"This is how commuter rail across the country starts," said Tim Yantos, executive director of the Northstar Corridor Development Authority. "Two thousand riders a day means 2,000 cars taken off the road system every day. That's encouraging."

Commuter rail, across the country starts by lying about reasonable expectations of use in order to institute a financially shaky cram-down? Come on, Tim, can't you say Met Council is nationally unique in some ways?

The "everyone lies" thing, means you too Tim, i.e., you're within the the classic lines of the logicians' liar paradox.

This Nov. 8 online item continues from the screenshot text. Read it all.

Yantos is no turnip and has to know the Met Council is famous for lying on the high side in imposing growth quotas for towns under its thumb. Now - big news - it lied in getting Northstar done ahead of more sensible things to add earlier in building a grid, such as the central corridor which now has an uphill push because the agency cannot be fully trusted.

Sure, nobody has a reliable crystal ball, but using bogus ridership "projections" likely involves their voodoo planners simply always read the chicken entrails on the high side; science and good statistical practices be damned in the exercise.

About a month after the publishing of the Finance and Commerce lead item, STRIB also covers the "Oh my, the ridership is not there" brand of communication emanating now from the transit pundits who put Northstar second in line after Hiawatha, instead of building the Central Corridor earlier, with always scarce dollars.

STRIB coverage is significant because of the wider readership base it has, over Finance and Commerce.

Coincidently, you do not see STRIB asking Met Council voodoo merchants to do their readership forecasting and then basing payroll on such numbers. They'd have gone fully broke years ago, had they been that foolish.

In opening, Paul Levy of STRIB says:

Barely a year old, the $317 million Northstar commuter rail line will fall 20 percent short of ridership projections for 2010, according to a Metro Transit official who said "we're very concerned."

Expectations for the 41-mile line from Big Lake to Minneapolis have been set back by the 7 percent unemployment rate, reduced downtown parking fees, moderate (until recently) gas prices and improvements to Hwy. 10, said Metro Transit spokesman Bob Gibbons.

"That's not how we built our expectations," Gibbons said.

While cost-conscious officials have managed to keep Northstar within its $16.8 million annual budget, they now face a winter without baseball and the boost the line got from Twins home games. Special-events trains to and from the Target Field station were packed during the season.

Northstar's ridership was still 5 percent below expectations through August. By October, when the Twins' season ended, ridership was nearly 11 percent shy of 2010 projections. The numbers for November and early December, not yet calculated, are expected to plummet, Gibbons said.

Proponents of the line remain undeterred.

"This is how commuter rail across the country starts," said Tim Yantos, executive director of the Northstar Corridor Development Authority.

Lies, prevarications, and mendacious obfuscation are prevalent "across the country?". Excuses, excuses, excuses? Yada, yada, yada, more yada? Same old, same old? If as Yantos says, it always starts that way, when does it end?

Tell that entire story elsewhere, and let us believe that the truth instead is that the numbers were fudged up from the get-go, intentionally and not in error by overlooking foreseeable downside factors so clear ahead of actual numbers that a child could anticipate things.

So, bottom line: STRIB, online Dec. reports talking front men for the operation fronting a host of excuses, as if downside ridership numbers was not foreseen as at all a possibility when the tub-thumpers were out and about and when BNSF was consistently robbing the citizenry of millions in negotiations with Clifford Greene.

What a surprise.

Read both articles front-to-end. Ramsey readers, do so from the perspective of town fathers wanting to install a fourteen million rail stop structure, based on insufficient ridership and a Field of Dreams mentality going with the use of public money. So is it how they'd spend their own resources, in business. Go figure that one out.

Not only do they want it, but the entire joke of The RESIDENCE at The COR, contracting gives the promoters a walk-away power if the CITY DOES NOT BUILD IT by a cutoff date. Again, go figure.

Rental housing, calling all the shots.

As Northstar in its entirety was a cramdown, the toot-toot Ramsey Crystal Palace across "Civic Center Drive" from the Norman Castle will be nothing else. How the money flow is jiggered between local tax money, state tax money, Met Council tax money, and federal tax money, the common theme in that is "tax money." Call it fees, call it assessments, call it grants, but view it for what it is - spending ever-scarcer tax dollars one way instead of in some alternative manner, for other goals. AND - treating city reserves as risk capital is not a fiscally conservative thing, know that, believe it, it is the truth.

Ben Dover whispered to me once, "Referendum," as I walked past his pedestal across Sunwood from the Norman Castle. That's a most interesting word with regard to Crystal Palace intentions.


Referendum is a nice word.

They had one recently on technicalities of administrative organization, but never one on profligate spending. Go figure. Opinion of Ben and the rest of the citizenry is chopped liver.


*********************
I would be satisfied with any outcome of a referendum. 


Wouldn't you? 


Who wouldn't? 


Why not?


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photos: Crystal Palace from city public data; The RESIDENCE from ABC Newspapers, this link; Ben Dover the Ramsey Tax Payer across Sunwood from the Norman Castle, a Crabgrass original.