New this year is Spotlight on Maplewood, a cable TV program being produced by the City of Maplewood. And I'm happy to see that, in case you don't have cable, or don't have the chance to watch or record it at the times when it's played, episodes are being put online so that you can watch them on your computer.
Here is the August episode. In it, City Manager Jim Antonen interviews Ann Hutchinson from the Maplewood Nature Center about the Extreme Green Makeover; and then talks with environmental planner Shann Finwall about the idea of organized trash collection.
The League of Minnesota Cities has a new video in their "Outside the Ox" online series, calling attention to the fiscal crisis facing cities in our state. Here it is:
John Gunyou is the endorsed DFL candidate for Lieutenant Governor. I found him an intriguing choice for running mate Margaret Anderson Kelliher, not only for his background as a finance commissioner in the Carlson administration (an important qualification considering the fiscal challenges Minnesota faces) but his more recent work as city manager of Minnetonka.
I had a chance to record a very short interview this past weekend with Mr. Gunyou at a DFL door-knocking event, where I asked him about the relationship between the state and local governments.
Matt Bostrom, who is running for Ramsey County Sheriff (and has my support), addressed the delegates at the June 15th endorsing convention for the Maplewood City Council special election. I recorded him speaking and uploaded it to YouTube:
The June/July 2010 episode of Your Police Report pays tribute to fallen Maplewood Police Sargeant Joe Bergeron. In case you unable to catch a broadcast on government access cable, it's also available to watch online any time:
Minnesota cities face tremendous strains in today's economic and political environment. The Executive Director of the League of Minnesota Cities, Jim Miller, recently wrote in an e-mail to city officials:
We have recently contracted with the University of Minnesota for an analysis of the trends that will shape city budgets in the decade to come and the dire financial constraints and painful policy choices that lie ahead for all cities. We are preparing to publicly release the results of this analysis at the League’s Annual Conference in St. Cloud, June 23-25. The results are stunning – both in the severity of the pain ahead and in how widespread that pain will be felt if nothing changes.
The League of Minnesota Cities has launched a new campaign to build awareness and solicit input from the public on the topic of city services and funding. Part of the campaign is the following web video:
People are invited to visit outsidetheox.org, to share reactions, comments, and ideas.
At this past weekend's DFL convention, a little ritual unfolded with each candidate nominated for endorsement. First someone would endorse, which supposed to be just the name of a proposed candidate. Then it was necessary to have 50 delegates second the endorsement, by raising hands. Then the supporters of the candidate were given time to demonstrate -- this usually involved a lot of marching around the convention, cheering, sign waving, etc. -- and the candidate was given a chance to address the convention.
State Auditor Rebecca Otto, who is seeking reelection and faced no challenge for her endorsement, offered the most entertaining demonstration by far. She turned the stage over to her teenage son's band. She explained that she had suggested the name themselves "The Auditors of Rock," but they decided to go with "Radium" instead.
I didn't grab the camera fast enough to get the very start of their song, but here is most of the performance:
Unfortunately, I missed a funny parliamentary moment that happened immediately after: Party chair Brian Melendez rose to a point of personal privilege, to ask if the band new any ABBA songs. And if not, he offered a motion to close nominations.
Here is Rebecca Otto speaking, followed by the convention endorsing her:
This past weekend we went to Duluth and I attended the Minnesota DFL State Convention. I had a video camera with me, and recorded a little bit, though lacking a tripod and holding a camera up above my head to see over a crowd made for shaky images.
Rep. Tom Rukavina impressed me as a political speaker, exhorting the convention with obvious passion and leavening his speech with self-deprecating humor. (One of his memorable lines, which I'd heard before, was his recounting one voter on the campaign trail who told him he was like "the love child of Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura." I also liked a pin for him that I saw a delegate wearing, with the tag line "Reducing the Size of Government"...in reference to his height, not his political philosophy!)
When it was announced that he was going to address the convention again — which is usually a sign that someone is going to graciously bow out in light of how the balloting is going — I remembered to pull out my camera and record it. Here it is:
North Saint Paul resident Bob Zick is a regular at our council meetings, always looking to create footage of himself to show on his cable access TV show. At this past Monday's meeting, he promised that he would be showing the video shot by his camera people (primarily the former mayor's husband) at last week's city council retreat and the citizens forum. Wondering what clips he would find to take wildly out of context, I TiVo'd his show out of curiosity and skimmed through it.
