Monthly Archives: October 2025

Election 2025: Sample Ballot/Index of Posts

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Greetings to everyone pulling up my site on their phones from a voting booth. For your convenience I’ve put links to (hopefully) all of this year’s races. If you scroll and don’t find what you’re looking for, try searching a candidate name, but remember, I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis or Saint Paul.

Saint Paul (we’re doing Saint Paul first because it’s a very short ballot)

Saint Paul Mayor: Melvin Carter

City Question 1: Yes

School District Question 1: Yes

Minneapolis

Minneapolis Mayor: (1) DeWayne Davis; (2) Omar Fateh; (3) Jazz Hampton. DON’T RANK FREY.

Board of Estimate and Taxation: (1) Eric Harris Bernstein; (2) Steve Brandt. THERE ARE TWO OPEN SEATS; RANK BOTH OF THESE PEOPLE.

Minneapolis Park Board At-Large: (1) Tom Olsen; (2) Michael Wilson; (3) Amber Frederick. THERE ARE THREE OPEN SEATS. RANK THREE PEOPLE.

Minneapolis Park Board District 1: Dan Engelhart. (Both candidates are named Dan. Pay attention to the last names.)

Minneapolis Park Board District 2: Charles Rucker is running unopposed.

Minneapolis Park Board District 3: Kedar Deshpande is running unopposed.

Minneapolis Park Board District 4: (1) Jason Garcia; (2) Andrew Gebo.

Minneapolis Park Board District 5: (1) Kay Carvajal Moran; (2) Colton Baldus; (3) Steffanie Musich.

Minneapolis Park Board District 6: Ira Jourdain

City Council Ward 1: Elliott Payne

City Council Ward 2: Robin Wonsley

City Council Ward 3: Marcus Mills

City Council Ward 4: Marvina Haynes

City Council Ward 5: (1) Ethrophic Burnett; (2) Anndrea Young

City Council Ward 6: Jamal Osman

City Council Ward 7: Katie Cashman

City Council Ward 8: Soren Stevenson

City Council Ward 9: Jason Chavez

City Council Ward 10: Aisha Chughtai

City Council Ward 11: Jamison Whiting

City Council Ward 12: Aurin Chowdhury

City Council Ward 13: Ugh, why can’t we have some better choices? Linea Palmisano I GUESS but it’s not like BobAgain is going to win so maybe write in your favorite neighbor.

And that’s it! If you’d like to express your appreciation for my work in a monetary way, you can donate to my fundraiser for YouthLink. Also, please consider supporting one or more of the many excellent journalists I rely on when doing my writeups.

Election 2025: Some of My Many Sources

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If you would like to learn more about any of the races, or any of the groups involved, or politics in Minneapolis more broadly, or if you’d like to support the people whose work I turn to when I’m writing my election guide, there are in fact a LOT of people whose original reporting and data-gathering I rely on heavily, and I’d like to list some of them along with Patreons and fundraisers and so on.

John Edwards of WedgeLive, who provides social media coverage of a whole lot of events on Bluesky, writes a blog about local politics, and does amazing interviews on his podcast, which you can find via a podcast app (it’s called the WedgeLive podcast) or on YouTube. Something distinctive about his interviews is that he likes to interview people while biking or engaged in some other physical activity, which means you often get a much more genuine and authentic look at the candidate or politician than you would normally, because they’re just a little bit distracted. I listened to many, many of his interviews with local candidates, followed his coverage of conventions, and deeply appreciate his work. Support his Patreon here.

Taylor Dahlin has done a ton of research on the PACs that have been throwing money around the Minneapolis city races. You can find her on Bluesky here and her blog (full of useful coverage of those PACs) is here. I don’t think she has a Patreon but she does have an open GoFundMe to support her ongoing fight against breast cancer.

Josh Martin documents meetings and also has this absolutely AMAZING set of spreadsheets (link is to his Google Doc that rounds up all the stuff he does) that give you summaries of (and links to more) campaign finance stuff, endorsements, his “campaign viability matrix” where he tries to calculate the people who might actually win, just a TON of stuff. I could not find a Patreon.

The League of Women Voters Minneapolis hosted a TON of forums this year, all staffed by volunteer moderators and livestreamed. You can donate to the LWV Minneapolis here. LWV St. Paul also hosted a forum. You can donate to LWV St. Paul here. They’re also both always looking for volunteers; volunteers run all those forums but also register voters, answer questions about voting, and educate people about voting. Volunteer with LWV Minneapolis / Volunteer with LWV St. Paul.

Racket is an online arts and politics weekly that is staffed by people who once worked for the City Pages. It’s terrific and you can subscribe to it here.

Sahan Journal does immigrant-focused news coverage and is my go-to source for anything related to the Feeding Our Future scandal (other stuff as well, to be clear). It has no paywall, and you can support it here. MPR News and MinnPost also provide paywall-free coverage of local politics at least some of the time.

