First, no transit and, now, no East Metro section either

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	First, no transit and, now, no East Metro section either Maybe you saw the front-page article titled “Mass Transit vs. Mess Transit” in Monday’s StarTribune. The sub-title says, “Commuters in the east (metro) wonder if they’ve missed the bus.” “In the west metro area,” reporters Dave Peterson and Kevin Giles write, “transit is bursting out all over….” You’ve got the Hiawatha line up and running. You’ve got the Northstar commuter line, and bus rapid transit on I-35W and Cedar Avenue being developed. And a light rail line to Eden Prairie looks like the next priority. Meanwhile, only the Central Corridor linking the two downtowns will provide any service to the east metro, but it won’t “touch any suburb in the east.” It’s not just commuters, then, who “wonder.” “Washington County commissioners are angry,” too, Peterson and Giles report. The issue is heating up, they say, because “new sources of funding in Minnesota and the election of a transit-friendly national administration…has increased the amount of money for transit… (thus) accelerating long-dormant plans.” Still, there’s more than a little irony in the timing of the Strib’s report. When Giles called last week to ask me some questions about transit services in Washington County, he said that the article would appear Saturday, in the Strib’s last-ever East Metro section. Instead, it was delayed a couple of days and appeared in a new section combining national, international, state and local news, all in one. So, first, Washington County isn’t getting its fair share of metro transit services. And, now, they’re taking away our East Metro section. It’s a conspiracy! Or, as Peterson and Giles report, “There’s…a strong suspicion…(that) money talks!” The truth is that for 150 years now, two-thirds of population growth and development in the metro area have gone west, into areas surrounding the more dynamic of the Twin Cities. Meanwhile, here in the east metro, we’ve taken our lead from the more reticent of the Twins, a place where the Gatsbys were always treated with a little more suspicion and where, if money talked, it at least didn’t have to talk quite so damned loudly. Today, the west side has twice the population of the east. The Golden Triangle in and around Eden Prairie has a critical mass of jobs and workers that the east will never approach, and the 458,000 square foot former State Farm headquarters in Woodbury remains vacant three years after its original tenant moved out. Large employers don’t think there’s enough population nearby from which to draw a quality workforce. So, yes, of course, money talks. The west is a better market for large employers and newspapers and buses and rail transit. But if there’s been a conspiracy, it’s been a conspiracy of us east siders, past and present, who like things more or less the way they are, and who don’t believe as firmly as those west siders that change will necessarily be for the better. And it’s been a conspiracy to keep more of a neighborhood and small town and rural feel in our communities. Which is, of course, a fine thing. It’s just that transit doesn’t fit the model very well. Or, as I told Giles, “We’d like to have transit, but there’s a lot of folks…who wouldn’t like to have the (population and housing) density that goes with it.” Now, lest anyone interpret that to mean that I don’t support investing in transit in Washington County, I do. I just don’t understand a philosophy that says, “The east metro’s real problem…is that Hennepin County is rich…and the east metro is not.” I don’t understand the demand for our “fair share,” or for “regional balance,” at least not when it seems to mean that we want what Hennepin County has got. We don’t. A more reasonable philosophy for Washington County, it seems to me, would be one that for many decades guided that most quintessential of east side companies, 3M. “Make a little,” they used to say, “sell a little.” Minimize your risks. Don’t go for broke, lest you accomplish exactly that. Or, in other words, in creating expectations of a light rail line on Highway 36, we’re going for broke. We’re setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment. And broke, and failure, in this case, would mean losing what little transit services we have, such as express bus service from Forest Lake and Minneapolis and St. Paul. Bashing Hennepin County is not going to get us where we want to go. “Spend a little, get a little” would seem to be more of the east siders way. The Washington County commissioners need simply to focus on achieving the achievable, which means first saving the transit that we’ve already got. Marc Hugunin lives in the city of Grant.