The Outdoor Era

I imagine there are elements of the Twins organization that remain bitter from the decade-plus fight for a new stadium. Who feel let down by the fans, the press, and the elected officials. Who see ownership magnanimity, not taxpayer charity, in the current stadium deal. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. But now the taxpayers have ponied up, and the fans soon will as well, as substantial increases in ticket and concession prices that come with a new stadium are revealed.

The key to the team’s long-term success is maintaining a larger, more stable revenue base. The stadium will go part of that way, but perhaps not as far as people think. After all, the Twins are going to lose millions in revenue sharing dollars dedicated to the league’s poverty cases (the Royals, the Marlins), a group the new ballpark’s revenues will knock the Twins from.

The formula requires making baseball a more broadly ingrained pastime in the Twin Cities. Turning us into a baseball town in the way that cities such as St. Louis or Cincinnati are. Places with a century of baseball history, (mostly) consistent competitiveness, and a fan base that doesn’t wilt when hard luck comes.

Inherent in that kind of loyalty is the fans’ certitude that management is intent in keeping a winner on the field, and when unable, following a sound plan for a quick rejuvenation. We cannot afford another era like 1992–2001, where the Twins not only lost, but were rarely competitive. It cost the Twins a generation of interest.

That era seems like ancient history today, as the Twins have last season’s MVP, Cy Young Award winner, and batting champion in the same lineup. Of those, only Joe Mauer is signed long-term.

The Twins have no choice but to adjust their payroll structure to keep 2008 free agents Johan Santana and sign Justin Morneau to a long-term deal as well. Joe Nathan, also a free agent after next year, needs to be re-signed or replaced with someone of similar skills. They are the present and future of this team, which is unprecedentedly blessed with high-impact talent. For the Twins not to make such a gesture toward securing the future would be a serious affront to the fans and taxpayers.

And in return, fans will reward the Twins with less and less regard to the current won/loss record. The return of outdoor baseball will function to evolve a community of fair-weather, passive fans into one that is dedicated, steadfast, and assures the means to put a competitive team on the field.

When the Cleveland Indians disbanded a talented team several years ago to rebuild, its management made a wise move. They published a letter in the ballpark program laying out a vision and purpose, acknowledging that short-term failure was inevitable, but that long-term success would follow. It was a gesture of respect to the loyal, regular components of the fan base who filled the ballpark, win or lose. The Indians are competitive again, and seem poised for many years of success.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is: I’ve bought my season ticket, I’m paying my sales tax. I’ve got my new stadium priority. The Pohlads have said they are committed to owning this team for the long-haul. I’m confident that part of that commitment is doing what it takes to evolve the boom and bust cycles into long periods of competitiveness separated by short periods of rebuilding, and not losing world-class talent in our midst.

A Home Run for Minneapolis

Baseball is important to me.

I attended my first Twins game over Labor Day weekend 1981, a week after I arrived in St. Paul from Chicago. I’ve been wracking my brain to remember whether I saw them lose to the Brewers on Sunday or beat the Blue Jays on Labor Day, but most of what I remember is how dingy Met Stadium was and how unfavorably it compared to the turn-of-the-century ballparks I grew up with, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park. But the following April, when I wiped construction dust off my seat at game two of the Metrodome era, puzzlement turned to despair.

I have been to forty-one Major League Baseball parks, and of the current crop of thirty, the Metrodome is the worst (I never saw the Astrodome, but the Kingdome was grimmer). Say what you will about the Pohlads, the economics of small-market baseball, the innovative marketing of the Saints—the Metrodome set baseball back two generations in this town. Utilitarian in every respect, from food to finishes, charmless and plastic, it hurt more than losing Big Papi, more than the 1992–2000 decade of irrelevance, and more than the growth of the NFL.

The new Twins stadium is an unequivocal win for downtown, Hennepin County, and the entire region. This from a guy who accepts the naysayer premise that there is a finite pool of entertainment dollars and what new revenue the Twins glean comes directly out of Mystic Lake Casino’s or Restaurant Alma’s pockets.

