditions — which were met — for his support would be a serious matter. It would suggest that he has been duplicitous in his dealings with Central Corridor supporters or that he is looking for someone to blame for the project’s demise.
Facing a DFL-controlled Legislature that wants to spend more than he thinks is right, he stomped on the dimmer switch and got everybody’s attention. But the lights are still on.
Good work,
Winter Carnival
A thousand bucks is a thousand bucks, and if that’s what’s left when the books close on the 2008 version of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, we’ll cheer about it. As Alex Friedrich reported in Sunday’s Pioneer Press, the Winter Carnival had made a profit only once since 2000.
“We had a good year,” said Kate Kelly, president of the nonprofit organization that runs the carnival. “I’m just nervous about having to do it again.”
Kelly has reason to be nervous. Competition for time and money is intense. There’s a lot going on in the entertainment marketplace, a lot of ways for people to amuse themselves and participate in cultural activities they care about. There also are myriad avenues for advertising and sponsorship dollars, many of them increasingly specific to the audience the advertiser wants to reach. And the metro-area population is diversifying rapidly.
The challenge for the Winter Carnival, then, is to celebrate and perpetuate its traditions — its reasons for being — and to compete.
This year’s success owes to some things that local folks have control over, and some they don’t (weather, for example). It also owes to the Vulcans, who, as Friedrich reported, “saved the day after the foundation had to cut the traditional snow-sculpting contest for lack of funds. The men in red raised money, streamlined costs and saved the foundation $19,000 out of a $20,000 event.”
Traditions matter, so we pause amid the big issues of the day to take note of the good people who did good work to take good care of the Winter Carnival this year.
Copyright 2008 Pioneer Press.
