IMPORTANT UPDATE: I was wrong, this election isn’t happening in November. It’s happening next February (February 11, 2025). It says so right on Garrison’s “vote for me!” site and I managed to miss it. I’ll try to revisit this sometime in January in case there’s any interesting new information about the candidates. (I think it’s possible there would have been a primary election in November if there’d been more than two candidates running? but then only two candidates ran? I don’t know.)

I held off on creating a master elections post in part because I thought this might happen, and sure enough: I had missed a race. Ramsey County Commissioners 1, 2, 3, and 7 are up for election this year, but 1, 2, and 7 are all fully suburban districts from what I can tell (and I generally stick to city races, which is to say, races that appear on ballots in either the City of Minneapolis or the City of St. Paul.)

District 3 is having a special election because Trista Martinson (formerly Trista MatasCastillo) resigned to take a different county position.

On the ballot:

Garrison McMurtrey
Joshua David Bau

Garrison is endorsed by the DFL (and a long list of people and organizations) and has an extensive government and policy background: he currently works for Angie Craig, has previously worked for Amy Klobuchar, served as the Chair of the St. Paul DFL and was on the St. Paul Planning Commission.

Joshua works for a nonprofit (Merrick Community Services, where he runs the food shelf). His website doesn’t list any endorsements. I couldn’t find much of an online footprint otherwise.

There’s a forum that you can watch online here. I watched it (slightly distractedly) and my take-away was that Joshua is a committed progressive (I was a little worried he was a Republican — he’s definitely not) but without a ton of governance or policy experience. He’s sincere but unpolished. He had some insightful stuff to say about homelessness (an area he works in directly for his job), less about managing the county budget.

I would vote for Garrison, but if you came to this page wondering if either person was just terrible or anything, the answer is no, they both seem like excellent people. I would vote for Garrison mainly because I think he’s better prepared for this particular job.

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I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy books, math manipulatives, and social and emotional learning resources.)

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser!