First off I'm surprised an article like this would get published in the Star Tribune but it makes a lot of valid points. I'm 35 and the town I live and grew up in has gone down hill seriously in the last 25 years or so. When I was young we could buy most of what we needed to survive in town. Now you have to drive 20 to 30 miles to get a lot of things other than liquor or to go to church. This area has a lot of agriculture in it but we don't have a coop and other than a small feed store, most supplies come from 20+ miles away and most grain is marketed 40+ miles away. It has quickly become a bedroom community for people who work out of town even though we have a large hospital (supposedly around 900 employees) but quite a few of their employees drive here to work from other towns. I get annoyed with the metro area that has to have a billion dollars of state money for a light rail line that may serve a hundred thousand people in the suburbs but complain when outstate counties ask for a couple million to do major highway improvements that probably affect just as many people. There is getting to be too many state legislators from the metro that want to decide how we are supposed to live our lives out here and have no real idea what is actually going on.