Why is it a “win” on such terms? Because eighty-one game nights of 20,000 people or more will add a vibrancy to downtown that can’t be bought any other way. It’s a lot of people of the right demographic at the right time of year. Target Center or a new Vikes arena can never provide that kind of impact. Too few games and/or too much weather. If you believe the Twin Cities ultimately thrives or stagnates on the strength of downtown Minneapolis, it’s the kind of investment that wise communities make.

It’s hard to argue that the contraction nightmare, despite its bad taste, didn’t have the intended effect. Ultimately, the “stakeholders” did their part. MLB uplifted smaller-market teams with revenue sharing. A combination of luck and wisdom brought the Twins a stretch of competitiveness that has eclipsed the blips of 1987 and 1991. And the men of the Hennepin County Board, led by Commissioner Mike Opat, took a gamble on behalf of a city with a mayor who would not make it a priority and a dilettante city council. The fruits of these efforts move earth this week.

A month ago, the Twins’ one legitimate superstar, Johan Santana, attacked the philosophical underpinnings of its baseball operations and questioned management’s commitment to take it to the next level. Whether Johan is right or wrong, it’s a relevant topic on such a future-focused week.

My son and I completed a six-year path through the current MLB parks last month in Cincinnati and St. Louis, both smaller metropolitan areas than ours, less affluent, less lively, and with less fundamentally going for them. But they remain great baseball towns, with fans who stuff the parks (Busch Stadium and Great American Ball Park), line up to traipse through museum-quality local baseball hall-of-fames, and support a literate baseball dialogue among young and old alike. In bad times and good, the Reds and Cardinals are part of the unfrayable fabric of those communities.

It will take more than Pohlad Park at Target Plaza to turn the Twin Cities into real baseball towns. Failing that, the alternative, I believe, is ending up back in the same boat in two decades—asking how we can keep a competitive team, or a team at all, after the sport’s economics inevitably shift again.

In part two of this post, on Thursday, I’ll talk about what I believe the city, the team, and the fans owe one another to assure that twenty years from now we’re not wringing our gloves over how to save the Twins.

(Conflict of interest note: mspmag.com’s parent company publishes the Twins' magazine under contract to the team.)

Fantasy Island

In case you missed it, there was an absolutely crazy Wall Street Journal feature earlier this month about online fantasy sites such as Second Life, where people create optimized cartoon versions of themselves (“avatars”), and use them to develop a fictional existence online. For the uninitiated, this isn’t porn or some sort of competition, but an “online, digital world, imagined, created, and owned by its residents.”

According to the Second Life website, nearly 9 million people participate, and a cool million have been “living” online in the last month. There are stats about “land sales” by residents, “islands” owned, metrics available in Excel spreadsheets. And it’s all bulls**t. Except that users spent $64 million on the site last year, according to the Journal. (Feel like a sucker yet?)

Until recently, the media has been besotted with Second Life and its ilk, publishing credulous trend stories, enamored of and celebrating the users who detach themselves from reality.

I’m usually loath to judge something I’ve not tried myself, but Second Life has all the hallmarks of full-grown pathology. The WSJ article describes its subject, Ric, as a middle-aged guy who, months into a new marriage, has lost all interest in his real life and spends hours a day engaging with others online in a fantasy life with an optimized version of himself. He has a fantasy spouse, fantasy business with fantasy employees, he earns fantasy dollars, and owns, wait, wait—a fantasy island! His real-life wife describes Second Life as escapism into an unreality free of aging, failure, and disappointment. Ric’s Second Life wife has good skin, big boobs, and wears fishnet shirts.

His real wife is ready to walk.

That there are folks out there who celebrate Second Life as part of their “lifestyle” or as a form of personal expression is an even stronger sign as to its perversity. I’m gonna sound like an old fogey, I know, but in a world where seniors sit lonely in old-age homes, kids lack attention in broken family units, pets sit caged in facilities waiting to be gassed, and virtually every good cause is wanting for volunteers, Second Life is a depressing sign of our national narcissism.