I also pretty regularly use coverage from the Star Trib (you can find that on your own) and the Pioneer Press (ditto). The Minnesota Reformer has moved away from local political coverage in an unfortunate way (the decision they made resulted in extremely fine-grained coverage on everything Fateh has ever done wrong, and no coverage of anyone else) although they’ve been a key source for me in the past.

(I’m probably forgetting someone, so I may come back and add stuff.) Anyway, if you value news, please support journalism!

The Future Creation Workshop

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So as I mentioned: I spent the last couple of weeks in China. I went to Chongqing as the guest of the Fishing Fortress Science Fiction College of the Chongqing College of Mobile Communication in Hechuan. (Chongqing is both a city and a province — okay technically I think it’s a “direct-administered municipality” but I feel like “province” communicates what that means reasonably well. Hechuan is a “district” which in this case seems to basically mean “an outlying town.” It’s about an hour from the city of Chongqing.)

That’s a picture of (nearly) the whole workshop — teachers, students, staff, interpreters.

I had never taught at a workshop before, nor have I attended any of the big US workshops (Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, etc.) but I have participated in a writers’ group that does peer critique since 1997. The foreign instructors were all told to prepare two lectures — one two-hour lecture to be delivered just to the students in the workshop program, one 90-minute lecture to be delivered to anyone at the university who wanted to come. The 90-minute lecture was translated by our interpreter (which meant we needed to plan for less than 90 minutes) and the two-hour lecture was translated by speech recognition and machine translation.

For the “workshop” part, we each had two groups of three students. We worked with Group A for three days, and then with Group B for three days. Each student worked with two mentors, one Chinese and one foreign. The other foreign mentors were James Patrick Kelly, Roderick Leeuwenhart from the Netherlands, and Leonardo Epinoza Benavides from Chile. The Chinese mentors were Cheng Jingbo (who was introduced as Bo, at least to the English speakers), Ling Chen, Baoshu, Jiang Bo, and Deng Siyuan. (I think one of those people did lectures and not workshops but I’m not sure which.)

My students in Group A (I know I’m throwing a lot of names out here — this is partly for my own future reference! When I see a familiar looking name show up in Clarkesworld in 2028 I want to be able to come look at this) were Zhang HongRui (“Herry”), Xiong Qiong (“Shu”), and Gong Er (“Kiki”). My students in Group B were Cao Rong (“Ultraman”), Yang Luixi (“Osse”), and Nie Yong (“Andrew”). I had an interpreter all week, Li Min (“Diana”).

The program originally had all of us doing our workshops at tables in one big room, but the second day, Shu made a face and asked if there was anywhere quieter we could go. I sent Diana to find out, and she conferred with the program organizers and we relocated to this nice room with sofas, which was great.

I'm on a couch. Diana is whispering in my ear; Kiki is sitting to my left. Herry and Shu and visible from behind. Everyone has a laptop out.

(In the picture: Diana is the person whispering in my ear. Kiki is sitting to my left. Herry is in the brown t-shirt and Shu is in the black plaid shirt.)

Something I did not know before the first time I did something like this is that conversing through an interpreter is its own separate skill in a couple of ways. First, you need to pay close attention to what your interpreter is saying while filtering out the background noise of the person who’s speaking in the other language but hopefully still paying attention to their body language, tone of voice, etc. Like especially if you’re teaching, you want to notice if they’re getting frustrated or overwhelmed, and that’s especially important in a workshop setting where at least some of the students have not done peer critique before; one of my students did clearly start to feel overwhelmed and I temporarily stopped the critique and told him, this is still your story. We are not assigning you these changes. It is entirely up to you whether to make changes, or not; we are giving you our advice one what we think would make this a stronger story and you can take the advice that seems right to you and ignore everything else!

Two men sitting on a couch, both with laptops out.

(From my first group, a photo of Shu and Herry.)

Second, when you’re speaking, you need to pause a lot more often so that your interpreter can tell people what you’re saying, and you need to do that without losing your train of thought. Third, sometimes interpreters don’t know a word and ideally you should have a relationship with them such that they’ll let you know and you can offer a synonym or rephrase.

All that said, the workshops seemed to work reasonably well. Some of my students spoke some English, which helped.

Here I am with my second group:

Me and my students sitting on a low step in a decorative library. Three of us are holding books and one person is holding up a Nutcracker.

(This was a posed picture on the last day. Left to right: Ultraman, Osse, me, Diana, Andrew.)

We set a trend escaping the crowded room, which meant that as the week went by we kept having to find new spaces because other people would beat us to the couches. We stole some poor guy’s office several times:

The second group of students and me sitting around a desk. There's a giant Star Wars poster behind us.

As noted, I also had to deliver two talks. The first was on the very first day, when I did an evening talk to anyone in the college who wanted to come. I did a talk about good and bad advice I’d gotten on writing.

Me, holding a mic, standing in front of my incredibly ugly basic slide.

If you’re curious, the slide I’m in front of is about the advice to make backups and mentions that when I was in college, I heard author Maxine Hong Kingston give a talk where she read an absolutely harrowing story about trying to get to her house during the Oakland Firestorm of 1991 to rescue her manuscript. In The Fifth Book of Peace she tells this story and relates it in a metaphysical way to the Gulf War. I heard this story and thought, “this is a message from God to not only make backups but to figure out a way to do off site backups” which in the early 1990s was no joke — I used to burn CD-ROMs and then give them to my father to store at his house. These days it’s more critical to remember that you need not only the cloud backup but also the local copy in case you lose access to the cloud, a thing that can very much happen.

Did I mention my slides were basic and ugly? Just literally a bulleted list.

I had a nearly full house (I think this photo was taken that evening, they had me sit down in the audience at the end for a photo, which meant some poor person got booted out of their seat at that point!)

An auditorium full of Chinese students, except for four people in the front row (me, Roderick, Jim, and Leo.)

That talk was translated by Diana, who had looked at my slides in advance and done a ton of preparation. (I saw her notes, which were extensive.)

On the last day, I did my morning talk to the students in the program. Rather than trying to come up with two hours of material on one topic, I basically did two talks, one on the critical lessons I learned as a writer on my way to publication, and one on how I wrote my first novel. This was machine-translated by way of speech recognition. Including a somewhat unflattering photo of me because the image shows the translation in process:

A picture of me, discoursing. In the background you can see one of my ugly slides, overlaid with a projection of speech being transcribed in English and then translated into Chinese, as subtitles.

To be honest I had significant doubts about how well this would work, and I asked my students later if they were able to follow my talk. They said that it was helpful that I’d put an outline of the talk on very simple slides, because they could input the words on the slides into a translator app themselves and get some context for what I was saying. So, ugly slides for the win! Jim made it to more of the Chinese mentors’ talks than I did (this workshop had a heavy schedule and I skipped a bunch of other people’s talks because I needed to work on critiques for my students) and thought it worked pretty well.

Anyway: it was a really good experience, I enjoyed teaching, my students were great, the other mentors were great and I really enjoyed getting to know them, and I hope this workshop continues. I flew home over the weekend and have been slowly getting un-jet-lagged.

Administrative Note

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I believe I have blogged about every race happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul this fall. I was in a hurry to get it done this year because I am going to be teaching at a Science Fiction workshop in Chongqing, China. I am super excited about this, but it also means I’m going to be on a very different schedule for the next couple of weeks, and whether I’m able to even get to my blog to edit it remains to be seen. (Yes, I have a VPN. Will it work? I am not going to know until I get to China!) Also: I’m going to be teaching at a workshop, and want to devote the bulk of my energy and attention to my students.

All this means that if there’s some late-breaking scandal, I may not be able to update my post about the relevant race! I will try to weigh in on anything significant after I get back. I will also assemble my directory of posts after I get back; in the meantime if you’re looking for a particular race, stick the most distinctive candidate’s name in the “search” field in the upper right-hand corner and it should turn up. (I use search here a lot. It’s how I find what I said about candidates in the past.)

Election 2025: Saint Paul Mayoral Race

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The incumbent, Melvin Carter, is running again. On the ballot:

Melvin Carter (incumbent)
Kaohly Her
Yan Chen
Adam Dullinger
Mike Hilborn

This is a ranked-choice election and St. Paul lets you rank five candidates, so you can literally rate these candidates in order of preference, if you want.

I need to get this done ASAP: it’s my last post and I’m about to leave town. I’ve been having trouble getting motivated to do this one for reasons that are summed up well in a conversation I had tonight with my father. He asked me when I was going to do the St. Paul mayoral race and I told him I was working on it. I then told him that the only person with any real shot at beating Melvin was Kaohly Her, and he grabbed a pen to write down the name. Bad news for people who hate Melvin: if, a month out from the election, reasonably politically engaged St. Paul residents are not even aware of the name of Melvin’s main opponent, this is not much of a contest.

I mean, get out there and vote, please, whether you love Melvin or hate him or feel “eh, I mean, he’s okay?” about him, because we need your votes on the two ballot questions (vote yes on both).

tl;dr I’m going to vote for Melvin. If you don’t like Melvin you should rank Kaohly Her and Yan Chen.

Mike Hilborn

Mike Hilborn owns an exterior services business that does stuff like powerwashing. I e-mailed him to ask him if he had any endorsements or any governance experience (like, had he ever served on a city board or committee or a county advisory board or attended city council meetings as an observer)? He does not. “I do not have any endorsements.  I don’t seek them.  Endorsements come with strings to promote their agenda.  My agenda is to lower taxes, crime and homelessness.  I do not have any government experience.  I have spent the last 30 years focused on growing my business.  We are a second chance employer with 45 employees.  I’m at the point in my career where I have time to see if can save our city.  I believe my business experience is what is required to fix Saint Paul.”

I disagree that running a small business is (all by itself) adequate preparation for the job of mayor. (I also don’t know that Melvin Carter would be qualified to take over a 45-employee exterior services business. At the very least I would have a bunch of questions about whether he’s run a small business in the past and how much he knows about power washing; his Wikipedia entry does not lead me to believe that he has any relevant experience in that area.)

