Readers Write: Light rail, vacant St. Paul CVS, progressives and MAGA, fraud, Venezuelan boats

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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The Minnesota Star Tribune website on Monday featured an article on the Metro Transit’s problems and how its riders view it (“Rider texts show scope of Metro Transit’s problems,” Oct. 7). Comments were allowed initially, but then they were cut off and no longer visible. I can only assume that the users’ assessment of our light rail is not one that the Star Tribune wants to hear. I was an early supporter of light rail and used it frequently in the beginning. But no longer. The bad conduct, drug use and unsanitary conditions override any benefit of not having to drive one’s car. Until fare payment is strictly enforced with serious penalties, nothing will change. It will continue to function as mobile homeless shelter for the poor but not much else. But I suppose that’s cheaper than providing adequate housing for those in need and sufficient treatment centers for those addicted. A sad commentary on our times.

Jerry Johnson, Minneapolis

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I returned to Minneapolis last week after a month away, and to my surprise and delight I saw beautiful new murals under the light-rail station on Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue. This site has been plagued by graffiti and trash for years. I have observed that while blank walls on freeways and buildings attract graffiti, taggers seem to respect art and murals affixed to such walls. We learned long ago that places that are defaced by graffiti are signals to those with criminal intent that no one is watching and no one much cares, and so they are magnets for other crimes. The city has invested in murals along the Greenway, and the taggers have thus far left them alone, making that corridor beautiful and safer. I hope that the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the cities will consider investing in more of the same on our freeway walls along Interstate 94, Interstate 35 and anywhere else that has become a magnet for graffiti.

Brooke Magid Hart, Minneapolis

The writer correctly pointed out that the troubled corner has a long history of abandoned structures (Midway Bank, Walgreens and more recently a nearby Cub Foods). And why is that? The very large elephant in the room: crime. It’s the same abandonment problem facing Lake Street in Minneapolis, from Uptown east to near the river, and in sections of the downtowns of both cities, to name but a few.

In the case of the CVS site, without seizing the property under eminent domain, there exists the possibility that the current owner will find a buyer just as absent from the community as the current one is, as the writer correctly points out. But unless the very real threat to public safety is addressed at that intersection and others facing decline in the core cities, the announcement of any grandiose redevelopment plans will have a hollow ring.

Bruce Lindquist, St. Louis Park

As a political independent with sympathy for the good of both political parties, I find it astonishing to witness the myopia of progressives. They are as off-kilter from the center as guest commentator Katherine Kersten is. The recent letter “Thank you, Walz, but goodbye” (Readers Write, Oct. 6), along with recent comments by Nekima Levy Armstrong (“The truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy,” Strib Voices, Sept. 20), both demonstrate that. Neither seem to grasp the reality that if racial preference laws based on skin color/ethnicity were wrong in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s to the 1960s, then they are wrong today.

The injustice of today’s racial preference laws is the single greatest factor in the rise of the MAGA movement and the ensuing destruction it has wreaked. The greatness of America is the practice of freedom, opportunity for individual accomplishments and the protection from predators, foreign and domestic, that ensues with a federal government focused on protecting its citizens from those predators. If Minnesota’s moderate Democrats don’t reassert themselves, the MAGA movement will reduce Minnesota to just another Mississippi or Alabama: poor, undereducated and wondering why the world has passed them by.

Regarding “Legislative auditor: Fraud will get worse before it gets better” (Strib Voices, Oct. 5): Of course! The problem, which any experienced manager can see, is that Minnesota has a “no fault” personnel management system.

Whatever the current scandal, the response is always the same: “Gee, we’re sorry. We didn’t recognize ... ” and a committee or work group is created. No one is ever demoted, fired or reassigned. This would never happen in the real world. In the real world, people responsible for major screwups get fired.

Government employment is different. In both government and the real world, high-performing employee turnover is significant. The good guys have plenty of jobs available to them and take advantage of opportunities. In the real world, too, low performers are fired, laid off or otherwise removed. This helps keep the workforce quality high even as the high performers come and go. In government, though, there is no significant culling of low performers. The low performers have few outside opportunities, so the workforce stagnates. These lifers are assigned to large and expensive programs that then become the front-page stories.

This is not hard, folks. We don’t need committees and studies. We need to ditch the no-fault personnel system. Screw up, get fired. Done.

Geo. Anderson, Minneapolis

A recent interview with the wife of one of the men incinerated by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said her husband was on the boat and was a village fisherman. This story deserves more inquiry. The next question that all four strikes suggest is, how does the U.S. know that they were all narco-terrorists on missions to declare a fatal drug war on our country? These boats were destroyed almost 2,000 miles from the nearest U.S. landfall in Port Everglades, Fla. For all I know, any illegal drugs aboard could have been headed to over a hundred Caribbean islands including Jamaica, Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, Cuba, Puerto Rico or even further to Bermuda.

Was this boat capable of a 2,000-mile open ocean crossing when its probably projected range was about 600 nautical miles without refueling stops? Were there mother ships awaiting them with more fuel? Until our government releases data on the type of boat, its fuel capacity, its ocean worthiness and its payload potential I will remain skeptical that any information coming from Hegseth and Trump isn’t a complete fabrication.

If Trump and Hegseth are going to commit murder on the high seas in our name, I believe they should have solid proof of these vessels’ cargo and sailors’ intents. This proof should be clearly spelled out for anyone to assess. I doubt that any such proof exists, and these strikes are more in a series of presidential efforts to distract us from his role in the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile scandal.

“Don’t look behind that curtain! Look at what a great job I’m doing killing narco-terrorists who want to destroy the U.S.” Why would a drug cartel want to kill off its largest consumer, the U.S.? This does not add up, but then I am just a humble retired contractor.