Minnesota Caucuses: The Basics

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So let’s say you’re a Minnesota resident, and you’ve got an opinion about either the Democratic presidential candidates, or the Republican presidential candidates.

On March 1st, you can vote for your preference by attending your precinct caucus.

Location and Time

A caucus is a meeting. Caucuses can be held anywhere the party can arrange space, but for logistical reasons, schools are very popular. Often all the precincts in a ward will be held at some local school, and each precinct gets its own classroom. (I have never been to a caucus that wasn’t held at a school. Possibly because state law requires schools to allow political parties to use them for caucuses.)

You can find your caucus location using this handy online site: http://caucusfinder.sos.state.mn.us/

I would suggest that before you go, you note down your ward and precinct number, and if the website gives you a room number within the building, note that, too.

When I went to my precinct caucus in 2008, there was a huge, huge line leading out the front door of the building, down the block, around the corner, and down the next block. The thing is, the bottleneck was being created by people consulting ward maps to figure out which precinct they were in. I knew my precinct, so we found another door, went in that way, and just made our way to our classroom. (Which also had a line! But at least it was a shorter line. And indoors.) In a regular election, if you find a line, you just get into it, because you’re in line to get a ballot, and everyone needs to go to the same place. At a caucus, once you’re in the building there will probably be at least a dozen different rooms for each individual precinct caucus. Each room has its own line for people to stand in to sign in and get a ballot. So if there’s a line outside the building, you generally will not be cheating if you find a way around it. (Mind you, it’s possible all the other doors will be locked, but in 2008 it was definitely worth trying the other doors!)

Doors will open no later than 6:30 p.m. (Many caucus conveners are planning to be there earlier.) The meetings are supposed to be called to order at 7 p.m. Balloting runs until 8 p.m. (and if you’re standing in line at 8 p.m. they’re supposed to abide by the way it works during a regular election: you’re there, so you’re present, and you get to vote.) (Edited to add: that’s true for DFLers but not Republicans! Republican balloting is done at the beginning of the meeting, so get there on time.)

Who Can Caucus?

You do not have to be a registered party member to attend a caucus, but you are supposed to be a person who generally considers themselves a Democrat (to attend the DFL caucus) or Republican (to attend the Republican caucus). When you sign in at a DFL caucus, you are affirming the following: that you live in the precinct; that you will be 18 and eligible to vote by November 8th (in order to cast a preference ballot) or that you will be 16 (in order to participate in caucus business); that you consider yourself a member of the DFL and are not an active member of another political party; that you agree with the principles of the DFL party.

You are not actually registering as a party member by signing in, exactly, but you’re affirming that you consider yourself a Democrat. It’s a somewhat fine distinction.

If you sign in to a Republican caucus, you’re affirming a similar set of things but mentally cross out “DFL” and insert “Republican.”

(For the recent transplants and the non-locals: the DFL is the local Democratic party. It stands for “Democratic Farmer Labor” and is used interchangeably with “Democrats.”)

All that said, there’s no quiz. The only scenario where someone might care is if you are very publicly a member of some other party — for instance, if you hold public office as a member of some other party. (There is actually a procedure for “challenges” but I have gone to these meetings for years and this has never come up. In theory, if someone thinks you’re not there legitimately, they can challenge you, and your precinct caucus will then vote on whether or not to let you stay. In practice, we are talking about Minnesotans. The reanimated zombie of Ronald Reagan could turn up at your precinct caucus and no one would say a word because oh god that would be confrontational.) The one thing they really don’t want anyone doing is caucusing for two parties on the same night. (Note: if you try that trick, you’ll be breaking state law. Don’t do it.)

(The caucus-finder website lists only Republican and DFL caucuses at the moment, but in fact other parties are caucusing that night as well. More info on the the Green Party caucuses, Libertarian party caucuses, and I went looking for information on the Constitution Party but they don’t appear to hold caucuses.)

Note that you can totally caucus and cast a presidential preference ballot if you are 17 years old right now but will turn 18 before November 8th! And if you will be 16 by November 8th, you can “participate in caucus business,” which basically means that you can propose and vote on resolutions. (Edited to add: that’s a DFL thing, I think.)

