-----Original Message-----
From: Fredric Markus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2001 9:31 AM
To: mpls-issues
Subject: NewsFlash: All politics is still local!
We�ve had ten years of NRP in Minneapolis. This has trained thousands of
people to think about their quality of life with the understanding that they
and their neighbors can impact and even steer major components of the public
planning process that affects them. There have been many opportunities for
cross-fertilization as well, bringing these folks into close proximity to
one another and to the region�s traditional leadership.
We�ve gone from the action of the 1970s where a handful of activists steered
the urban renewal planners away from a total clearance mentality to the new
millennium where a handful of powerful people are being challenged by a
grassroots revolution of rising expectations and the forging of new populist
assets in the outwash of user-friendly information technology.
Hmm. Are certain political party ward conventions being clumped together at
the Hennepin County Government Center for economy of scale or for ease of
centralized control? Is that the sound of barbarians at the gate I hear?
Will the restless natives be more manageable stuffed into the ground floor
of the HCGC rather than out in the more familiar settings of their
neighborhoods? Is it a bad plan to have a ward convention within the ward
where its delegates live?
Will the significance of this retreat to a municipal redoubt elude the new
class of grassroots planners who may have noticed the slow learning curve of
some traditional elites? It seems for example that we�re all soon to become
amateur mapmakers, redrawing post-2000 Census ward and precinct lines right
alongside the �professionals�. What a novel political calculus! How do
existing and/or proposed NRP neighborhood boundaries fit into this decennial
planning puzzle? Shall the inmates run the asylum?
More to the point, is somebody out there looking for a temporary advantage
by finessing the parochial nature of ward conventions? Fred Markus, Horn
Terrace in the Lyndale Neighborhood, Ward Ten.
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