He also had Republican vibes and sure enough, Open Secrets showed donations to Tim Pawlenty and the Minnesota GOP. He also gave a rousing defense of ICE at one of the forums. I would not rank Hilborn.

ETA: someone pointed out in the comments he ran for State House last year. This means I sent him the question I sent to all Republicans running: who did he think won the 2020 election? From my post last year: “He gets some credit for responding to my e-mail asking who won the 2020 Presidential election but no credit for his response. (He made it clear that (a) he 100% buys into Trump’s big lie and (b) he wanted to fight with me about it by demanding why Democrats opposed the SAVE act. When I pointed out that the law he and his party wanted to pass would disenfranchise about 30% of married women, and a disproportionately Republican subset at that, he stopped replying.)” Don’t rank Mike!

Adam Dullinger

Adam is an engineer (he makes firefighting equipment, I think for this company) and has no endorsements or political experience. He is very earnest (though he got scolded at a mayoral forum for his lack of civility) and given his genuine interests in city design particularly as it applies to bikes, I think he should consider applying to one of the the city advisory boards. (Among other things, I genuinely think this would be a better fit for the information deep dives he wants to do than the mayor’s job.) I do not think he’s qualified to be mayor, though I’d take him over Mike.

Yan Chen

Yan Chen is a retired science professor who ran for City Council in 2023. Last time she picked up a second-choice endorsement from a labor coalition, and this time she’s co-endorsed with Kaohly by former City Council rep Jane Prince. When I asked her about her governance experience, she said that she had attended City Council meetings multiple times, had visited every district council, was a board member of Summit University District Council until she withdrew to run for office, and is a community board member for a public charter school (Career Pathways). That’s actually pretty solid from a “does this person have any real idea what this sort of job entails” perspective.

She really loves to post videos and I really hate to watch videos but I watched enough to be reassured that she is not secretly a Republican despite her focus on property taxes. I am unconvinced that she’d do a better job than Melvin, but if you’re unhappy and feeling like you want a change (any change) she’s worth ranking.

Kaohly Her

Kaohly Her is a State House Rep for 64A (a section of the middle of the western part of the city). She did an interview with WedgeLive and my primary takeaway from it is that she’d do basically the same stuff Melvin is doing but she’s pretty sure she’d do it better.

Asked about the Summit Trail thing, she said the process was flawed, which … I don’t know, honestly, I feel like there are some real problems with the communication around that project but I don’t think that means that the project is a bad idea. (I wrote about this project in my Ward 4 post a few months ago, here.) The way she talks about this project makes me worry that she will cave to pressure from NIMBYs to the detriment of everyone in St. Paul. She also talked about this bike trail like it’s an amenity for the people who live on Summit. It’s really not; the whole point of a regional trail is to provide a really good, pleasant, well-maintained trail that people can use for both recreational travel and bike commuting and Summit is terrific for this for anyone who needs to get between downtown and the river and a ton of people use Summit (for driving, biking, and walking) as their preferred route just because it’s nice. (This was the thing Adam got scolded over, incidentally; he said her answer was bullshit.)

ETA: Kaohly has totally signalled her alliance with the anti-bike-lane side of that fight. (She’s “refused to pick a side” according to the Strib which is — to quote Adam Dullinger — a bullshit answer. I consider this a really good reason NOT TO VOTE FOR HER.

That said: she would bring good relationships with the legislature and she clearly has the experience to do the job. I like her fine and she’d probably be a reasonably decent mayor. I’m just really not convinced she’d actually do better than Melvin. I’m thoroughly put off by her “oh, I just don’t think the process was sufficient” BS on the Summit Ave bike lane thing. Nope. Also, someone in the comments also raised concerns that her “urban wealth fund” thing would be stealth privatization.

Melvin Carter

Melvin’s WedgeLive interview is also worth watching or listening to. He has one really interesting moment where he talks about how one of the aspects of unidentified, masked ICE officers is that we had a political assassination in this state a few months back committed by a masked guy pretending to be law enforcement.

Melvin has done an outstanding job on one particular thing, which is gun violence in St. Paul — basically he worked with the police department to have them investigate non-fatal shootings with the same energy they bring to murders. This has made a massive difference in the number of shootings. I’m also happy with what he’s done with municipal garbage collection. Homeless encampments in St. Paul are dealt with by an outreach team and while they pop up from time to time this is more or less what I think most Minneapolis advocates would say is the right way to deal with encampments. (I ran searches in the Minneapolis and St. Paul subreddits to see how much people are talking about encampments and in St. Paul they mostly just are not, which is funny given that r/stpaul really hates Melvin and thinks he sucks. Or at least that’s the direction of the threads on the mayoral race.)