The Presidential Preference Ballot

Assuming this works more or less like it has before, they will give you a ballot when you sign in. They’re pre-printing ballots with candidate names, but they may run out, in which case your ballot will be a piece of blank paper on which you write your candidate’s name. (All reasonable spellings will be counted. However, eight years ago, there were two very confused Republicans who came to my DFL precinct caucus and cast ballots for McCain and Romney, and that will not work. If you want your vote to count, you really need to go to the correct party’s caucus.)

If all you want to do is come, sign in, cast your ballot, and leave, you can totally do that.

Our presidential preference ballots are binding. This is true this year for both the Democrats and the Republicans. (Four years ago, it was not true for the Republicans! But it is now.) Essentially our caucus is a very inconvenient primary (because you have to come during that 90-minute period and the lines are much more of a hassle) with absolutely no absentee balloting.

The DFL has a five-minute video on what to expect at your precinct caucus, which is pretty accurate. The one thing I will note is that precinct caucuses are held every year, and they are much, much less crowded in an off-year.

Be ready for crowds this year. That means that if you’re driving to your location, expect parking hassles. If it’s a cold night, be aware that you may wind up stuck outside for a bit before you can get in.

(Edited to add: Republicans will get ballots as the first agenda item at the meeting, not when they sign in. They can vote and leave, though, if they want.)

Accommodations

If you have a disability and need accommodations to participate in your caucus — for instance, if you can’t stand in line for a long time — you have a couple of options. First, you can contact your precinct chair or the chair of your Senate District. You can find your local contacts on the DFL site. The Republican site only gives people down to the Congressional District level, but I first started trying to get answers to my questions back on New Year’s Eve, and I e-mailed Jim Carson, the GOP party chair for Congressional District 4. I heard back from him within hours. (Don’t get me started on the Democrats. Really, don’t.)

The other option is to contact the campaign of the candidate you’re planning to support and see what they can offer. You specifically want their Minnesota campaign office, because they should have local people who can help you out. Bernie’s got a very, very informative page with lots of people you can call on. Hillary’s contact information is somewhat less helpful: here.

Hillary’s less-than-optimal local organization info is better than anything I could find for any of the Republicans. Trump has a Minnesotans for Trump Twitter account. Cruz has a Facebook page. I couldn’t find anything for Kasich. “Rubio for Minnesota” got me a Wikipedia page for a Timberwolves player and here’s Google’s most helpful information on Bush for Minnesota.

(FYI, I tried a bunch of different searches and still came up dry.)

All caucuses are supposed to be held at wheelchair-accessible locations unless they literally can’t find anything within a reasonable distance of the precinct. Also, under state statutes, you have the right to an ASL interpreter if you need one, Braille materials if you need them, etc., unless they literally can’t find you an interpreter. Let them know in advance what you need.

Other Obstacles to Caucusing

You have the right to take time off work to go to your caucus, though you are required to give your employer 10 days notice.

You are allowed to bring your kids with you to the caucus. They can’t participate unless they’re old enough, but they can be in the room. How well this will work depends heavily on your kids.

If you are out of town that day, if you’re home-bound, if you’re sick … you are S.O.L. There are no absentee ballots for the caucus.

I totally agree that this sucks. I think this is a stupid way to pick a presidential candidate, and we should switch to a primary system. My recollection from the last time this got proposed is that the state doesn’t want to switch because they’d have to pay for a whole extra election in March every four years and that’s a lot of money. Under the caucus system, the parties bear the cost.

Oh yeah, that reminds me!

They will totally hit you up for a donation at your caucus. There’s usually a can that gets passed around and they may even suggest a sum.

This donation is entirely optional. You do not have to contribute. It’s nice if you can: there are costs for holding the event that your party has to bear. But you have the legal right to participate without digging out your wallet.

 

Do you want to be in the room where it happens?

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In the presidential primary excitement calendar, Super Tuesday is March 1st. That’s when Minnesota’s political parties hold their caucuses. (Lots of other states, too, but I’m going to focus on Minnesota.)

Both the Democratic and Republican races are interesting enough that I think a lot of people are likely to attend their precinct caucus, many for the first time. So, as a public service, I am writing up information on who can participate in caucuses, how they work, what to expect, and helpful tips. I’ll note that my information is specific to Minnesota —  caucuses do not work the same everywhere.