I know, I know, people read fiction, watch soap operas, role-play with their love interest. Second Life is something entirely different, because it has all the hallmarks of real life, except it isn’t.

Disney just bought a virtual-world site aimed at kids called Club Penguin for $350 million. It has 12 million kid-users who interact with other kids as cartoon penguins. If it’s a gateway to Second Life, I think I’d rather have my son looking at porn. At least he’s learning real-world skills.

The Full Upright Position

It’s late August, and half of America is on vacation. Odds are you are getting on a plane this month. And odds are you are going to recline your seat, sigh, and settle in. Or the guy in front of you is going to recline his seat, crunch your leg, and push even harder at the resistance.

We all know our penchant for rock-bottom–priced air travel has driven the airlines to pack lots of rows into today’s airliners. And I love those low fares. So I can’t really complain about seat pitch (the distance between rows on an airliner).

What puzzles me is why we universally revile being leaned back into, but nonetheless continue to do it to others? I’m of average height, and though I can appreciate a little recline, find the full monty pointless unless it’s an overnight flight. I no longer recline my seat more than an inch because I know how uncomfortable it is for the poor sap behind me. I know she can’t reach her bag, that her laptop won’t open fully on the tray table, and she has to keep her large soft drink in her lap, which makes her pants wet.

Yet many of you hit my knee or crossed leg and instead of pulling back or saying “excuse me,” push even harder. Breaking my knee gets you only a small additional benefit in recline.

There are devices that you can purchase to inhibit the seat in front of you from reclining. The Knee Defender is apparently not popular with the airlines. Our own Northwest Airlines has apparently banned its use; I imagine it could cause some problems in an evacuation.

But the product was invented to solve a real problem. The problem isn’t seat pitch, it isn’t cramped airliners, nor is it cheapo travelers. It’s the growing rudeness of our culture. If you’re on a plane this month and think you’re in a chaise lounge, you’ll eventually know it’s me you’re reclining onto. Because nowadays, I push back.

(Conflict of interest note: mspmag.com’s parent company publishes Northwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine, for which I occasionally write.)

Osama's Bill Comes Due

As I write this, the stock market has fallen another couple hundred points and those of us who haven’t defaulted on a mortgage lately are scratching our heads. Global financial markets are reeling in an overblown panic rooted in the failure of consumers to pay off risky mortgages.

It all started after 9/11, when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost nothing to keep the American economy—reeling from public fear over terrorism and anthrax—from falling into deflation and/or panic.

Nothing like cheap loans gets us back in the mood. And it did, boy did it. Much of the housing boom of the recent half-decade was rooted in those rate cuts. It cost less to borrow more, so everyone was buying, everyone was renovating, and lots of properties, particularly condos, were purchased by folks who planned to flip them as prices skyrocketed.

The lenders and mortgage brokers didn’t want to miss out, so they offered loans to people without any proof of credit worthiness. Many of these mortgages were ridiculous, interest-only traps with balloon payments or the certainty of massive upward adjustment in the interest rate. The lenders didn’t care about the risk, because they quickly sold the debt and made it somebody else’s problem. Whatever the safeguards in the American economy, we always seem to find a way to subvert them.

Gradually, the day of reckoning came. Interest rates started upwards. Debt wasn’t as good a deal, and everyone owned three homes anyway. So we stopped buying new condos, and the flippers couldn’t sell the ones they had. Balloon payments came due and adjustable-rate loans adjusted up until people couldn’t afford them. Faced with a choice between locking in a fixed rate or floating with the low payment and buying a forty-eight-inch plasma, they chose the latter.

Now loan defaults are rippling through the marketplace and the foolish money men who loaned all the funny money now don’t want to loan to even the credit-worthy. And that precipitates a stock market panic, based on the fear of a so-called liquidity crisis.

