Will it Take Stimulus Spending to Uncover “The Untold Delights of Duluth?”
03/13/09 4:37 PM EDT
By JOHN VAUGHT LABEAUME
Special to the Examiner
“High-speed rail has emerged as the cornerstone of Obama's ambitious attempt to remake the nation's transportation agenda,” enthused the front page of last Sunday’s Washington Post. Reporter Dan Eggen zeroes in on the very corridor of a proposed high speed light rail network that should raise the eyebrows of any committed earmark watchdog: a “Northern Lights Express,” linking the Twin Cities with Duluth. Eggen notes that, though progress “has crept along in fits and starts,” fueled by possible stimulus spending, the project could soon travel full steam ahead.
Eggens fails to mention is that this envisioned stretch of rail would speed through the district of Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-MN), who, serving as either chairman or Ranking Minority Member of the House Transportation Committee since 1995, has leveraged those powerful perches to drive hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars to the depressed Iron Range communities that he’s represented since 1974. Oberstar himself is not shy about hyping this boondoggle, and his picture features prominently on the home page of a site for a group agitating for full funding.
While the Post’s graphic took pains to remind the reader, via bold text, that the Express is merely “designated…for possible high-speed rail funding,” Duluth is not only the smallest of the Census Bureau’s Metropolitan Statistical Areas on that map, but, arguably, the most down in the dumps.
Rumored on the Web to be the town “where the Rust Belt began,” Duluth has suffered a decline that has spiraled since US Steel shuttered its plant back in 1981. Amtrak pulled up the tracks along this route back in Easter of 1985. City Fathers claim this route is necessary to relieve an Interstate clogged with cars hurtling along to Duluth’s casinos and “tourist attractions.” High speed rail will shuttle even more visitors and fill the city’s coffers, they insist.
Skepticism about railways that promise a dubious Duluthian renaissance is nothing new. An obscure Kentucky Congressman with a florid name, J. Proctor Knott, took to the House Floor in 1871 to lampoon “The Untold Delights of Duluth,” in opposing a land grant to lay track from St. Croix, Wisconsin to the then-tiny settlement on the shores of Lake Superior. “I felt instinctively that the boundless resources of that prolific region of sand and pine shrubbery would never be fully developed without a railroad constructed and equipped at the expense of the Government—and perhaps not then,” blustered Knott, to “roars of laughter,” reported the Congressional Globe.
And just what “Untold Delights” will be revealed to the tourists who speed to Duluth, other than hard luck folks pulling on “one-armed bandits?” A disquieting monument paying penance for a notorious lynching back in 1920, for one, and…a couple of short scenic railways and the Lake Superior Railroad Museum! U.S. taxpayers, however, shouldn’t be blamed if they don’t exactly “delight” over the thought of millions of federal transportation dollars frittered away on a questionable quest for tourists who want to marvel over minor attractions funded even more federal transportation funds.
John Vaught LaBeaume is Editor of ElectionDissection.com
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