On February 12, 2007, current city council candidate Dave Hafner gave a lengthy visitor presentation:



The audio of his comments at the Mayor's Forum, which he referenced, is available in an earlier posting. You can also see my notes from the meeting, which Mr. Hafner discusses.

While in 2007 he praised Mayor Longrie, Rebecca Cave, and Erik Hjelle (or at least the "good, decent, honest citizens" who support them) in this presentation, today he is running on a slate with two different candidates: Ken Smart for mayor and Delray Rokke for council.

Labels: campaign 2009, Dave Hafner, video

Posted by John Nephew on 8/05/2009 08:16:00 AM Email to a Friend | Permalink | Comments
Tweet

While unsuccessfully seeking the support of the local DFL last Thursday, Diana Longrie mentioned a report from the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust which seemed in her mind to minimize the gravity of the insured losses incurred in the Copeland-Longrie era. It's not so bad if you just spread those losses out over 5 or 10 years rather than looking at a one-year period when Longrie's majority and their henchman, Copeland, ran the city, she argued.

She invited residents to submit data practices requests to get a copy of the report for themselves. As it happens, the report was shared with the entire council, so I figured I'd put it online for anyone who is curious, and save our city staff time in fulfilling data practices requests.

I'm not sure why Longrie thinks the report puts Maplewood in a good light. Grouping Maplewood with the eight other Minnesota cities in the 30,000-40,000 population size, our one city of the nine constitutes a whopping 27% of the total losses over a 10-year period and 36% of the losses over a 5-year period. If we were just average, you'd expect us to be about 1/9 of the losses, or 11%. And remember, this is the effect of taking that horrible Copeland-Longrie year of litigation and averaging it with 4 or 9 more normal years.

In any case, I'd encourage residents to read the report and judge its meaning for themselves.

Labels: finance

Posted by John Nephew on 8/04/2009 07:36:00 AM Email to a Friend | Permalink | Comments
Tweet

Mayoral candidate Ken Smart addressed the city council during our truth-in-taxation hearing on December 8, 2008. He expressed concern that the city was not cutting taxes in response to the poor economy, and suggested that one way to reduce the city's budget would be to sell the Maplewood Community Center. I am told that he repeated this idea at the DFL meeting last Thursday.



Ken Smart is running as a team with city council candidates Delray Rokke and Dave Hafner.

Labels: campaign 2009, finance, parks, video

Posted by John Nephew on 8/03/2009 08:42:00 AM Email to a Friend | Permalink | Comments
Tweet

Delray Rokke, one of the 2007 candidates, has decided to take another run at city council.

In the last election, I noticed that Rokke seemed to switch his position on some issues after aligning himself with Rebecca Cave and her then-majority of the council with Erik Hjelle and Diana Longrie. For example, after being a skeptic about the mayor's conservation easements (saying in his Maplewood Review profile that they should be "not encouraged"), he signed on to make it a central issue of his joint campaign with Cave. Here's a joint flyer later distributed by the two of them (click on the image to enlarge):


This is from Gladstone, but I know they did a number of variations on this flyer, each focused on a different neighborhood, falsely suggesting that its local park or preserve would be on the auction block if Will and I were elected.

Cave is also on the ballot again, but this time Rocky is running with a different slate. I saw at the DFL Central Committee meeting that he had produced a joint campaign flyer with Ken Smart and Dave Hafner. I'll be interested to see what his positions are with a new set of running mates.

Labels: campaign 2009, parks

Posted by John Nephew on 8/02/2009 11:02:00 AM Email to a Friend | Permalink | Comments
Tweet

This week's Maplewood Review features an interesting article about Margaret Sletten Behrens, who sits on the board of the Ramsey County Soil and Water Conservation District. Ms. Behrens was the only person who filed to run for the office last fall, and now has made waves by submitting unusually large requests for per diem and mileage reimbursements. Apparently she is billing the taxpayers for things like attending Mayor Longrie's monthly forum at the Maplewood City Hall. (A $25 to $75 per diem, plus mileage, for two hours of mostly listening to the mayor's admirers praise her and bash Will Rossbach?!)

The article casts a new light on the following exchange, which took place at our council meeting of June 8th, 2009. Behrens' father, Ralph, and her sister, city council candidate Elizabeth Sletten, lobbied to have Ms. Behrens appointed to the Fish Creek ad hoc commission:



At the time I didn't see the point in telling the conservation district who they must appoint to attend our ad hoc commission meetings, if they wished to send a representative. But now it sounds like Behrens was looking for more meetings to attend in some official capacity, if conservation district staff and other board members had started to question the validity of paying for her to sit in the audience at Maplewood City Council meetings.

Labels: media, video

Posted by John Nephew on 8/01/2009 11:55:00 AM Email to a Friend | Permalink | Comments
Tweet