Ben Stein, writing in the Wall Street Journal this week (subscribers only), makes the point that the crisis is overblown and represents a tiny piece of the global economy and is not affecting the corporate economy. He thinks it will blow over and the smart money should be buying instead of selling—stocks, that is.

I’m just another sap frustrated watching my 401Ks lose thousands of dollars in value, my spouse’s stock options sink into the mire, and the value of my house drop. But the next time I am tempted to fulminate about CEO salaries and leveraged buyouts, I’ll console myself with memories of the sub-prime mortgage crisis—when I realized that borrowing more than you can afford, wanting three homes when you only need one or two, and ignoring all the prudent advice you hear is not just the province of greedy corporate titans. It’s the American Way.

Radar Love

I was watching the finale of Hell’s Kitchen earlier this week when FOX9 chief meteorologist of the month, Ian Leonard, interrupted to present news of the latest round of deadly storms approaching. I was taken with the colorful high-tech radar Ian showcased. TITAN 3D is its name, and the link reveals its power to stunning effect. Apparently while your house is being pelted with hail and your basement floods, TITAN can show you what it looks like 35,000 feet above. Bravo, gentlemen! A TITAN, indeed.

KARE-11 used to have VIPIR, which was an exciting radar that gave you a feeling of confidence. It was the “don’t f**k with me” of radars, to my mind. But from what I can see from Sven Sundgaard’s page (I don’t find him as sexy as many of you, I might add), I think Ken Barlow took it with him to Boston, because Sven boasts nothing but the sorry-ass SkyScan 11. I believe it scans eleven miles. Sorry, Lakeville, you’re on your own.

Sven’s blog has pictures of cute dogs, pictures of Sven (OK, he’s pretty sexy), and a countdown to the Twin Cities marathon. His bridge-collapse posting ends on a positive note, with pictures of his mom’s new dog and of Sven at a marathon. Scrolling down, there are pictures of a goat called Lady Abagail, grandparents, and more marathons. OK, Sven’s not looking like a dude with a lot of existential angst.

KSTP boasts Skymax 5, which sits high above University Avenue in the aging and smelly Hubbard complex. Dave Dahl is a global warming skeptic, which is certainly unique among people with advanced scientific degrees. And he doesn’t seem to age, so if he’s wrong, he’s going to take a lot of heat in about fifty years.

At WCCO-TV, Paul Douglas, who writes for this magazine’s print edition, is apparently spending too much time on his literary efforts, because the 'CCO device is simply known as “LIVE RADAR.” There used to be an attraction on the North Shore called Live Bear, which I believe was a black bear in a pen or cage, just up the road from Betty’s Pies. Perhaps 'CCO’s radar could be renamed “THE BEAR,” which I think would thematically wipe the floor with either TITAN or VIPIR. (No charge, homes.)

We’re all a bunch of pikers though, compared to the protective power of ABC7 Los Angeles. It has gone out and bought itself LIVE MEGA DOPPLER 7000 HD, which scans the entire Southland at 7000 degrees (C). In case you were wondering, it is dry right now in the Antelope Valley.

Earth to NASA

I was at the Getty Center in LA last weekend, the architecturally stunning museum complex high in the mountains overlooking the city. The friend I was there with noted that his mother, upon first viewing the expanse of galleries, gardens, and grandiosity, suggested the money should have been spent on the homeless. It’s hard to even offer a response to that level of reductive thinking. 

Until you read about the newest mishap with the Space Shuttle. In case you missed it, yet another liftoff debris encounter has punched a gash in the heat shields that is so severe that NASA fears it may burn up on reentry without a spacewalk repair, perhaps even with one.

The Space Shuttle seems to be the latest embodiment of American idiocy and impotence right now. Something so badly thought out that it can’t function without frequently grave consequences and waste of life and human energy. Something of so little apparent utility that we have no intention of designing new ones that work properly. Yet something we just won’t give up on.