However, something that should be true everywhere: if you want to participate (in primaries or caucuses) and aren’t sure where to go, how it works, whether you’re eligible, etc., call up the campaign of the person you’re planning to go and support, and ask for information and advice. They should be very motivated to help you!

In Minnesota, you can find your caucus location using this handy online site: http://caucusfinder.sos.state.mn.us/

Note that your caucus location is most likely not the same as the place you go to cast a ballot on election day. You will get to cast a ballot at your precinct caucus, but instead of going to a a polling place, you’re going to go to a meeting.

I’m going to split up the rest of the information across a couple of different posts, so stay tuned.

Gender Nonconforming or Creative

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In the news coverage of the controversy at Nova Classical Academy, it’s really clear to me that some people have no earthly idea what “gender nonconforming” is and how it differs from being trans, so let me talk about that, just briefly.

I think most people have at least some idea what it means for a person to be trans. A trans person identifies with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth: if at birth, people thought you were a boy and gave you a male name, and have always used male pronouns for you, but despite this you know yourself to be a girl, you are trans. (If at birth people thought you were a girl and you agree with that assessment, the word for feeling comfortable in that identity is “cis” or “cisgender.” I am cisgender, or a cis woman.)

The best example of a gender-nonconforming or gender-creative kid I can readily point to is C.J., the son of the blogger at Raising My Rainbow. C.J., now eight years old, likes dresses, wears his hair long, wanted a Bitty Baby for Christmas, and prefers things pink or purple or covered in sparkles (or all three). He went through a brief period of requesting that his family call him Rebecca and use female pronouns, then decided this didn’t feel right. His mother, in a recent blog post, wrote about the fact that she’s had people insist that her son is trans, and pressure her to transition him: “My son no longer wants to be a woman when he grows up, like he did when he was four. He didn’t feel comfortable during those days when he was six and we called him Rebecca and used female pronouns. And, after watching his friend transition he declared that he couldn’t imagine being a girl every day.”

One confusing factor here is that a lot of trans kids start out presenting as gender-creative kids, then transition. But if you’ve got a boy who loves to wear sparkly purple dresses and identifies as a boy, that’s also fine. The appropriate pronoun is “he,” the appropriate word is “boy,” and his communities (school, preschool, day care, church…) should take steps as needed to make sure he is safe and respected. It is no more okay for people to tease a boy about wearing a dress than it is for people to tell a little girl, “you shouldn’t play with that lightsaber; Star Wars is for boys.”

It’s a lot rarer that you hear people talk about gender-creative or gender-nonconforming girls, in part because the idea of a “tomboy” is so solidly part of our culture. We have narratives in which tomboys grow up and put away their blue jeans and join the world of ladylike girls — Katie John, Caddie Woodlawn — and narratives where they hold tightly to the empowerment offered by “masculine” behavior — Tomboy, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. While there are many ways that society squashes girls who want to resist the “feminine” box, society in general these days is overall kinder to little girls who want to wear pants and play baseball than it is to little boys who want to wear dresses and play with dolls. Even the 1970s-era empowerment story (and song, in “Free to Be, You and Me”) William’s Doll shows William as reassuringly masculine other than in his desire for a doll, and assures both readers and the other characters in the story that nurturing behavior is still appropriate masculine behavior.

The two books My Princess Boy and Jacob’s New Dress are both about gender-nonconforming boys. The boys in these books are creative and exhuberant dress-wearing boys. (Here’s a really lovely interview with the author of My Princess Boy, by the way.)

In creating safe schools, we need to protect and empower both gender-creative kids and trans kids. (We also need to recognize that protecting a gender-creative kid may mean something different than protecting a trans kid — just as it’s unacceptable for a peer to say to a trans kid, “you are really a boy!” it’s unacceptable for a peer to say to a gender-creative kid, “you are really a girl!”)

Nova Classical Academy

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Nova Classical Academy is in the news today. This is the school both of my kids attend and have for years. It’s in the news because a few families have responded to anti-bullying efforts at the school by renting space and bringing in the Minnesota Family Council (sponsors of the Parent Action League, named as an anti-gay hate group by the SPLC).

