As the legislature slogs through another session, the House Transportation Finance Committee has a queue of bills to sort through. Most of these would provide specific appropriations to fund a single transportation project. A few may succeed on their merits and statewide significance, some may gain popular support resulting in a project’s inclusion in a bonding […]
This is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities regional planning agency. It’s located in downtown Saint Paul. Notice anything about how it’s laid out? If you ever walk past, it may take a moment, but you’ll soon realize that the building doesn’t have any entrances onto the street. There are doors […]
I was catching up with an old friend the other day, an economic geography professor who moved away for a job at a big West Coast university. We were eating dinner and swapping stories. “What are you working on now?” I asked. We exchanged little bits about our lives, homes, friends in common. Somehow as […]
A new statewide poll conducted by Minnesota’s three largest Chambers of Commerce—Minneapolis, St. Paul, and TwinWest—shows for the second year in a row that support for expanding the transit system in the metro area is strong. Seventy-nine percent of respondents said that Minnesota “would benefit from having an expanded and improved public transit system, such […]
If you were to read the City of St. Paul’s legislative wish list, you’d see a list of big projects such as: $14 million to improve the Children’s Museum $7 million for parking and transportation improvements at Como Park $32 million loan forgiveness tied to the Xcel Energy Center (in an effort to not pay […]
We are almost there, good readers; 2013, and the end of our gilded series on your opinions on where our fair cities are headed in the next year and beyond. Unfortunately, I have the task of reporting on what was least popular subject: the Best Current Plan. Woe is me. Of the 10 subjective and […]
Earlier this year, the city of Minneapolis received a grant from Met Council to study possible strategies for doing away with its over-abundance of downtown surface parking. For lots of reasons, the fact that surface parking covers one-third of the entire surface area of downtown is bad news for the city. One solution to this […]
Just two years after the Minnesota State Senate and House of Representatives came under Republican control in the Tea Party wave of 2010, both houses flipped back to Democratic-Farmer-Labor majorities in the election this past Tuesday. This was a big surprise to local news outlets, who had expected Republicans to retain the upper hand. The […]
In the boom years, cities got very lazy with the assessment process, allowing the general widespread rising of property values to cover up their poor practices. Few have adjusted to the new reality. Now that the market has changed, a very clear statement from the legal system reaffirming that actual property values need to measurably increase would […]
Over at my blog, I wrote today about some of the problems that both Minneapolis and St Paul have had in constructing bike infrastructure in over the past few years. In both cases (a cycle track and a bike boulevard), the city had drawn up a decent plan but had botched the implementation. Instead of […]