Furst Draft

Steve Lange, every week

This is a dream come true for us on the newspaper side of the mighty Post-Bulletin Co. building: Steve Lange, editor of Rochester Magazine, will write a weekly column for the newspaper, beginning Tuesday.

Steve is one of the best writers in town and until now his copy has been pretty much exclusive to the magazine, also published by P-B Co. We've picked up his longer magazine features on occasion, but he's never written a column that will appear first and only in the P-B.

How Steve's going to make this work in his schedule, I don't know, but he'll work that out and probably won't even break a sweat. His Oddchester column will run on the Southeast MN cover on Tuesdays.

Dip into it tomorrow and tell me what you think. Thousands of Rochester Magazine fans can't be wrong -- they love his magazine column and I'm quite sure you'll enjoy his weekly column as well.

 

Roundtable on poverty and affordable housing

Tomorrow in our elegant training room, we'll have a working lunch with about a dozen people in the community who deal with poverty and affordable housing issues in Rochester/Olmsted. Among them: City/county planning director Phil Wheeler, Don DeCramer of the Rochester Area Foundation's First Homes program, County Board member Stephanie Podulke, the Salvation Army's Jeff Urban and others.

It's part of the "Publisher for a Day" program that Publisher Randy Chapman has put together, and he'll write about that in his column Wednesday. The lunch will feature a roundtable talk about the current demographics in the county, homelessness, the challenge for the "working poor," and what's being done by public agencies and nonprofits to help people out of poverty.

We'll have coverage of that conversation in Thursday's paper and on this blog. If you have questions or issues you want addressed, note them here or send me an email: furst@postbulletin.com.

 

'That's like worrying about what's for dinner on the Titanic'

A reader from the Washington, D.C., area who happened to be in Rochester sent this note to the Answer Man last week:

     My name is Alex Kriss and I am from the commonwealth of Virginia. I have come to Rochester for a short period of time to clean out one of my relatives' houses. Over the years she has accumulated a lot of office supplies. This includes packs of 3 hole lined notebook paper, boxes of legal pads, many types of notebooks, pens, pencils, crayons, markers, paperclips, the list goes on and on. These supplies are all unopened and in the original boxes. In Virginia I have read in the paper and heard on the news that our school teachers have to buy supplies for their students out of their own pocket because of the cuts made to the school system so I called a Middle School near by to offer these materials free of charge. I didn't want to throw them into the landfill. The school said that they could not accept these materials due to policy. My question is this. Why? and who came up with this policy?
Any information you can provide would be most appreciated and I thank you for your time.

Before the Answer Man could even make any calls, Alex followed up with this:

Dear A-man
Thank you for getting back to me. I wrote to the school super Mr. Munoz and he said the middle school I contacted was mistaken and I could donate. Thanks for all you do. I enjoy reading your articles. I sure wish the Washington Post in D.C. had someone of your skills working for them.
Thanks again,
Alex

That made the Answer Man blush, but here's the point: Alex said he was interested in the coverage regarding Rochester's local-option sales tax, which he found sort of amusing, because it's small potatoes compared with the bigger fiscal issues the country faces. Here's his note:

I went to the Tea Party event monday. A little different than back home. The major topic here was the sales tax. To me that's like worrying about what's for dinner while on the Titanic.

For the record, here's what was for dinner on the Titanic on that fateful April night in 1912.

 

About today's jobless report

Here's something from the Times I haven't read before in the monthly unemployment reports:

Plus, bear in mind that the margin of error on all these numbers is huge. The headline number for payroll jobs is always plus or minus 100,000 jobs, meaning that March’s gain of 120,000 is not really statistically significant from 220,000 (or 20,000).