I won’t go so far as to say the whole manned space program has been a giant waste, but I’m open to persuasion. And you do wonder, as with the Iraq war, what higher purpose could have been achieved with the billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and handful of lives that have been sacrificed for a program that devotes much of its in-flight time to assessing and repairing damage brought on by inherent design flaws.

Most of us pay so little attention to NASA and these “routine” flights that there is no public outrage or sense of national shame. Can our government and its retinue of outsourcing partners do anything right anymore? Or are we destined to pour billions and billions of dollars down various rat holes in the interest of satisfying the whims of politicians for whom there is no fact as compelling as the religion of manifest destiny?

Ripoffs, Pizza, and Bad TV

OK, enough bridge talk. On to other matters of great importance.

+ Are prices for soft drinks, and especially iced tea, out of control in restaurants? I mean, $3.75 for a glass of flavored water? I think restaurants are using our thirst to cover their losses on rising meat and commodity costs. And while we’re at it, if you price your wine at $14 a glass, you’re not selling any to me.

+ Pat Reusse doesn’t get enough credit. He’s the best sports columnist in town by a mile.

+ If you want to read an insightful piece on how one pundit went from pro-Iraq war to anti-, check out Michael Ignatieff’s essay in last Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a bit long and abstract, but the comments about how Bush’s lack of real-world failures lead him to imagine himself infallible seem right on.

+ The Cubs’ surprising drive to win the NL East must fail. As a born-and-bred Chicagoan and Cubs fan, the most fitting record the Cubs should hold is to go a full century without a title. They are the embodiment of failure and perseverance. Win it all, and they’re just another bunch of short-term heroes. This is year 99, if I’m counting right.

+ If you’re headed to LA anytime soon, don’t miss a meal at Nancy Silverton (La Brea Bakery) and Mario Batali’s new Pizzeria Mozza. Killer. Makes Punch seem like Pizza Hut, and I love Punch.

+ HBO’s Entourage has lost me entirely. Does anyone care about the characters or find the show the least bit fresh or original? How quickly it went stale. If you want fresh and original, tune in at 9:30 p.m. Sundays for Flight of the Conchords. It’s smart and not the least bit crass, which is Entourage’s stock-in-trade.

+ While I’m on the subject of TV, there’s an awful lot of good stuff this summer. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America (Can Fox’s version this fall be anywhere near as good?); Damages and Rescue Me on FX; Mad Men on AMC; this hilarious new reality show Flipping Out on Bravo about an obsessive-compulsive house flipper in LA. My only reservation is that it’s summer. Run these shows when it’s cold, not when we want to be outside.

+ Who do you think won the Zimmern/Bourdain battle of New York this week on Travel Channel? Andrew’s clearly the better dresser. And he tells me his ratings were better. You will find over time that my TV recommendations are far better than Zimmern’s.

+ Can we all agree that websites that play music when you land on the homepage are a plague that must be snuffed out? Yes, that’s you, Via.

+ I have not given money to Minnesota Public Radio in a long while. I’m just not a big fan. But I’m considering writing a check because The Current (89.3 FM) just gets better and better. Could they start a similar station for all the great music that’s more than two years old that never gets any airplay?

+ Spent last weekend in San Diego, a metro area that’s about the size of ours. Want to know what life is gonna be like here in a decade if we don’t invest faster in roads and transit? It’s gonna be gridlock seven days a week. Traffic in San Diego is so bad, so much of the time, that it’s actually a deterrent to visiting. And that 75 and sunny every day really wears on you.

+ Finally, one more bridge item. The Strib’s cutesy headline after the collapse—“Buckling and Swaying, Then Down, Down, Down”—was tacky. Just as the headline “Terrorized” was after 9/11. I don’t know what consultant told them that factual headlines don’t work after big news events, but the cutesy crap trivializes it.

Bridges or Schools or Stadia?

