It's About Priorities, Not Blame

Category: Minnesota Politics

by Dave Mindeman

The GOP and their mouthpieces are so defensive about any questions about the bridge collapse, that there isn't any allowance for proper debate and analysis. In every discussion, everyone must carefully tip toe around the blame game.

It is ironic that Michael Brodkorb of MDE and Sarah Janacek are leading the defense on this. After all, Brodkorb has politicized Al Franken's entire career as if it was one long political attack....and at the same time, Sarah Janacek, has the Wellstone memorial on her resume; You must remember... that while acting as a guest commentator, she loudly protested that the words crawling along the bottom of the screen was a way for the Democrats to orchestrate crowd reaction. When in reality, it was just the closed captioning system.

It is hard to take it all seriously when the politicizers in chief are criticizing the rest of us.

But we desperately need to focus on the issue of transportation.... to make sure that what happened on Wednesday, never happens again. This is not a subject that just popped up because of the bridge tragedy. I have 12 posts referring to the transportation problem from 2007 alone....and I know others have tried to raise the issue as well. It was an issue that could be pushed aside, delayed, or ignored. But that has to end.

This isn't a blame game, it is a sincere desire to fix this. When that bridge went down, I was home and saw the very first reports coming in. After the shock of it, I cringed at the sight of the mass of rubble with cars scattered throughout. Frankly, I am stunned that the death toll has not been higher.... a tribute to the emergency response and the willingness of our citizens to help each other.

But as the hours unfolded and it became clear this was not a terrorist incident or an act of God, it was very hard for me not to be angry. This issue (transportation) has been of particular interest to me for some time.

I am not saying this is just a Governor Pawlenty problem or a Republican problem alone; but having watched Phil Krinkie wail against light rail over the years and some of my local GOP legislators ignore my pleas to override the vetos on the last two transportation packages, it is hard not to see a connection.

There are two sentences that sum a lot of it up for me:

Governor Pawlenty vetoed two transportation bills during his tenure.
Governor Pawlenty signed a $600+ million stadium bill.

Those are symbols of priorities for this administration.

Now, I know that if we had a Governor Hatch, the bridge would still have collapsed. But we need to find out where we went wrong and get the maintenance right. The public will demand it.

As we move forward to resolve this, we need to remember the innocent lives that were affected by an infrastructure failure. State government must never again abdicate its responsibility to make our highways safe and efficient.... and maybe even more importantly, be honest about the cost.