As it turns out, he never did play any video from either the retreat or the citizens forum. He played lot of video, but it all seemed to be him talking to the city council at our last two meetings. You'd think that fresh footage (not available online on demand) would be more interesting to his audience. Then again, the retreat was a nine-hour meeting that didn't include Bob Zick talking, so perhaps there wasn't any footage of interest to his regular viewer(s).
I did get a chance to see many examples of how spectacularly uninformed, misinformed and mathematically illiterate Mr. Zick is. For example, he went on about “pre-agenda meetings,” which have not been in place as long as I've been on the council. Those were meetings held the Thursday before a regular council meeting. The mayor and council would review the packet with staff, ask questions, and give staff a couple of days to research answers for the Monday meeting if they didn't have them already.
He also declared that this year's city council was working in secrecy out of the public eye, because we decide things in workshops, which are not broadcast. Umm...except that all our council workshops have been broadcast as long as I've been on the council. If you missed them, because they tend to start at some time between 4:30 and 5:30, all of the workshops since the start of 2010 are or will be archived for online viewing on demand.
Mr. Zick likes to pull amazing numbers out of the air, and declare them to be well-established facts. At one point he announced that the council/staff retreat cost $30,000-40,000; another time he said $80,000. I think I heard him say one point that city employees are paid $80 per hour (that would be $166,400 per year, though state law caps local government salaries at about $145,000), and he then multiplied that figure by the months of staff time he imagines went into setting up the retreat. At one point he claimed that meals at the retreat were “catered” and cost $10,000.
Sounds lavish, doesn't it! You might be imagining some high society party with sterling silver canape forks and servants in black ties.
Well, I never saw the caterers. It looked to me like city staff just set out snacks, drinks (coffee, hot water for tea, a cooler of soda pop), disposable cups and plates, and take-out food from some local restaurants. For breakfast there were a few things of yogurt, some muffins, coffee, two half gallon cartons of juice (pour your own into a paper cup), and some sliced fruit like you might pick up at Cub or Rainbow. At noon we had boxed lunches from Panera. For dinner, some big aluminum trays of salad and pasta, and some Italian bread (not heated like that fancy garlic bread you might have heard of, just cold sliced bread with packets of butter to spread on it yourself) from an Italian restaurant were set out for the five councilmembers and eleven staff members.
It says a lot about Mr. Zick's financial acuity that he imagines this spread would cost $10,000. Let's average $3,333 per meal – maybe less for breakfast (smaller, since department heads didn't join the retreat until lunchtime), more for dinner (what with bread on the side and some fancy packets of optional crushed red peppers for culinary thrill-seekers). I'm going to say there were no more than twenty boxed lunches from Panera (which, let's remember, is located in the same building that Mr. Zick claims as his Maplewood address). Do the math, $3,333 ÷ 20...
So the next time you see Mr. Zick claiming to speak with authority on any topic whatsoever, just remember — this is a guy who convinced himself that a six-inch sandwich, cookie and chips in a cardboard box from Panera Bread costs $167. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust him to buy lunch unsupervised, let alone advise my local government on policy and operations.
The City of Maplewood website doesn't yet have all the links and directions in place, but streaming of live and archived Maplewood meetings is in fact available now.
Here are links to the archived Maplewood City Council meetings of the year to date:
Tonight's workshop, in which we will be interviewing a lot of candidates for the new Business & Economic Development Commission, begins at 5:00 and while it's going on it should be viewable online. Later it will also be available as an archive, with those handy agenda links embedded to make it easy to find whatever specific item on the agenda you may be interested in.
At the Tuesday, November 17, Planning Commission meeting, Maplewood Fire Chief Steve Lukin gave an informational presentation about the planned East Metro Regional Fire Training Facility.
As I wrote earlier this week, we're hoping that the state 2010 bonding bill will include this important project.
In last week's election, sitting councilmember Will Rossbach won the race for mayor. This will mean a special election in 2010. Numerous residents have asked me about the mechanics of this, so I brought it up at Monday's council meeting. Here is the discussion:
To summarize:
When Rossbach takes the oath of office as Mayor, it creates a vacancy in his council seat.
Since more than 6 months remain in Rossbach's council term, the 2005 ordinance requires that we hold a special election.
There is some flexibility as to when exactly to hold the special election.
The earliest it could be held is about 90 days after the vacancy is declared, in order to comply with all the relevant state laws (notice, filing periods, etc.).