St. Paul’s downtown is ailing but it’s dealing with the central problem of downtowns everywhere, a reduced in-office work force. Property taxes are high, and this is a problem that is largely created by the fact that huge sections of St. Paul are owned by the government (because it’s the state capital) or a large nonprofit organization (we’ve got a truly ridiculous number of colleges) and are thus not taxable; the fall in commercial property values in downtown is a major contributing factor and this not a problem that’s going to get solved as quickly as would be nice. It’s annoying to start a business in St. Paul (Minneapolis has this same issue) and they should rethink some of the regulations; I’ll put that on Melvin. Kaohly Her says that Cub says that nobody at City Hall took their calls; Melvin says this is bullshit (except he was more polite about it than Adam) and that they complained a lot about shoplifting but then never called 911 when it was actually happening.

Fundamentally I think Melvin has done a pretty good job of fixing the stuff that he could fix. In the coming four years (because as noted, I think he’s going to win) I hope he’ll bring some of that energy to dealing with the Snelling-University vacant CVS (is that a pet peeve of mine? I mean yeah but I think it pisses off everyone who regularly passes that intersection. Seriously, what the hell) and those vacant buildings on Grand that the Ohio teacher’s retirement fund is basically just sitting on and leaving empty.

A final strategic note: Melvin’s father was a cop, and it’s pretty clear that he has a good relationship with the SPPD, enough that he was able to get them to aggressively investigate non-fatal shootings. In the current political environment, I can think of worse things than a progressive mayor who can successfully tell the cops to do stuff.

Anyway, I am currently planning to rank Melvin #1 (and Kaohly #2, and Yan Chen #3, even though I don’t think those rankings will matter.) If you’re unhappy with Melvin, I think Kaohly would make a fine mayor would probably disappoint you just as much, honestly (unless your ONLY issue with Melvin is that you hate the idea of the Summit bike trail, in which case, I guess she’s your girl.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 5

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Steffanie Musich is the incumbent and is running again. She was not endorsed at the City DFL convention, probably due to the walkout of all the Frey supporters in a failed attempt to break the quorum.

On the ballot:

Steffanie Musich (Incumbent)
Kay Carvajal Moran (Labor-endorsed)
Justin Theodore Cermak
Colton Baldus

tl;dr I would rank Kay Carvajal Moran #1, Colton Baldus #2, Steffanie Musich #3.

Over on the post about the At-Large race I provided a whole lot of backstory on the last four years of the Park Board, and I don’t want to just C&P that whole thing over because there’s a lot. For the people who don’t want to click over, here’s a minimalist “why I’m super annoyed with the current Park Board, and why I want candidates who will do different things” summary:

I think Steffanie was the only candidate seeking endorsement at the City DFL convention, which is why there was no endorsement in District 5 — she was one of the members LiUNA (the park board workers’ union) identified as a union buster, but there was no viable alternative presented at the time. Since then, Kay has entered the race and gotten a ton of union support.

Justin Theodore Cermak

Justin listed his Instagram as his campaign site but I linked to his campaign Facebook because it’s a lot more informative. (For example, the newest post as of today appears to suggest that supporters put his signs up in parks.) Most informative bit is his rant about how the incumbent is “THE driving force behind the plan to ruin Hiawatha Golf Course.” That golf course is not viable in 18-hole form. One of the things I like about Musich is her refusal to prioritize golf over a clean lake and people not losing their homes. I would absolutely not rank Justin.

Steffanie Musich (Incumbent)

Steffanie was on the wrong side of both the Uptown Mall vote and the strike. She was also the driving force behind a program that sells carbon offset credits to companies, theoretically in exchange for planting trees. Her website mentions this in her first-term accomplishments: “Facilitated Public/Private partnership with Green Minneapolis to expand tree planting by 7,000 trees annually.” Except that according to the 2024 Star Tribune article I linked above, “none of the profits has been used to plant a single tree. It may be used to purchase trees in 2025, said Park Board spokeswoman Robin Smothers.”

I have mixed feelings about carbon credits; I mean on one hand they’re weirdly reminiscent to me of medieval-style indulgences and on the other hand they’re maybe better than nothing. However, if someone’s buying indulgences carbon credits on the basis of trees getting planted, and the trees aren’t getting planted, it’s really hard to see this as anything other than greenwashing.

Kay Carvajal Moran (Labor-endorsed)

Kay doesn’t have the DFL endorsement (presumably because she entered late) but does have multiple labor endorsements and endorsements from various high-profile DFLers. She’s held various jobs in human services (her LinkedIn says she’s currently a case management assistant for Hennepin County, and has worked as a youth coordinator).

She’s worked with the Minnesota Immigrant Movement to support street vendors, and supports “micro entrepreneurs” in the parks. She’s also worked on youth programming in the parks (she mentions kickboxing, Bike Alebrijes MN, and academic support.) Her website leads with youth programming and also talks about environmental stewardship and worker rights.

Colton Baldus

Colton Baldus is a tenant organizer. The vision section of their website leads with “stand with organized labor” but also talks about climate justice, reduced fees for those who currently struggle to afford to use park programs, public restrooms in every park, and harm reduction strategies. They don’t t seem to have any endorsements.

