Twice now, because once apparently isn’t enough when the city of St. Paul wants its way, the courts have ruled that the city willfully broke the law by denying Bob Cattanach the plans for the Summit Avenue bike trail. He first sued last year and won. The city appealed his victory. Last week, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that St. Paul did, in fact, willfully violate the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. Just flat out ignored it. Cattanach was awarded $30,000 plus administrative fees.

“Haven’t seen a nickel,” he said the other day.

Cattanach, a retired Dorsey & Whitney partner but still a practicing attorney, lives on Summit. He wondered what the full extent of the plans were when the proposal went before the St. Paul City Council in 2023, what the bike trail truly meant for the historic avenue. He asked. Any tax-paying citizen was entitled to the information.

Minnesota Statute 13.01 Government Data, Subdivision 3 “establishes the presumption that government data are public and are accessible by the public for both inspection and copying unless there is a federal law, a state statute, or a temporary classification of data that provides that certain data are not public.” Nope, there was none of that certain data stuff. Open up the books and show us exactly you have in mind.

Cattanach asked and asked and asked. He was rebuffed, ignored, blocked and slow-walked. Ultimately, he went to the courts. Put in its most basic terms, planners, presumably but perhaps not exclusively, under the direction of former Public Works director Sean Kershaw, were probably sitting around one day shooting the breeze and somebody said, “Hey, let’s make Summit Avenue a part of a regional bike trail, but maybe we shouldn’t tell those Summit Avenue people everything.”

Never mind that another bike lane is not the phoenix that will lift St. Paul out of the ashes, what in the world did it mean for Summit? When a citizen asked for information, the citizen didn’t get it.

Cattanach and other members of SOS (Save Our Street, or Save Our Summit) believe that “it is highly likely that critical data that would have demonstrated that the city’s failure to consider the impact of destroying Summit Avenue’s tree canopy and the dangers of an off-road trail, which creates conflict points for cyclists every 40 feet, has been destroyed and expects to seek additional exemplary damages.”

Goodness, the prospect of these unelected planners wishing or intending to dramatically upend one of the nation’s most charming old avenues was so urgent and so willfully and knowingly disruptive that they quite possibly destroyed the plans that showed the true and damaging nature of the project.

And ugly. Let’s not forget ugly. We don’t know how many trees would be lost, but probably a number that comes up ugly.

Bicycles are fun and great exercise, and with electric bikes flooding the market, even people with bad knees can ride. But bicycles are not going to save St. Paul, no matter how hard the green acolytes hector and harangue the rest of us. The planners would be serving us well just filling potholes or figuring out a foolproof way to keep the streetlights working.

What’s next? Well, for starters, slow down and follow the law. Planners will either have to be transparent or do a better job of lying. Transparency is preferred. Engage citizens who are paying for public projects in the first place, in this case particularly Summit Avenue citizens, especially the guy named Cattanach, who had the expertise, the time and the extraordinary patience to accomplish what should have been forthcoming more than three years ago. I don’t know him, but we are lucky to have him.

Virtually everybody I know does not live on Summit, and virtually everybody I know wants Summit to be left alone.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.