If we combine the special election with another election (such as the state primary), we can save the $26,000 we otherwise would have to spend on a stand-alone special election.
Regardless of when the special election is held, the ordinance requires the council to appoint a person to fill the vacancy until the winner of the special election is sworn in, just as happened in 2005.
From what I've read and a recent conversation with a legislator, it sounds like it is very likely that the primary date will be moved up from September to August. This change was in the elections reform bill that was passed and vetoed last session, but it was not itself a controversial provision. (Besides having bipartisan support, it will be needed in order to comply with pending changes in federal election law.) The idea of moving it forward is to protect the voting rights of Minnesotans overseas, especially the deployed members of our military. General election ballots obviously can't be printed and mailed until the primary results are finalized (sometimes including a recount, as in one of the judicial primaries last year).
On September 14th, the city council debated the maximum property tax levy for 2010. One option was a zero levy increase. Each department laid out the implications of that budget scenario, given the loss of more than half a million dollars in Market Value Homestead Credit from the state. For the police department, which uses a very large percentage of our property taxes and spends most of their budget on payroll, the impact included not hiring two new officers to fill vacancies created by recent retirements.
Even knowing the impact that a zero levy increase would have, Erik Hjelle and Diana Longrie proposed going even further in the revenue cuts, by offering a motion to cut more than $1/2 million more from the property tax levy. Had their motion passed, the city would need to consider a lot more than just leaving two officer positions vacant in order to balance the budget.
Two weeks after voting with Mayor Longrie against the funding needed to maintain Maplewood police and fire(and other property-tax-funded city services -- if you like having your streets plowed in the winter, for example), Erik brought forward his motion "that the city council support not cutting any police officer or fire staffing levels in the 2010 budget."
This was my response to his original motion:
In the end, we agreed on language to say that it is a priority of the council not to make cuts to police and fire, something that all five of us agreed on. It remains to be seen whether the whole council will step forward and take responsibility for paying for it as well when the final levy decision comes before us. In the meantime, Councilmember Hjelle and Mayor Longrie seem determined to have their cake and eat it too, taking symbolic votes in support of public safety while voting against the taxes that pay for them.
In what was undoubtedly the dramatic highlight of the evening, City Council candidate Dave "911" Hafner came forward at visitor presentations this past Monday to defend his self-image, to rebuke one of his neighbors (along with sitting councilmembers), and to ask voters to write in his teammates who didn't make it through the primary -- Ken Smart and DelRay Rokke -- on the November election ballot.
Here's the video, including a rebuttal from the neighbor, and Mr. Hafner's effort to come forward again to rebut the rebuttal.
Here's a message worth watching, from the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities:
Outstate cities, which rely on Local Government Aid (LGA) for a significant part of their budgets, are especially hard hit by Governor Pawlenty's cuts.
Maplewood lost its LGA years ago, and so the Governor has gone after our Market Value Homestead Credit (MVHC), a program designed to give homeowners property tax relief. We are expecting that Maplewood will lose more than $1/2 million this year from the Governor's unallotment of MVHC, and a similar amount again in 2010 -- the entire amounts we were supposed to receive from MVHC. It's worth keeping this in mind as we consider increasing our tax levy in 2010 (or, alternatively, cutting back on city services). Even if we go with the 5% maximum increase we passed on September 14th, that won't be enough to balance the money taken away from us by the Governor.
Many folks have told me they were surprised to hear that Mayor Diana Longrie sought a Resolution of Support and then the endorsement of the DFL Party in her campaign for reelection. This comment was often accompanied by curiosity about what she would say in an effort to woo party delegates.
To satisfy that curiousity, here are two video clips from Thursday's endorsing convention. Each candidate was given two minutes for a short speech, and then there were ten minutes of questions and answers.
First, here was Diana's two-minute pitch to the Democratic delegates:
Two of the randomly-drawn questions in the Q&A session aimed at the issue of the candidates' party involvement. The questions were, "When did you become a Democrat?" and "What involvement have you had with other political parties in the last ten years?" Here are Longrie's responses:
At the Monday, September 14, city council meeting, a resident spoke in visitor presentations to describe his recent encounters with city council candidate Dave Hafner (and a resulting 911 call) and express his concerns about candidate conduct and ethics.
Hafner received, coincidentally, 911 votes in the primary and will be one of four city council candidates appearing on November's general election ballot.
