Walz morgue for sale at $1.25 million loss

At the height of the pandemic last year, Gov. Tim Walz told the people of Minnesota he was so afraid of dead bodies piling up outside funeral homes that he purchased an abandoned fruit warehouse for $6.9 million to use a morgue. With Minnesotans looking to him for leadership and guidance, Walz used the morgue purchase to create a statewide panic that forced people to retreat into their homes for months. It wasn’t the pandemic that caused the fear. It was the overreaction to it by “leaders” like Tim Walz.

Driving Walz’s morbid predictions of dead bodies overwhelming funeral home capacity was his stubborn reliance on “models” that predicted first 74,000 COVID deaths, then 50,000 deaths, then 22,000 deaths. The models proved to be criminally wrong, and our incurious press eventually stopped asking about them last fall.

Needless to say, Walz’s morgue sat empty.

It did make news by winning American Experiment’s inaugural Golden Turkey Award for outrageous spending. The vote wasn’t even close — Minnesotans recognized the wasteful spending on the morgue even as COVID cases grew last fall during the contest.

This week the Walz administration announced they are looking to sell the morgue. If you take them at their word, the sale of the morgue means the pandemic is over, with a Walz administration spokesperson saying last year:

At a minimum, the State of Minnesota will keep the building until the pandemic ends. This disease is unpredictable, so it’s prudent to maintain the ability to stand up a temporary morgue until the danger passes.

This would be breaking news if words actually had meaning in this administration. Nonetheless, the building is for sale and taxpayers stand to lose money on our ill-fated purchase.

The $6.9 million cost was outlined in a StarTribune article on May 20, 2020:

In a deal that closed Monday, the state paid $5.5 million for the grocery distribution warehouse and land; operating costs and improvements to ready the building for its new purpose will bring the total to $6.9 million.

With a proposed sale price of $5,650,000, the state stands to lose over a million dollars when the dust settles. But what price should we put on the fear needed to convince Minnesotans to give up our freedoms, close down businesses and schools and force children to wear masks?

The Walz morgue will go down in history as a monument to both stupid spending and poor leadership in a crisis.