Nova’s facility rental policy left things open to anyone who showed up with the necessary insurance and a check. I think this type of scenario didn’t occur to anyone when the policy was written.

The Minnesota Family Council does not represent Nova. Not only does it not reflect Nova’s values, it is antithetical to the values my children are learning at Nova. MFC is explicitly pro-bullying; they want to see GSAs (supportive organizations for queer kids and allies) eliminated and books censored. They endorse completely discredited, abusive tactics such as conversion therapy, and they want to force teachers to be their mouthpiece for homophobia and transphobia. None of that is what Nova stands for.

Not only do I stand with the targeted family against bullies both inside and outside the school, I will stand between those bullies and the vulnerable kids they are targeting any chance I get.

 

Whimsical Gifts (for people you hate), 2015

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It’s December, and do you know what that means? That means it’s time for my annual very special article on gift shopping for people you hate.

In a better world, we’d only ever have to be presents for people we want to buy presents for. But the sad fact is that sometimes, presents are obligatory. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that sometimes, giving a present is a whole lot less trouble than the inevitable drama that would result from not giving a present.

Let me just reel out the usual disclaimers before we get started. I love everyone I give gifts to: if I have given you a present and you hated it, I swear I tried to get you something you would like (or at least find briefly amusing) and for heaven’s sake please feel free to donate it to a thrift shop or something if you’ve still got it. And if you’ve ever given me something that could possibly fit one of these categories, I am not talking about you, your gift was lovely and I do not suspect you of passive-aggressive malice, I promise.IMG_20131225_201536

I ran across this totally fascinating document from World War II earlier today. (Props to the Central Intelligence Agency, for sharing this riveting bit of history!) This is a guide to “Simple Sabotage,” which I guess was covertly distributed in occupied Europe as a guide to sabotage for the motivated layperson. Probably the funniest part is the section where they talk about how to use office politics as an engine of sabotage against the Nazi war effort. “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.” “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.” “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.” “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”

Anyway, the relevence here is that Resistance members and Allied sympathizers in Nazi-occupied Europe could get away with dropping wrenches into machinery, breaking drill bits and dulling saws, tying up phone lines with wrong numbers, and making lots of time-wasting patriotic speeches to avoid decision making because that sort of thing legitimately happened on a regular basis just by accident. That same basic principle is at work here. People get terrible, inappropriate gifts all the time; usually, it’s not because anyone was trying to give them a bad gift, it’s just because buying good presents for people we don’t know well is really difficult. All those inadvertant bad gifts are your camouflage. Adhere to a certain degree of subtlety, and no one needs to know that your goal here was to make your target unhappy with your Simple Sabotage Christmas largesse.

ON TO THE GIFT IDEAS.

Sports Memorabilia

Many people have a favorite team, and if you buy a thing with their team’s logo on it, this shows that you have paid attention to something they like, and are trying to please them. The thing is, even very devoted fans don’t usually want everything in their house to be dedicated to their sports team. (There are exceptions. You probably already know if you’re dealing with one of those, though.) You can find a Tiffany-style table lamp with a sports team logo. A curtain valance. A wallpaper border. A light switch plate. A spandex throw pillow that looks like a giant baseball. A wall clock! A SHOWER CURTAIN. A pot holder and kitchen towel set. The list goes on, and on, and on.

My favorite item on this list, for sheer WTF value, is definitely the Tiffany-style table lamp with the team logo, but it’s $129, and gifts for people you dislike should always be inexpensive. There are far more reasonably priced items.

Like duct tape. Duct tape is not normally something you would give as a Christmas present, probably, but you can present this with the air of someone who’d never seen sports team duct tape before and got overexcited. Use the statement, “when I saw this I knew I HAD to get it for you!” Which is probably a statement you’ve heard a few times over the years, usually just before being handed a terrible gift. See what I mean about camouflage?

Whimsical Housewares

There are well-designed whimsical kitchen items that are both cute and functional. And then there are whimsical kitchen items that will take up space in a drawer or cabinet without being good for anything at all.

1. Mugs are pretty dang basic, you know? How do you even screw up a mug? Well, you can make it take up the space of two mugs or you can give it a handle that you can’t easily slip your fingers through.