I would rank Kay #1, Colton #2. I originally said that I was not worried enough about Justin and his “NO ENDORSEMENTS – NO MASTERS” approach to campaigning to rate Steffanie #3, but a friend made a case for her on the grounds that it’s worth having the golf course ride-or-die lose as decisively as possible, and she deserves some gratitude for sticking with her stance on the golf course. (FWIW I think this is a contest between Kay and Steffanie, in any case.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 6

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Cathy Abene is the incumbent and is running again. Her opponent, Ira Jourdain, has the DFL endorsement, probably in large part due to the walkout at the City DFL convention of all the Frey supporters in a failed attempt to break the quorum. (If I were Cathy Abene, I would be absolutely furious at Frey. Apparently they’re campaigning together, though.)

On the ballot:

Cathy Abene (Incumbent)
Ira Jourdain (DFL-endorsed)

Cathy Abene

Cathy Abene was my second choice in 2021 and while I don’t think I regret this (could’ve been worse) I’ve been disappointed with her as she’s largely gone in lockstep with Elizabeth Shaffer. I wrote a longer assessment of all the reasons I don’t like the current Park Board on my At-Large post and I don’t want to recap here, but I will note that Cathy got called out by LiUNA (the union that represents the Park Workers) as a union buster in the wake of the park worker strike. On Cathy’s website, she says, “The number one refrain I hear from constituents is that we should prioritize taking care of what we have, and I couldn’t agree more. When it comes to our physical parks, our world-class system is only as good as the assets that make it up.” The thing she doesn’t acknowledge is that among the assets that make it up are the people who take care of what we have! Taking care of the workers who maintain our parks is part of taking care of what we have. Cathy also joined Shaffer in the vote to cut youth programming positions in order to repave a bike path.

When my kids were little, we lived close to the Hiawatha School Park, and we went there a lot. There was a woman who worked at the park (I would guess she’s now retired) who was the person who would literally haul out the hose to spray down the surface of the ice rink any day when it was cold enough to freeze, to give skaters a fresh surface. One time some asshole dropped bubble bath into the wading pool and she spent the next day scrubbing it out by hand. She worked so hard making sure that park stayed pleasant and usable and nice. The parks system is partly the fields, playgrounds, ice rinks, woods, community centers, etc., and it’s partly the people who mow the grass, fix the play equipment, flood the ice rinks, trim the trees, and staff the community centers.

Ira Jourdain

Ira is an enrolled tribal citizen of the Red Lake band of Ojibwe, works in Human Services, and served on the Minneapolis School Board for two terms. In an article where he reflects on his time on the school board he mentions his proudest achievement is mandating 30 minutes of recess per day for Minneapolis elementary schoolers. (That’s a minimum, to be clear, and many — possibly most — Minneapolis elementary schoolers were not getting it. My kids definitely did not, when they were in a Minneapolis public school.)

Ira got an anti-endorsement from someone who’d had very bad experiences with him back when he was running for the State House seat in 62B (okay, someone let me know you can’t see that link without a Bluesky account. The statement was, “Ira Jourdain is the single worst elected official I have ever interacted with. I had to block him on Facebook because he would constantly harass me in the DMs at like 2AM,” made by a former resident who maintains ties to the area) but I’m very unhappy with Cathy, and Ira actually explicitly acknowledges how much the parks are the result of hard work from the park staff.. I would vote for Ira Jourdain.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 4

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This district is currently represented by Elizabeth Shaffer, who is running for the Ward 7 City Council seat. I don’t like Shaffer; she is central to all my current grudges against the current Park Board.

There are three people on the ballot:

Jeanette Colby
Jason Garcia (DFL-endorsed)
Andrew Gebo

tl;dr I would rank Jason Garcia first, Andrew Gebo second.

Over on the post about the At-Large race I provided a whole lot of backstory on the last four years of the Park Board, and I’m not going to fully recap that here because there’s a lot, but here’s one thing: last spring, there was a vote on the Uptown Mall, which is a stretch of park-owned land between Hennepin and Lake of the Isles:

A snip of Google Maps showing "The Mall," just south of the Midtown Greenway, running between Lake of the Isles and Hennepin (which isn't labeled in this snippet but where you see MoZaic, that's Hennepin).

There were five years of community engagement over how best to develop it, which resulted in a detailed plan in 2021: the plan included a play area, a connection to the Greenway, seating, a “shared woonerf” that could be used for stuff like farmer’s markets or small art festivals, and a community garden. When this plan was originally created, it looked like it wouldn’t be implemented for years, because it would require money to be allocated to do it. However, this year, the Met Council announced they were going to do a sewer rebuild, which involved tearing out all the roads anyway, and offered to rebuild it however the Park Board wanted it rebuilt. It was an absolutely amazing opportunity for a free park, basically.

