Here’s a late entry into this story about downtown St. Paul news racks and the Green Party activist on a mission to get them cleaned up.
It appears he’s not alone. Tony Bol, chair of Wabasha Partners, a new downtown business group, said he met with 24 Wabasha Avenue business advocates on Tuesday afternoon, and many store owners shared his concerns about dirty, graffiti-covered, misplaced news racks.
“We spent an agenda item talking about how bad news racks are, and how frustrated we were,” said Bol, who has been snapping pictures of artistically designed or uniform news racks in Minneapolis and other cities. “Downtown Stillwater has a very attractive way of managing these. We came to a few conclusions, that there’s a couple of problems. … If you go by the permit regulations, these should be removed. And that’s not happening.”
Bol, as chair, is thinking of writing a letter to the city explaining his concerns. He’ll probably want to address them to St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, who led the charge to enact the city’s news rack ordinance as city council member a decade ago. The ordinance passed in the year 2000, but it doesn’t have much teeth as far as enforcement goes. There are no real fines. The worst punishment, according to the story, is news rack removal at the vendor’s expense, and that doesn’t happen often — or at all:
Paul St. Martin, the city’s traffic engineer, is quoted as saying:
A vendor has 10 days to correct a violation or the city may remove a rack and charge it the cost, a rare step, he said. “Typically, the news rack vendor is fairly responsive,” he said.