It's amazing how boring the River Park Square parking garage story was in retrospect. A public-private partnership to build a parking garage for the mall downtown turned out to be not nearly as lucrative as the estimates predicted. Yet the entire saga was so convoluted — with so many legal twists and turns, combined with the fact that the rich family that owned the local daily newspaper was behind the project — conspiracy theories were inevitable. Time was, newspaper comment sections would be absolutely brimming with people treating the "Cowles family" like a combination of the Koch Brothers and the Illuminati. But two things happened: New scandals — Police Chief Frank Straub! Rachel Dolezal! — began to crowd out the old scandals, and newspapers stopped having comment sections. With time, the garage stopped becoming a symbol for elite corruption and became a symbol for the place you'd park your car while going to see Cocaine Bear.
2003: Best Local Conspiracy Theory
The River Park Square Parking Garage Fiasco
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