2. Oh look, a hedgehog cheese grater! So adorable, but try to picture using it. How do you even hold onto it while grating cheese with it? If you read the reviews, the answer is, “argh!”

3. The Nessie ladle looked so adorable in the magazine articles about it six months ago — I totally wanted one. Too bad they’re apparently both runty and flimsy. (Small ladles can be functional — we have one that we use for gravy — but it sounds like this one comes in an awkward size, too big for gravy but too small for soup.)

4. A sculptural dragon that will embrace your salt and pepper shaker like they are part of its hoard. Okay, to be fair: I totally know people who would honestly love this item. Use your own judgment here.

5. Even most of the people who would love a dragon salt and papper shaker holder are not actually going to install a dragon TP holder. Especially since, according to the reviews, it’s really pretty annoying to install.

6. In the “easy to install but WHY WOULD YOU” category there is a Santa toilet decal. If you give this for Christmas, it’ll already be too late to stick it on when they unwrap it; they’ll have to save it for an entire year in order to get any use out of it.

7. A decorative tabby cat wine bottle holder. This is a bulky storage gadget for a single bottle of wine that also makes it look like the cat is drinking wine directly from the bottle. Note that the five-star reviews are entirely from people who gave it as a gift and say that the recipient just loved it (except for one person who cheerfully notes that his girlfriend thought it was hideous and “mysteriously lost it.”) If you need a present for someone who’s more of a dog person, you can get a dog version and somehow the wine-sucking golden retriever puppy is even more disturbing to look at than the cat.

8. In the “whimsical wine” category there are also whimsical wine bottle covers. What are these even for? Is there a reason that wine needs a cozy? Are these to dress up gifts of wine because you don’t like wine gift bags? My suggested strategy for bad wine gifts is to go to a wine store or Trader Joe’s and tell them that you need a bottle of wine for a stage set, it needs to not be a recognizable brand (so no three-buck-Chuck) but it doesn’t have to be drinkable and you don’t want to spend more than $5. Then stick a sweater on it, I guess. (WHY. WHY DOES WINE NEED A SWEATER?)

9. Whimsical nested measuring cups. Because you totally want to play “Take Apart the Matryoshka Dolls” before you can measure 1/4 cup of flour, and put them all away again every time you wash them rather than just throwing them in a drawer.

10. Whimsical dinosaur fossil ice cube trays. There is a huge selection of whimsical silicon ice cube trays out there. I spent some time last summer in a rented apartment that came with silicon ice cube trays, and I went out and tracked down a real ice cube tray because life is too short to pry whimsically-shaped cubes out of those stupid silicon trays. They are a complete pain in the ass and no one cares about whimsical ice.

Cookbooks

Rather than linking to specific cookbooks, I’m going to suggest that you visit your nearest chain bookstore and check out the discount section, although before buying, make sure that the discount sticker can be easily peeled off.

There are people who love to cook and disdain any recipe that calls for Cream of Campbell’s or Lipton Onion Soup Mix as ingredients. For those people, you want to find a cookbook where the recipes mostly involve assembling the contents of cans. The whole “Dump Dinners” series is arranged around this premise but there are plenty of others out there.

There are also people who really hate cooking and for them, you want to find a cookbook that claims everything in it is “quick and easy” and “ready in ten minutes” but also assumes that you just happened to stumble across 2 finely diced onions, 10 peeled and minced garlic cloves, 2 chopped green bell peppers, and four deboned ducks before you started the process of cooking. If you’re not sure how to identify those, look for cookbooks produced by Cook’s Illustrated or America’s Test Kitchen. (I have a copy of the America’s Test Kitchen Family cookbook, and I even use it, but they have crock pot recipes in there that call for, I swear to God, two hours of prep before you turn on the crock pot. That is not why I have a crock pot. That is not why anyone has a crock pot.)

Alternately, I’m pretty sure that It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, could successfully irritate anyone who is not already a member of Gwyneth’s personal cult. Especially as it’s apparently about 2/3 pictures of Gwyneth.

