Dear Minnesota Democrats:

It’s once again road construction season. That means detours but, there’s little, if any, evidence that the various and sundry publics works, highway and transportation departments do much of anything to coordinate in order to make life easier for the taxpayer / voter / driver. Here in Chisago county, there’s one map for “County Transportation Improvement Plan” projects and a separate, different map for "Seal Coat Projects” and yet another for “Mill and Overlay” projects. On the latter, there’s instructions "For latest updates please visit www.chisagocounty.us , click on Road Construction” There is no “Road Construction" to click on at the linked page which is actually https://www.chisagocountymn.gov/. And the web site provides contact info for each of the cities and townships, but THERE IS NO COORDINATED MAP OF HIGHWAY PROJECT CONSTRUCTION IN THE COUNTY.

local? county? state? whose?

Photo by J. Harrington

So, DFL controlled government, how about if you mandate that the Minnesota Department of Transportation, before each road construction season, work with the 87 counties and all the cities and townships to prepare a county by county map showing all the road construction, of all types, in each county, AND THE ESTIMATED CONSTRUCTION TIME STARTS AND FINISHES, UPDATED WEEKLY.

You see, the taxpaying drivers don’t have the privilege of only detouring around projects at one level of government. We have to navigate them all. 

Palinode

By Sasha Steensen

O dove, fly to Aleppo with my Byzantine ode
And take my greeting to my kinsman.  
                                                –Mahmoud Darwish

Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle

wreathed with mistake.

 

Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened.

Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of

antiquity.

 

Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully

smoothing the lip of the continent.

 

What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.?

The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A.D.

 

A globe enclosed. Bottomless years. The train has stopped on the platform and no

one is there, for these are the Public Days, when the “Poor Association” claims the

museum’s building.

 

As if bound by the knots of invention, I found a wrong road dotted with weeds

and sorrows.

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