St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman says he usually delivers an upbeat message to groups like the visiting RCGA delegation from St. Louis. But seeing the wreckage of the I-35W bridge out the window of the Guthrie Theater, where he was speaking Monday, put him in a downbeat mood. So his speech, he acknowledged,was more negative than usual. He focused on the infrastructure issue:

The bridge disaster has become a metaphor for our community in terms of what we are going to do to deliver services to the people who live in our state.  

He turned his attention to suburbanites, who he said don’t appreciate the need for regional investment in roads, bridges and mass transit:

They’re saying, ‘You know what, we can go it alone. We’ll be just fine.’ The truth is, we won’t be just fine. … We’ve gone away from that sense of common goals.

Then, he returned to the bridge issue, noting that  Missouri’s Legislature had passed an infrastructure-repair bill in special session:

If a state 600 miles downriver could make that kind of decision and commitment, you’d think the state that it happened in could do the same, but we didn’t. Is it going to take another bridge collapse before we act? … That bridge collapse has got to be a wake-up call not just for the Twin Cities, not just for the state of Minnesota, but for this country.