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When I saw the Star Tribune article ("Hate crime added to Va. charges," May 17) about a man clubbing two congressional staffers in Virginia, I scanned down for the paragraph I suspected I would find. Xuan-Kha Tran Pham's father said his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late teens, and he had been trying without success to arrange mental health care for him. The son refused to appear in court, so a judge read the four counts against him by video while he huddled under a blanket in his cell. I read further for the sentence I also suspected I would find. "At this time it is not clear what the suspect's motivation may have been," police said.

Really! Is this the best we can do for people with schizophrenia and their families?! Putting up innumerable barriers against them getting care if they won't do so voluntarily, but then pounce when they are finally delusional enough to commit a crime? Unlike people with other mental illnesses, most people with schizophrenia have anosognosia, a brain condition that leads them to believe they are not sick, so they will not seek care.

Our Minnesota civil commitment statute is deemed best in the nation by the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center, but we are not as superior as we should be. We are like all other states, with jails and prisons filled with way too many people with serious mental illnesses. Would we treat those suffering from Alzheimer's this way?

Mindy Greiling, Roseville

The writer is a retired state legislator.

Lewis Zeidner and Mary Beth Lardizabal correctly call out the mental health crisis facing our children and youth ("Disabled, vulnerable, abandoned. Enough is enough," Opinion Exchange, May 17). Recent investigative reports point out the lack of funding for mental health compared with other health care conditions and the lack of mental health parity enforcement. We can and must do better, and we're hoping that there will be significant investments this legislative session.

The one thing I would take issue with in the commentary is stating that parents are abandoning their children in the emergency room. It's the system, not the parents, that has abandoned these children. Without residential treatment or intensive home services available, what are parents supposed to do to keep their children safe? Too many parents have been referred to child protection in these situations, as if child protection has the magic wand to create services that don't exist, or find workers who can't be found by our providers. Families then fall into greater distress being in the child protection system — and still no one can find the care that their child desperately needs.

Sue Abderholden, St. Paul

The writer is executive director, NAMI Minnesota.

The May 16 counterpoint by Jim Brimeyer and Sue Sanger, "Wrong route was the root of rail line woes," provides excellent and much-needed perspective on the Southwest light-rail project history from those involved in the planning process.

Former Metropolitan Council Chair Susan Haigh wrote in 2013, "The Twin Cities' privately owned bus company was rapidly disintegrating — a victim of rising fares, declining ridership, and an aging bus fleet." In fact, the company was a victim of Kid Cann and his gang looting it and burning it to the ground.

Seven short years after the local mob's lawyer Fred Ossanna was sent to prison for fraud, the Metropolitan Regional Development Plan of 1967 proposed a concept for regional transit with a rail backbone, organized to connect "Constellation Cities." (Southdale appears to be in the process of becoming one of those.)

Organized opposition to anything rail came instantaneously and from every direction. It has been relentlessly maintained for the past five decades, especially at the Legislature. If not for Jesse Ventura's Hiawatha Blue Line coup in 2000, light rail anywhere in the metro region would have remained dead on arrival here.

It's not as if this is the only instance of moronic government mismanagement and fraud; razing the Metropolitan Building and the rest of the Gateway District, racist federal redlining of Black neighborhoods, the Interstate 94 destruction of Rondo, and closing Nicollet Avenue to build a Kmart and massive surface parking come to mind.

But we should stop finger-pointing and spend our valuable time figuring out how to mitigate the damage. Junking the Southwest line and returning $2 billion plus interest to the feds is a sure loser.

William Beyer, St. Louis Park

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A May 11 letter writer asks, "Would someone please explain why a Senate committee voted to reappoint Charlie Zelle to the Met Council?" in view of problems with the Southwest light-rail project. I'll try.

This project has a long and complex history, with plenty of mistakes by different actors long before Zelle joined the council several years ago. The project's general contractor places much of the blame on the engineering design for the Kenilworth tunnel, a process that began in 2011.

Delays and cost increases are common when building large public works projects in dense urban areas. This project's updated cost per mile ($190 million) is lower than peer projects in Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and on par with many others (according to the legislative auditor's report). This suggests that original plans were unrealistic rather than that construction has been mismanaged.

Richard Adair, Minneapolis

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Monday's commentary attributing the problems of the Southwest light-rail project to the early routing decision favoring the existing railroad route through Cedar-Isles over a street alignment farther east omits key facts and thus leaves a false and misleading impression.

A critical objective for the SWLRT service was a fast enough journey time from the western suburbs to downtown to entice drivers to use transit instead of cars, reducing congestion in Uptown, Kenwood and Cedar-Isles neighborhoods. The rail alignment did that, but none of the more easterly alternatives came close, not Uptown, not Lyndale and not Nicollet. The Uptown route would have defeated a core purpose of building the line at all.

Second, the commentary fails to address the real cause of SWLRT cost overruns: engineering decisions that added many hundreds of millions in costs unnecessary to a successful LRT line and without commensurate benefits. The Cedar-Isles tunnel leads the list, but the monster Hopkins viaduct and the routing immediately adjacent to BNSF's freight corridor are close behind.

It seems there is no common sense or fiscal responsibility in this state's government (i.e., "Program for free tuition is OK'd," May 11). Citing reduced enrollment and possibly having to close low-enrollment state colleges, the Legislature has decided to boost enrollment by giving it away free. Can you imagine if the private sector used this same plan? Car sales down, let's give them away free. Pizza sales down, free pizza for everyone.

Potential students are not seeing the benefit of a college degree costing close to $25,000 per year (room, board, tuition and books). College costs have increased multiple times the rate of inflation over the last 40 to 50 years. Why not cut costs for everyone by reducing bloated administration and providing more online options?