The sponsors of the event at the Urban League had an introductory slide presentation that was a good start and anybody who came late missed that. I wasn't happy with being invited to attend without any instruction about the intent of the invitation, expecting to observe and listen and instead being placed at the front of the event and being grilled for information about negotiations in progress. One staffer claimed to have made the invitations and my email files show that another actually sent the RSVP but whatever that authorship the reality is that we commissioners came as individuals, not as a public body, and I at least came away without much new to work with during the last five days before the Commission meets to finalize the details of our draft plan.
It is also inappropriate to label the plan I brought to this event "the Markus plan" as list member Annie Young has done. The name of this plan is Green Plan 2, companion to Green Plan 1, and these two plans have mutually exclusive properties. Both have very small deviations from optimal population totals, both have promising minority opportunity characteristics, but Green Plan 1 is drawn in a way that protects all the incumbents at the expense of some pivotal neighborhoods two of which have specifically asked not to be split between wards. Green Plan 1 has no downtown ward. Green Plan 2 is an artful plan that assembles neighborhoods following the city's planning districts and is less intrusive of neighborhood boundaries than Green Plan 1. Green Plan 2 has a downtown ward and displaces several incumbents. These are my negotiating instruments as the representative of the minority caucus of the city council and they need to be understood as a brace of hypothetical options placed alongside other hypothetical options and subject to further revision during the next few days. There may well be new complete hypothetical plans emerging, including something from the NAACP et al., and we'll all have to wait on events and evaluate these options as they become available. I hope the people present last evening and the members of this list join me in insisting that all the plans that were brought forward at the Monday evening Commission discussion meeting on March 25 be posted on the city's website for the public's information. I recall this being asked for at the Commission meeting and am disturbed along with the participants in the March 28th community event that we commissioners were sent scrambling for copies of these several plans. I am also disturbed that I saw a DFL-sponsored plan in circulation last evening - DFL Plan 1 - that was not the DFL plan 3-25 that was in fact introduced at the Monday evening Commission meeting. I must join with other Commissioners in warning that these draft documents are like draft bills in the legislature - they are ephemeral creatures until something is chosen for real by our various dates certain and anything hypothetical that appears on the city's web site is just that - hypothetical, not exclusive of other possibilities, and at best descriptive of the thinking going on and not immediately predictive of any eventual outcome. I regret that the people present didn't have a better chance to look at what we redistricting commissioners have before us - had we been asked to bring visual materials, had we been asked to be prepared to discuss our process as the main event of the evening, had we been informed that there would not be any prepared plan brought to our attention, I for one could certainly have organized my purposes accordingly. I also want to leave the list with the clear understanding that I reject the notion that Green Plan 2 is somehow "the Markus plan" - this connotes authorship apart from the Green Party whose interests I represent and doesn't validate the companion plan, Green Plan 1, that further contextualizes what I'm about in my work on this Commission. Fred Markus, Horn Terrace, Ward Ten, Redistricting Commissioner _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
