Last week, Mayor R.T. Rybak and interim Police Chief Tim Dolan journeyed up to the North Side to announce their new public safety initiative, a plan designed to neutralize the young gangs that are terrorizing that part of town. This is not an easy thing for Rybak to do; North Side audiences--particularly the black activist community--have never taken to him. But last week’s press conference marked a new low for the mayor’s relationship with the vocal bunch of community leaders who speak with so much passion against the white power structure in Minneapolis.

For the past four months, Fire Chief Bonnie Bleskachek has been sitting at home drawing her full-time paycheck, while someone somewhere in the bowels of City Hall is investigating charges of harassment and sexual discrimination against her. I say someone somewhere because nobody anywhere in city government seems to know anything about who’s doing what or, more important, when.

Later this month, a City Council committee will hold a public hearing to discuss the pros and cons of criminalizing the sale of spray paint. The reasons for this particular obsession are many and varied: the perceived connection between graffiti and gangs, the annoyance of cleaning up after even the more artistic (mostly suburban) taggers, the belief that any blemish on the landscape will lead to some public safety crisis. All these are viable threats to civil society, I suppose, but such a prohibition doesn’t really solve any problems.

After several months of deteriorating relations, the city’s Police-Community Relations Council finally has the look of a failed experiment. Last month's news that community activists were prepared to walk away from the table has been anticipated for some time, and it seems likely that federal mediators will once again be asked to intervene in the process.

The state legislature’s orgy of spending on sports stadiums seems to have stopped just short of giving billionaire Vikings owner Zygi Wilf his requested football palace in Blaine, but that was the only restraint demonstrated last week by Republicans and Democrats alike in this year’s version of stadium-mania.

A little more than two years ago, the city was in the unenviable position of having to fill three top-level leadership positions: police chief, parks superintendent, and schools superintendent. This historic intersection of bureaucratic fumbling produced three controversial hiring decisions: Police Chief William McManus, schools superintendent Thandiwe Peebles, and parks superintendent Jon Gurban.

When a Level III sex offender moves into almost any suburban or small rural community, you can guarantee that residents will raise a ruckus. They’re rightly concerned about monitoring their new neighbor’s movements and behavior and protecting their children from harm. Why, then, is there no similar concern expressed when sex offenders settle in the most vulnerable parts of the inner city?

We are now seeing what appears to be--to borrow a phrase from the Bush administrations--the “final throes” of the Minnesota Twins’ stadium extortion.

A year after the Hennepin County Board passed a controversial measure to dedicate a countywide sales tax to building a new stadium for Twins owner Carl Pohlad, the legislature remains unconvinced and the Pohlads have trotted out one last feeble attempt at browbeating the public into acceding to their demands.

We were struck last week by a couple of intersecting items in the news—both involving Mayor R.T. Rybak—that we hope will not be indicative of the mayor’s priorities during the next four years. The first had to do with Rybak’s intention to become more active in the city’s public schools. The second speculated on his interest in running for the U.S. Senate. Neither inspires confidence about the direction he may be headed in this second term.

With the third resignation of a schools superintendent in the past two years, it may now be fair to say that the Minneapolis School Board has reached its nadir. We can now look back and see a series of three (or more) truly disastrous examples of institutional decision making. The first, of course, was the sycophantic devotion to the underperforming yet popular Carol Johnson, who broke her contract for a sweetheart deal in Memphis. Then came the inexplicable decision to turn the district over to David Jennings, a savvy Republican politician with no educational background to speak of--a decision, that predictably inflamed the knee-jerk “activists” in the black community and painted the School Board into a political corner and likely influenced its short-sighted “national” search (which turned out to be far more limited than was publicized) for a replacement, which gave us the ornery Dr. Peebles.