I agree with David's points about the unfortunate disconnection of Kingfield from the other neighborhoods that share its general concerns. I'm still going to be more concerned about the issues that affect me personally (my kids schools, shops, the lakes), even those just happen to no longer be in the ward I live in.
Hopefully the person who represents Ward 8 will focus primarily on the issues related to I-35W expansion and potential 38th street ramps. The concern is that most of the highway plans proposed have suggested that re-development East of the highway is worth weakening the Kingfield neighborhood by altering traffic patterns negatively. With the Ward 8 boundaries shifted to favor east of the highway neighorhoods Kingfield runs the risk of being, again the low man on the totem pole and having our concerns under-emphasized. How long will we be without representation?
-mike hess
kingfield
>From: "David Brauer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Mpls list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: RE: [Mpls] Fat lotta good testifying does ya
>Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 07:33:03 -0500
>
>First, thanks also go to Vic Thorstenson for his work on the NAACP plan.
>
>Tim Connolly mentioned how hard it was for non-geeks to grapple with
>this (one of my best friends on the list deleted every single
>redistricting post, not wanting to cling to a steep learning curve). Vic
>took his considerable skills to a community organization to expand the
>circle of knowledge. That's an impressive thing. He also educated me and
>I'm sure others out there.
>
>So now I and two-thirds of my Kingfield neighbors are in Ward 8 - our
>neighborhood is among those split and for good measure isolated with a
>ward that is 85 percent east-of-the-highway. It's interesting that Wards
>13 and 11 lost population, and thus needed to grow size-wise, yet
>somehow Ward 8 *expanded* its sliver west of the highway.
>
>Congrats to Downtown - a newly recognized community of interest.
>Apparently, southwest Minneapolis does not have quite the same cachet.
>
>Oh well; after being depressed about not being in a ward oriented toward
>southwest - as I believe most southwest-school-attending, Southwest
>Journal-reading, Uptown-shopping, 5th Precinct-policed, Lake
>Harriet-jogging residents of Kingfield are - I'm enough of a
>rationalizer to try to find the silver lining. I know embarrassingly
>little about communities like Bancroft (hi Holle Brian!) and west
>Powderhorn (hello Matthea Smith? Hey, on May Day; I'll now watch the
>boats cross the lake that's in MY WARD). There's also the
>barely-explored terrain of Bryant and Regina and Northrop. And of
>course, I'll get to meet more Central people than just Eva Young in a
>political context!
>
>The highway was built as an intentional racial moat and now the
>political heads have forced more of us to leap it. There's good that can
>come from that.
>
>Still, too often communities of interest were split for political
>interests. The game involving us, as I understand, is that the
>Republicans really wanted Wenonah Park to be in the 11th Ward - although
>the question of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" is
>rivaled only by "how can you really create a Republican opportunity
>ward?" Apparently, Ward 11 is the attempt. The Republicans get their 2
>months in the sun and it affects my neighborhood for the next 10 years.
>
>Because Wenonah was in 11, Scott Benson couldn't get more of Kingfield,
>which he and many of we Kingfield neighbors wanted. (Why straddle the
>highway in Ward 11 but not 8? Because there are at least two other
>west-of-highway neighborhoods there - it's at least balanced with
>communities we regularly deal with.)
>
>Also, there was a political interest in dicing up our very staunchly DFL
>neighborhood - both for Republican and Independence Party opportunity
>elsewhere in Southwest but to also "southwest-ize" the 8th Ward.
>
>My position has been if you're going to straddle the highway, balance
>both sides' interest. However, the "southwest-ization" game is a craven
>political one, and a far better alternative would have been to not
>dilute political interests east of the highway by throwing us in there,
>and not diluting our interests by doing so.
>
>Hopefully I'm horribly wrong about such mutual dilution, but I think any
>neutral observer would have to agree this is how it looks.
>
>Some of you may be asking, "so if you're so DFL how 'come the DFL
>commissioners didn't take care of you?"
>
>Part of it is every party had to negotiate with each other and give
>something. The simplest answer, though, is that none of the three DFL
>Commissioners really represented us. None of them would have been seen
>at a rally last fall for RT Rybak, a symbol of the "new guard" who
>overwhelmingly carried our ward. Earl Pettiford and Steve Claypatch are
>primarily labor-backed, and Rick Stafford - the guided missile of the
>inside game - was hired by the DFL council members to protect their jobs
>(nine out of 10 aint bad, Rick!).
>
>That's politics - they were picked and all fiercely protected their
>constituencies. It's just that some constituencies fell in-between the
>cracks, and others were over-represented.
>
>(To be fair, Rick did keep me in the loop on what was happening with
>Kingfield, though we were always mostly in 8. I also know he fought hard
>not to reduce Ward 8's minority percentage, which held at 60 percent
>after dipping to 51 percent in the tentative plan.)
>
>This showed me you have to pay attention to the whole process: from the
>Hennepin County Chief Judge who appoints the Charter Commission who
>appoints the Redistricting Commission who determines your council fate.
>If those parts aren't attuned in a way that represent a broad swath of
>the public, you're going to get a result that doesn't.
>
>A final political observation: I came away from the redistricting
>commission meeting feeling that the DFL continues to push
>African-Americans into the arms of the Green Party.
>
>Now, I've been around the block enough to know one can't assume the
>NAACP speaks for the black citizen on the street, just as other
>political organizations often don't. But it was impossible to miss the
>black anger at a redistricting plan that the DFL helped cobble together
>and the Greens eschewed.
>
>I'm agnostic (professionally and personally) on the
>one-ward-for-Downtown question; however, getting the Jordan neighborhood
>out of Barb Johnson's ward and into Natalie Johnson Lee's may not be
>packing in a Voting Rights context (the 82 percent minority count gives
>way to a 51 percent eligible-minority-voter percentage, which some claim
>is enough to torpedo such a claim) but seems to be in the moral sense.
>
>If you read this far, thanks for letting me disgorge. Despite whatever
>happened here, we need to keep working toward open, understandable
>processes and transparent government. I learned a lot from this that I
>hope will help me do that better in the future.
>
>David Brauer
>Kingfield - Ward 10 & 8
>
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