Nick Coleman has lived up to his hard-ass rep, post-bridge collapse, with a series of polemical columns all but calling for us to burn down Edina in retribution for the state’s misguided priorities. Nick is too often turned up to 11 for my taste, and I find his workingman routine a bit fake, but a newspaper needs a columnist with a bit of wit, big cojones, and a willingness to go ballistic.

But here’s where Coleman and the other liberal polemicists are overreaching. It’s one thing to condemn the mentality that funds new stadia but not new bridges. Fair point. It’s another thing to say they have anything to do with one another in a real-world way.

First of all, I don’t know many folks who supported the Twins stadium tax who don’t support better transportation funding. It’s much the same constituency.

Or take the example of schools: I have a kid in the Minneapolis Public Schools. The schools are battered in every direction: by a goofball teacher’s union, societal problems they did not create nor can they solve, and years of discontinuity of leadership and vision. But money would help. Money to reduce class sizes, buy textbooks, replace 1950s desks, you name it.

My state senator, Scott Dibble—who voted against the legislation to authorize Hennepin County to tax for the stadium—used the schools in the same way Nick does the bridge—as a manifestation of misguided priorities and a reason to oppose good things. But the Legislature, which funds schools and bridges, was not asked to spend a penny on the Twins. Hennepin County levied the tax.

Had we given the Twins (conflict-of-interest notice: my employer publishes the Twins’ magazine under contract to the club) Nick Coleman’s middle finger, the bridge would have still collapsed and the schools would still be bailing water. The bleeding-heart segment of the DFL has abdicated on public works, period. That there are jobs for their constituents, economic development for their communities, and intangible benefits all around is seemingly irrelevant. Or as Hennepin Commissioner Mike Opat described the mentality earlier this year, “That’s not going to solve poverty, therefore we shouldn’t do it.”

The problem here is the right’s unwillingness to tax and spend period, not to tax and spend for things that aren’t sexy. The problem here is the left’s relentless focus on inequity to the detriment of everything else. The problem here is an electorate easily lured by “taxes and government are bad” reasoning.

Nick Coleman raised the right question. But the us vs. them stuff has so little resonance these days outside the political fringe that he lives in that I’m not sure Nick’s polarizing wrath, entertaining as it is, is what we need to convince those on the fence to vote for politicians who see a mandate beyond equity, terrorism, and taxes.

Molnau = Pawlenty. Don't Forget It.

Lt. Governor Carol Molnau, also the state's transportation commissioner, responded angrily at a Friday news conference to implications that the state DOT put cost control ahead of safety and thus brought on the bridge collapse. She noted that her daughter drove the bridge twice each day.

I'm not sure if that's a deliberate attempt to distort all the criticism the Pawlenty administration is getting, or just an angry reaction by one of the most combative anti-spending politicians in the state. But Molnau is missing the point.

Nobody in their right mind believes anyone wanted that bridge to fall, wanted children to die trapped in a car filling with water, unable to escape. But they have to accept responsibility for setting priorities that created unacceptable levels of risk to protect their anti-tax street cred. It's all about politics.

This gang that is running the state is simply contemptuous of government, period. Their modus operandi is to starve government of all but its core function of public safety, on the premise that the public sector uses its taxing power irresponsibly, largely to redistribute income from those who work to those who don't.

If we've learned one thing in the last six years, it's that people who hate government should not be in government. If you have no confidence in your instrument, why should we trust you to use it properly. It is manifestly clear that the Pawlenty/Molnau regime has starved the state of funds vital to make it function. They figured the DOT could make do. After all, government is so wasteful.

Molnau is an easy target because she projects such a disagreeable image. But this is governor Pawlenty's policy.

No, they did not want the bridge to collapse. But they are, deservedly, drowning politically as the public comes to genuinely understand their extremism. If this was Japan, they would resign in shame. In our "I'm not to blame" culture, they will just use political surrogates to try to shame those of us who insist they take responsibility for their actions.