And the current Park Board turned it down, because the rebuild would sacrifice parking. Their claim was that they were acting out of concerns over fire safety. However, their justification was that the Fire Department prefers a 20-foot road width; this is wider than the “shared woonerf/flexible market street” in the plan, but also wider than the 12-foot road that’s there now, unless you include the 8-foot parking lane, which is normally full of parked cars. The board then voted against banning parking there, or even enforcing the on-the-books overnight parking ban. The claim that this was about fire safety rather than parking was profoundly disingenuous. (Also, Minneapolis is full of streets that don’t provide that ideal 20′ road width and the Fire Department is able to cope.) The theory I’ve heard now from two places is that the rich people who live in mansions nearby didn’t want the renters who currently park on the Mall to relocate to the street parking in front of their homes.

One final note on this controversy: the Uptown Mall is in District 4.

One of the other major things that happened was the strike of park workers. Elizabeth Shaffer is one of the park board members called out by the union as a union buster.

Moving on! Jason Garcia was endorsed at the DFL City Convention. On September 29th an e-mail went out advocating for an “apolitical Park Board” and signed by some of the most aggressively centrist, absolutely political people in town. They’re supporting Colby.

Jeanette Colby

Jeanette Colby is campaigning with Elizabeth Shaffer — her lit highlights that endorsement — and I swear I saw her talking somewhere about having been recruited by her to run. That would be reason for suspicion but I also e-mailed her to get her thoughts on the Uptown Mall thing, and here’s her response:

On the question of The Mall, my biggest concern was that if street access were removed, emergency vehicles would not have had adequate access to the apartment homes of dozens of people according to the Minneapolis Fire Chief. In general, I believe a remake of a space like The Mall requires much more substantial community input than it received during the Southwest Area master planning process. When the issue came to a critical juncture in April, the East Isles Neighborhood Association did not support the master plan.

Yeah, no. Even the Star Tribune reporting made it clear the “fire safety concerns” were a smokescreen for a collective freakout over parking spaces.

Colby has volunteered with the Kenwood Neighborhood Organization, the SWLRT Community Advisory Committee, and the Cedar Lake Park Association. She is a an artist (ceramicist, specifically) and a docent at the MIA.

I would not rank her.

Andrew Gebo

Gebo is a tech guy with cats. He spoke in favor of the Uptown Mall plan when interviewed by the Southwest Connector for their coverage of the race. (“This project, part of the Southwest Parks Plan, would have created bike paths and recreational spaces that connected Uptown to Bde Maka Ska, which would have been a transformative enhancement to our park system. With the Metropolitan Council’s sewer project presenting a unique opportunity to implement this plan without cost to the Park Board, the decision not to act reflects a lack of vision and leadership.”)

He has done some volunteering in the parks (in an e-mail response he mentioned Earth Day trash pickups and supporting fundraising efforts with the Friends of Loring Park) but has not served on any commissions or advisory boards. I enjoyed listening to his interview with WedgeLive but there was one bit I found sort of eyebrow-raising — John asked him if he was ready for “nastiness” and Gebo thought he meant in the campaign. John did not mean in the campaign. (The Park Board has historically been one of the most drama-prone, acrimonious elected bodies in the City of Minneapolis.) If he were the only person running on a “park board, not parking board” platform I would endorse him but he is not. I would rank him second.

Jason Garcia (DFL-endorsed)

Jason Garcia is someone I’ve known online for years and I was really excited when they entered the race. They spent most of the month of September in the hospital after emergency surgery — they’re now home, but still recovering. They do expect to be sufficiently recovered to serve, if elected, but they are not able to do as much campaigning as some of their opponents. If you would like to see Jason elected, this would be a good race to volunteer to doorknock in.

Jason’s employment has involved a lot of work in local/indigenous foods. They worked for the American Indian Community Housing Organization and helped AICHO plan an indigenous food market. They were also the founding manager at the Indigenous Food Lab Market in Midtown Global Market.

Their governance experience includes a lot of time in meetings as an observer, and part of why I’m familiar with them is their involvement with WedgeLive coverage of local politics. I have a lot of confidence that they know what they’re getting into, and significant conviction that they’ll make good choices in Park Board work.

I would rank Jason Garcia #1, Andrew Gebo #2.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 1

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This district is currently represented by Billy Menz, who dropped out after not getting endorsed at the DFL City Convention.

On the ballot there are two Dans:

Dan Engelhart (DFL-endorsed)
Dan Miller

Over on the post about the At-Large race I provided a whole lot of backstory on the last four years of the Park Board, and I don’t want to just C&P that whole thing over because there’s a lot. For the people who don’t want to click over, here’s a minimalist “why I’m super annoyed with the current Park Board, and why I want candidates who will do different things” summary:

Dan Engelhart got endorsed at the DFL City Convention, Billy Menz dropped out, and Dan Miller joined the race. On September 29th an e-mail went out advocating for an “apolitical Park Board” and signed by some of the most aggressively centrist, absolutely political people in town. They’re supporting Miller.

Dan Engelhart (DFL-endorsed)

Engelhart’s website emphasizes his background as a union organizer and employee (he’s the business agent for MAPE). I e-mailed to ask for more information on his work with the parks, and he got back to me promptly to talk about his involvement with AFCAC (the Above the Falls Community Advisory Committee). Honestly I felt like I got the best sense of who he is, what he stands for, and what he wants to do on the Park Board from watching his WedgeLive interview. You can also listen to WedgeLive interviews as a podcast but this is a good one to watch on YouTube, as there’s a lot of discussion of the areas they bike through and it’s useful to be able to see some of what they’re talking about. He struck me as committed, knowledgeable, and thoughtful.

