Monday, December 03, 2007

How about some karma offsets?

Headline below the fold on the front page of today's Strib:

How much bang for GOP bucks?
Packed hotel rooms, restaurants jammed with patrons, thousands of shoppers descending on retail stores.

That's the promise from organizers of the Republican National Convention who say the influx of visitors for the Sept. 1-4, 2008, event at the Xcel Energy Center will pump $150 million to $250 million into the state's economy.

. . . Mostly in the form of steak dinners, crappy red-white-and-blue souvenirs, and shiny nickels tossed to buskers screwing up "God Bless America." Figures take into account the likely 10-12 percent tips generously showered upon the servers, hotel staff, etc.

Okay, now consider the headline directly below the one about how the Twin Cities were about to be rolling around in bags of cash handed down straight from the altruistic elephants:

Concrete jungles' dirty secret: Miles of unpaved streets
. . . St. Paul has about 60 miles of streets that have never been finished to moderns standards -- though most of them have been covered with enough layers of oil that they appear to be roughly paved. Officials are working to change that.

. . . St. Paul is tackling its oiled streets by spending $12 million a year to pave roads, check underlying utilities and add curbs and lamp posts. As part of that program, which the city hopes will rid St. Paul of oiled streets by 2018 (!! - Ed.), residents are assessed about 25 percent of the cost -- about $38.50 per foot of a homeowner's lot width.

Gosh . . . if only the city had an unexpected windfall or some sort of sign that it was time to pretend to be part of the big leagues or . . .

Granted, the hundreds of millions of dollars brought in by the RNC don't exactly go right into the city's coffers. But still. Come on.

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