In Shelby’s Defense

During the bridge-collapse coverage, inevitably my TV ended up tuned to WCCO-TV. I’m old school, and it’s the brand whose news values I trust most. And inevitably, anchor Don Shelby began intoning about structural engineering and physics.

My wife groaned. “This guy . . . .”

I know, Don is a showboat, but we are better off with him than without him. I can’t claim to be a confidant or a friend, but I know Don well enough to tell you he is one of the most intellectually curious guys around. He legitimately knows a lot about a lot of things. So he comes by it honestly.

With the exception of Cyndy Brucato, who knows politics and the state political game from her years inside it, I can’t think of another local TV anchor who has the intellect to actually add insight to a news story simply from what’s in his or her head.

Don suffers from our cynicism about TV news, which we come by honestly. It is a business that is shallow and cynical, and its values are not substantive ones, at least not anymore.

So give Don a break. He is legitimately the conscience of local TV news. And if you question his intellect, listen to his radio show on ‘CCO Radio each afternoon. Between the crushing commercial load, you’ll realize he knows bass fishing, he knows blues, he knows basketball, and he kind of knows bridges.

Random Thoughts on a Tragedy

Like most of you, I’m still trying to process my thoughts about what’s happened in Minneapolis. I’m going to avoid jumping to conclusions until a little more is known, but here is what I’ve been thinking and some questions I’ve been asking.

This Doesn’t Happen Here: When I moved to Minnesota in 1981 we were the state that got it right. We maintained our infrastructure, invested in our public facilities, and most of all had a sense of communal well-being that would not allow a bridge to deteriorate to the point of collapse. Louisiana and Minnesota were at opposite ends of the Mississippi and the universe. A massive bridge collapse is something that happens in states that fail to fund vital functions adequately. Someone convince me that this isn’t just another sign that Minnesota is regressing to the mean.

Are the Watchdogs Out There? In highly politicized times, where various government agencies manifestly fudge the truth, we need independent watchdogs. I seriously doubt the FOX9 Investigators are up to telling us why the bridge collapsed. Are there enough journalists left at the Star Tribune to get to the bottom of this? And if there aren’t, is it their fault, or ours? Some of both, I imagine.

The Good Guys: That said, one of the few truly independent federal agencies has long been the National Transportation Safety Board, whose findings are often ignored by the government agencies who have to implement the fixes the NTSB proscribes. If there’s anybody I trust to tell us why this bridge collapsed, it’s them.

The Farm Bill: I know there are a lot of hard-working, knowledgeable pros at the state Department of Transportation. But please convince me Minnesota has been well-served for the last five years with Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, a Chaska farmer and anti-spending/anti-tax advocate, as the state’s DOT boss.

You Get What You Pay For: We hear week after week on the national, state, and local level that our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling and under-maintained. Is it irresponsible to wonder if the chickens of Minnesota’s refusal to fund roads, bridges, and transit adequately for two decades are coming home to roost?

What Now? Highway 280 is a surprisingly elegant and proximate alternative to I–35W. But 280 has half 35’s capacity and the stretch of I-94 that you need to detour over to access it is congested all day long. Metro Transit noted that it had twenty-five extra buses at its disposal. Let’s see, 140,000 cars a day on the bridge, detour routes near capacity already, and twenty-five buses are all that stands between us and three years of gridlock. If time has value, this is going to be a very expensive next few years for folks who live or work north of the river.

Economic Victims: If there are any plusses to this tragedy, it is that the adjacent commercial nodes to the bridge, Dinkytown and the East Hennepin district, have numerous access points and largely rely on local traffic for customers. But it’s guys like Restaurant Alma’s Alex Roberts that I am concerned about. The University Avenue exits from 35W were how his far-flung customers accessed his restaurant. And the way many will get to his new Brasa on East Hennepin. They are closed for years. Twin Citians are notoriously weak-willed when it comes to inconvenience. After we’ve grieved and buried the dead, don’t forget to make a special effort to visit Alma and the many other great local businesses who now find themselves isolated from far-flung customers. We don’t need any more unintended victims.