As the political office holders in every major American city have become, with our regrettable acquiescence, virtue-signaling, behavior-changing career activists, crucial foundational necessities of our lives are not getting accomplished, much less prioritized.
In Los Angeles, the mayor, Karen Bass, is being criticized for being in Ghana while her city burned catastrophically. Chastened, she quickly returned, having nothing very useful to say. The problem wasn’t that she was on a junket to Ghana for the installation of a new president. That’s what modern mayors do. Her presence would have done nothing to mitigate the fires. She wasn’t about to climb aboard a hook-and-ladder.
The problem was that the city was not prepared to fight such devastating fires. It apparently wasn’t a priority. It doesn’t have to start with Bass. It could have begun several mayors ago. Los Angeles has a long history with wildfires. Don’t be so knee-jerk quick to put fire in the climate-change basket; look it up. Years ago, a mayor, rather than going on a junket, should have convened hydrologists and engineers to explain the remedy to keep the hydrants flowing during periods of full-on pressurization demands.
Elon Musk has a rocket that can parallel park itself after returning from space. The brightest minds in the country can figure out how to fight fire, even in the Santa Ana winds.
Los Angeles was going to burn to dust one day without serious dogged preparation. That is a crucial foundational truth more important than diversifying the city’s water department or fulfilling diversity, equity and inclusion targets in the city’s fire department.
Those are the goals of career activists, not the hard work of prioritizing the needs of the citizens you are supposed to represent.
A serious mayor would have made firefighting a top priority. It’s not as glamorous as a trip to Africa, but it certainly serves your citizens.
In St. Paul, downtown is hollowed out. Too many vacancies in office buildings. Too much crime and the feeling of unease near the light-rail stops. We don’t need a new dog park or another bicycle path or another layering of DEI bureaucracies with job titles that cannot be measured for achievement.
Those are the whims of professional activists, not the needs of the citizens. As in Los Angeles, an awakening to serious priorities doesn’t have to begin with Melvin Carter. But for our acquiescence, establishing serious priorities should have started several mayors ago.
We don’t face fires or earthquakes, but we have seen the loss of downtown employers for years. With that loss has come a decline in commercial property taxes and the resulting tax burden on homeowners. Were serious efforts made to lure business to St. Paul? Were serious efforts made to attract state workers, just blocks away, to St. Paul and those ready offices rather than build an unneeded new $1 billion State Office Building?
A newspaper guy I know once spent an afternoon on the phone with Volkswagen of America before he got to their real estate division and made a strong pitch to Volkswagen to retrofit the Ford plant in Highland Park for their new American plant. That shouldn’t have been up to me.
We shouldn’t be burdened by crime. Criminals should be arrested and prosecuted, not turned back out on the street in eight hours.
We haven’t lost thousands of homes to fire, but we experience the loss of well-being that can only be present when elected officials work on foundational truths over their own utter BS.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s ‘‘Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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