Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [67]
In Atlanta, the mass transit riders were predominantly African-Americans. I remember some young black kids recognizing me once and saying, “What are you doing on here?” I guess they felt that, being a celebrity, I should be riding in a limousine stuck in traffic. I responded, “Do I look stupider than you? You’re on here getting where you need to go for a buck and a half—well, so am I!” They laughed, and accepted that as pretty damned logical.
After I became governor, I went to Denver to study their light-rail system. They’re way ahead of the curve. They’ve eliminated buses from downtown. Imagine how good that is for traffic—and the environment. It’s the old wagon wheel concept; all the spokes lead to the city center, and those are your trains. Let the buses connect to the trains.
The Denver officials told me, “Governor, the most difficult problem you’re going to have is acquiring the land.” I said, “No, we’ve already got it.” When I was a kid growing up in south Minneapolis, the state had come in along the Hiawatha Avenue Corridor, confiscated all the homes, and made people leave. I remembered that because friends of mine had been forced to move. They were going to make a highway along there, but somehow it never happened. The corridor sat there and I remember the locals planting gardens along this wide-open piece of land. Now the state had owned the corridor for thirty years, and it was regarded as an ideal place for a portion of the light-rail system.
The idea was that the system would run for 11.5 miles, connecting the Mall of America to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to downtown, running through South Minneapolis and the Phillips neighborhood. That’s one neighborhood over from where I grew up. I found out that 60 percent of the people who live there can’t afford to own a car. By providing them a means of transportation, they’d now have the ability to get downtown or to the mall, and find at least an entry-level job.
I tried to explain this one day to the Republican House Speaker, Steve Sviggum—how these people would no longer be stuck in their neighborhood and could go seek gainful employment elsewhere. I’ll never forget his response: “I don’t have anybody elected down there, what do I care?”
That floored me. I looked at him and said, “Wait a minute, I thought we were elected to serve all the people of the state of Minnesota.” But he just wanted to make sure the Republican state of Minnesota advanced. And in the inner city of Minneapolis, places like the Phillips neighborhood, Republicans don’t even bother to campaign. So those people don’t count.
I took abuse from talk radio show hosts who called the light-rail plan “the big boondoggle.” Or “the train to nowhere,” as some Republicans preferred to say. Their notion was, we have our cars, Minnesota doesn’t need mass transit. One morning I boarded a Metro Transit bus at my home in suburban Maple Grove, along with transit officials, several lawmakers, and the media. A sign on the bus said, “Ventura Express.” We headed downtown during rush hour, a twenty-mile journey that took about an hour. “Bumper to bumper, stop and start,” I intoned through a microphone at the front of the bus.
A couple of hours later, a House Committee voted down my request for $60 million in light-rail funding. That money was crucial to getting the federal government to kick in another $250 million. The “Ventura Express” ran again that afternoon, back to Maple