In a cover story in this week's Pulse, Felein defends his friend and fellow Green Dean Zimmermann who was recently convicted of bribery.
On the Minneapolis Issues List, The Greens rallied to Zimmermann's fallen standard. Senate candidate and PRT promoter Michael Cavlan accused the Star Tribune (which has always given Zimmermann favorable coverage) of being... get ready to laugh... "corporate". Another list member, Chris Johnson accuses "special interests" of being "out to get Zimmermann".
David Greene responds:
You're kidding, right? This is why the Green party is difficult to take seriously. It's not about what other people have done. It's about what DEAN did. If all of our other councilmembers were members of the mafia, it wouldn't change the fact that what Dean did was wrong.
Now, I was no fan of Dean, I'll freely admit that. His work for PRT set back getting real transit going in the metro area quite a few years. In the end, he was a fairly ineffective councilmember but he did just enough damage to transit by diverting resources to pie-in-the-sky vaporware that has not a chance of succeeding. He simultaneously encouraged anti-transit legislators to gum up the conversation using calculated efforts to sell PRT as "real transit" in order to kill systems like LRT that are proven to work. This did not, in my mind, serve the community.
Then Ed Felein weighs in...
I find myself in the curious position of agreeing with David Greene at the same time I disagree with him. I agree that PRT was idiotic and that our energies should be directed toward making LRT as safe, fast, non-polluting and economical as possible.
Are the Greens throwing PRT overboard to save their sinking ship?
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