Dan Miller

Calling Dan Miller a “bike guy” doesn’t really do him justice. He teaches biking to kids through a program in the local schools; he’s chaired multiple groups working on planning bikeway expansions; he’s worked on master plan advisory committees; he’s served for years on the Bicycle Advisory Committee. From his website: “Thanks in part to his advocacy, $5.5 million in public funding was secured to begin construction of the Grand Rounds Missing Link between Stinson Boulevard and the Franklin Avenue Bridge. […] Dan Miller has spent a decade championing a safer Central Ave. His persistent advocacy helped shape MnDOT’s corridor plan. […] His firsthand experience [with kid biking safety] informed his role in the Edison High School Safe Routes to School study, where he led site tours and helped identify high-risk areas.” Various people I know have worked with him and say he’s good to work with.

I like this, and he sounds terrific in a number of ways (his website also expresses commitment to playgrounds, dog parks, ice rinks, etc., lest you think he is just a bike guy). I guess my main concern about him is the fact that the Super Apolitical (very political) people endorsed him. I e-mailed him and asked, among other things, whether he had considered screening for Labor endorsement.

He replied, among other things: “My reason for filing was after Billy Menz suspended his campaign. I felt strongly that there be at least two candidates on the ballot for Parks Commissioner District 1.  I do not have an agenda.  I am running because it is my civic duty to offer voters a choice of parks over politics.  I have years of volunteering on parks, city and neighborhood committees as well as a career managing people and projects.  There’s alot happening at MPRB which I think is going in the right direction. I don’t wish to upend Parks for All, the Above the Falls and Grand Rounds Missing Link efforts.  I’m a collaborator and will not be a ‘my way or the highway’ commissioner.” (I’m not sure if he’s referring to Billy Menz there but “my way or the highway” is a phrase that has come up A LOT when people have talked about Billy Menz.) So given his line about “parks over politics” I do have concerns that he’s weaker on labor issues, especially given that Engelhart has in fact done a bunch of civic work in the parks (less than Miller, but this is actually an extremely high bar.)

ETA: I watched the Parks & Power forum and my concerns that Miller is weaker on labor issues were reinforced by Miller’s answers on the questions about the strike. This first came up about 15 minutes in. A constituent asked how people would ensure a strike didn’t happen again. Miller’s reply went on for a while but included:

Miller: It was a bad mark — it was a bad mark on everybody. Park board and union. Particularly the union leadership. The park board is more than just a union contract. […] If you take a look at the park boards’ 200 page budget from last year, and to be able to see the challenges that are out there, you’ll see a dollar amount that is not increasing, it’s got to stay the same, costs are going up, something’s got to [inaudible] and that will be… [shrugs].

Audience member: the workers’ backs.

Miller: Could be workers’ backs, could be a reduction in labor.

The strike came up again 45 minutes in (they got asked about lessons learned). Miller again opted to blame union leadership:

I don’t fully understand — I can only tell you what I’ve read in the newspaper, which reflects worse on LiUNA’s leadership than on the Park Board. […] To have national leaders come down and try to beat up on the Park Board … those folks were stuck. They were trying. I think leadership led them down a crack that a lot of people in LiUNA didn’t want to go.

So yeah, I would vote for Engelhart. The people who have worked with Miller have good things to say about him, but it’s clear he didn’t miss out on union endorsement just because he got in late.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, At-Large

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Everyone in Minneapolis will have this race on their ballot, and it’s a bit of a doozy in terms of “complicated history” and “lots of candidates,” so buckle up. I am posting this with my current choice of candidates, then come back and edit in late October, based on the vibes I’m getting at that point in the race.

There are three seats up, and eight people running. This is ranked-choice race and you get to rank three people. Exactly how this shakes out is complicated, and I strongly recommend watching this video that explains how a multi-seat instant runoff vote works:

The key detail here that I think people need to take into account: when it’s a one-person race, you get to rank three candidates, which means if there are three people you like you can list them in order of preference. With a three-person race, you also get to rank three candidates, which means “who among the candidates I like are the most likely to beat the candidates I don’t like” becomes a more important piece of the equation.

Here’s who’s running, and then I will put in a cut because this is going to get very, very long.

Matthew Dowgwillo
Meg Forney (Incumbent)
Amber A. Frederick (DFL-endorsed)
Mary McKelvey
Tom Olsen (DFL-endorsed, Incumbent)
Adam Schneider (Green and DSA-endorsed)
Averi M. Turner
Michael Wilson (DFL-endorsed)

tl;dr if I were voting today (September 30th) I would vote (1) Tom Olsen, (2) Michael Wilson, (3) Amber Frederick. I may revise that closer to the election, depending (as noted) in part on vibes. ETA 10/30: I’m happy with my rankings.

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