Council Committee to Kahn: Quit Being So Cuckoo
News traveled this week from the Minnesota House of Representatives to Minneapols City Hall that Phyllis Kahn, a Minneapolis legislator, had introduced a bill forcing special city council elections in Minneapolis. Kahn (District 59B), a 31-year house vet, believes sitting council members should have to run again next year, after only two years in office, because of redistricting that was approved last spring. Council members currently serve four-year terms.
This was met with more than a few Bronx cheers by the council’s Intergovernmental Relations committee, which voted Tuesday to officially oppose the bill and send a resolution before the full council on Friday.
(Read Kahn's HF 67 for yourself.)
The proposal to vote against it was drafted by Dean Zimmermann (Sixth Ward) who does not sit on the IGR committee and wasn’t at the meeting. Nevertheless, his compadres on the council backed him unanimously. Most council members lashed out at the absent Kahn, saying the move was strictly political, designed to spit in the face of the once-insurgent Green Party.
The Greens, you may recall, scored pretty well in the last city elections, with both Zimmermann and Natalie Johnson Lee (Fifth Ward) pulling upsets to become the first Greens on the council. Kahn insists that her motive is to do right by a controversial redistricting approved last spring, after the 2000 Census showed some slight population shifts, many view it as politically motivated.
(Zimmermann’s wife squawked loudly on the Minneapolis Issues list Tuesday. While Kahn has yet to respond, she floated a similar bill last session, and posted regular updates on the list.)
Special elections would force Johnson Lee into a contentious race in the new Fifth Ward, which is mostly black. Johnson Lee, who is the council’s only African American member, could be forced to run against Don Samuels, a Jamaican-born entrepreneur currently running against Olin Moore for the Third Ward seat vacated by convicted felon Joe Biernat. (Both are ostensibly DFLers; Moore earned the party’s endorsement.)
Dean Zimmermann, meanwhile, would either have to move or opt to not seek his seat, since redistricting tossed him out of the Sixth Ward. (Or he could go against the almost-Green Gary Schiff, who represents the Ninth Ward, where Zimmermann's current residence would be under new ward maps.)
Even staunch DFLers on the council, like Paul Zerby (Second Ward), once Kahn’s neighbor when she lived in his ward, spoke out against Kahn’s proposal. “From Kahn’s standpoint, this is not aimed at the Green Party, but I’ll let the Green Party deal with that,” Zerby said. “My concern primarily is that an election will cost a half a million dollars, and we realize that’s more, these days, than pocket change.”
Council President Paul Ostrow bemoaned that Kahn’s bill would strip “local control” of government and policies. Assistant City Attorney Michael Norton noted that the bill might not have legal legs. “The rationale is that redistricting is prospective, not retrospective,” Moore claimed, meaning that new ward boundaries, in theory, were not to take effect until elections in 2005. “Still, the city is a creature of the state.”
But none offered more vitriol than Lisa Goodman (Seventh Ward), who said she was not opposed to the idea initially. Now, apparently, she's wisened up.
“There are three reasons why this is the most absurd piece of legislation I’ve ever seen in my life,” Goodman began. “This job is a full-time, year-round obligation, unlike work at the legislature. There’s a lot of work around here right now, and business does not stop in an election year.
“Let’s accept this in the spirit it was intended: Are we not serving our constituents? Of course we are. Everybody in the Seventh Ward that will not be in the ward after redistricting knows that I was elected to represent them and will continue to do so.
“And clearly, this is an unfunded mandate. We can’t be spending money on this right now. But in my mind, this is really overturning the results of the last election--we were all voted in to serve four years. This is simply the legislature usurping voters.
“I don't want to play into the conspiracy theory aimed at certain parties," Goodman concluded, noting that other cities facing similar dilemmas, such as Stillwater, are not named in Kahn's bill. "But this is clearly aimed at some members of the city council.”
Finer Point: More on The Norm
While everybody was marveling yesterday at the reports that freshman Senator Coleman would be appointed to head the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, a less-cheery tidbit went largely unnoticed.
Tom Ford, a Star Tribune Washington correspondent, wrote a piece about Mark Dayton, Minnesota’s senior senator, proposing $5.95 billion in disaster aid for farmers hurting alternately from flooding or drought. Based on the story, Dayton’s move seems well-intentioned and even reasonable in some regards. But no matter to Norm.
“Dayton said his staff asked Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., to co-sponsor the bill, but he declined,” Ford wrote. “‘I applaud him for raising the issue,’ Coleman said. ‘My concern is I can’t tell you that the Dayton bill is going to be the way to get it done.’”
Hear that, Senator Dayton? That’s the sound of your colleague using one hand to applaud you. The other hand is unavailable, no doubt due to Coleman feeling a little self-congratulatory right about now.
But here’s a bigger question: Remember all that “working together” stuff from Candidate Coleman’s camp? Remember the hullabaloo about carrying on Wellstone’s spirit and doing what’s right for all Minnesotans?
God, you know, I almost believed it for, like, two weeks.
2:17:58 PM 
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