For the inveterate scorekeepers in the upcoming municipal election season, the Sixth Ward in Minneapolis promises much entertainment. There are already five declared candidates: Shada Byobe-Hammond, Jim Graham, Dean Kallenbach, Barb Lickness, and Jonathan Palmer.The year is young - there could be more! The DFL dominates this part of Minneapolis although there are plenty of Ventura voters lurking about.What fascinates me is that there are only about 100-110 delegates eligible to vote at the DFL Sixth Ward convention, so competition for delegates is in high gear behind the scenes. Already an early email routing mistake by Barb Lickness has led to a nastygram at the conclusion of the December 21 edition of The Player's Page at <www.checksandbalances.com> (click on Minnesota). After quoting the text of the "purloined letter" which originally appeared November 13 on mpls-issues, the anonymous writer at Checks and Balances impugns Ms Lickness' independence of thought (she's alleged to be a shill for NRP's Bob Miller), her willingness to abide by the DFL endorsement process (like Senator Mark Dayton, I suppose), and her arms' length willingness to use (or so we are led to believe) to abuse me, Fred Markus, for political gain and for my maps and such - tawdry notion, that! Well, municipal information management is undergoing a tremendous change. I'm using GIS thematic maps to display nifty information for the benefit of all the Sixth Ward candidates - block and precinct-level material will be on a password-protected egroups site and any candidate who asks will have access. I'm sending a message to the city and political party bureaucracy alike that this sort of target marketing capacity is now routine. This levels the playing field, does it not? By this strategem perceptions for candidates and voters alike are built on a foundation of shared knowledge from public sources. After several years of field work in the Whittier neighborhood and the 61st Senatorial District in South Minneapolis, I'm bringing GIS into our most domestic political world - a city ward - when all the lights are turned on, so to speak. NRP is on this wavelength, so is the City's new Chief Information Officer, and so are the growing battalions of knowledge workers emerging from our post-secondary institutions of higher learning. Anybody that doesn't catch this political Pokemon will be last week's news. As it happens, to my personal knowledge Lickness and Palmer are au courant on this point in the Sixth Ward and Michael Guest and Gary Schiff in the Ninth Ward. There are no doubt more cogniscenti - I'm just really familiar with the Sixth Ward and am - ahem - just doing my thing. I really doubt the validity of the partisan endorsement process when in reality so very few live bodies show up at the precinct caucuses. Last time out in 6-3, there were seven individuals at the DFL caucus in a precinct that actual votes a thousand souls or more on any major election day. It seems to me that any serious candidate ought to market himself or herself directly to the likely voters wherever they live, paying no more than lip service to an increasingly hollow partisan structure. On the numbers in the Sixth Ward, this means a pitch to way more tenants than homeowners (70/30 in the Whittier precincts and 90/10 or better in Stevens Square - by far the most concentrated voting populations) and a prime interest in functional issues like affordable housing and neighborhood development, not threadbare party loyalty. I hope all five (or more) Sixth Ward candidates meet often in varied public fora and discuss the ward's affairs thoughout the campaign season. That makes better sense than a fierce and wounding convention battle with little likelihood of closure.
