The St. Paul Port Authority, tasked with bringing business into St. Paul, is kicking out a profitable, tax-paying, unsubsidized, woman-owned, 48-year-old family business. It is a company that pays its 43 employees — nearly half of whom are union members — an average wage of $24 per hour with full medical benefits.This part of St. Paul is, uh represented by a do-gooder socialist who obviously prefers the heavy hang of government policy to free enterprise and is helping chase away those who are currently paying the freight for all the jive dreamed up by the city council. In the last hour, I heard the real estate guy from the Saint Paul Port Authority say outright that they are happy to bulldoze legitimate existing business in order to wring even more tax revenue from the same land.
While showing this successful company the way out of town, the Port Authority has not found a replacement. What the St. Paul Port Authority is engaged in is little more than real estate speculation with $10 million of taxpayers' money.
Its current actions are an attempt to use a trumped-up environmental concern to return Minnesota to the bad old days when city planners had a free hand to push for their pet projects by abusing their eminent domain powers, using boatloads of taxpayer dollars, and turning property and subsidies over to private developers for so-called "economic development." The developer gets the land and a sweetheart deal, the Port Authority gets to crow about a new project, and the rightful landowner gets the boot.
(The port authority) claims that Advance's site must be taken for environmental remediation and points to high levels of methane and lead to justify the taking. What the Port Authority refuses to acknowledge in public, however, is that Advance's property complies with all the MPCA's directives.
All you can do is fall on your knees and hop that 'representative government' doesn't deep you unacceptable tomorrow.
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