Charitable Gifts: Wildlife Adoptions

Yesterday, someone on my Facebook shared an article about how the Bronx Zoo lets you name their Madagascar Hissing cockroaches after people for $10 per named cockroach. That is an awesome, if thoroughly unsubtle, gift. However, when I visited the Bronx Zoo website I couldn’t find any links to do this, so I think it may have been a limited-time deal last February. (Too bad, because with some effort you can sell it as not an insult, I think. You’d want to focus on the whole “only thing that will survive a nuclear war” aspect of the cockroach personality.)

It’s especially too bad because when you browse Wildlife Adoption options they tend to overwhelmingly focus on cute, appealing animals like tigers and panda bears. No one lets you adopt a blobfish. The World Wildlife Fund (logo animal: the panda bear) has 125 species available for wildlife adoption, but the blobfish is not among them. Dear WWF: I think you are missing an opportunity here. I know (I am sure) that as an organization you are strongly committed to saving ugly animals just as much as cute ones. You could even do one of your themed wildlife adoption buckets with the theme “save the uncharismatic fauna, too!” but for sure you’d need a blobfish in there.

Wildlife adoptions from the WWF are available at various price points — they push the $55 option, which comes with a stuffed toy, but you can also do a $25 option, which is just a photo and a certificate. And while they do not have blobfish, they do have some animals available that might suit your gift-giving needs.

Bonobos. “Bonobos are highly social animals,” the WWF tells you on their bonobo page, leaving out the part where they socialize primarily by having sex all day long. “They communicate in a variety of ways–visually, by touch and vocally,” they say, delicately leaving out the fact that bonobos in captivity have been observed using a self-developed sign language to proposition one another sexually. “Male bonobos stay with the group that they were born into; a male’s dominance is based upon his mother’s rank,” they say, leaving out the detail that bonobos live in a lesbian matriarchy. Get your homophobic bigot relative a bonobo wildlife adoption, and get yourself a copy of Biological Exuberance, which was where I first heard about bonobos. Fun additional fact: they’re our closest primate relative. (Well, they’re probably tied with chimps. But they are definitely at least as closely related to us as chimps are.)

Anacondas. If you think about it the right way, giving an anaconda adoption is a very subtle way of calling your recipient a dick.

The Great White Shark. If you have to give a gift to someone who’s ever cut you down emotionally, give them a Great White Shark adoption and think of this lovely image of a Great White Shark every time you look at their shark stuffie. (SUPER GREAT.)

Vampire Bats. This one is maybe a little less subtle, but hey, you are RESCUING ENDANGERED WILDLIFE IN THEIR NAME.

Honey Badgers. Not surprisingly, the WWF page does not quote this excellent educational video about the personal strengths of honey badgers.

The Sierra Club also does wildlife adoptions and lets you adopt tarantulas, which is awesome. However, Ed and I used to donate to the Sierra Club and they would not stop calling us, so I hesitate to suggest donating to them. Although they will send you a tarantula puppet, and how cool is that? Also, if you can figure out a way to sic their phone solicitors onto your recipient, that would definitely be a gift that would keep on giving, but I’m not sure how you’d get them to do that while not also calling you.

If you want a stuffed blobfish for a do-it-yourself wildlife adoption, by the way, you can order one. It’s kind of astonishing how cute it is, while also being recognizably a blobfish. You could pair it with The Ugly Animals: We Can’t All Be Pandas, a book by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, which sadly is an educational comedy group and not an actual non-profit. That’s less a gift for someone you hate and more a perfectly fine gift for anyone cool enough to appreciate it, though.

Uncategorizable

I made a note of this one months ago because it was inexpensive and kind of awesome. These are super cute, but they are also spikey cacti in tiny cases. Available as either key chains or jewelry, and there are teeny tiny holes in the case so you can water them occasionally by immersing them briefly in water. Nifty, cute, suitable for stocking stuffers, but there is something subtly hostile about giving someone a tiny cactus.

Happy holidays to everyone!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

2010: Beyond Fruitcake: Gifts for People You Hate
2011: Gifts that say, “I had to get you a gift. So look, a gift!”
2012: Holiday shopping for people you hate
2013: Gift Shopping for People You Hate: the Passive-Aggressive Shopping Guide
Gifts for People You Hate 2014: The Almost-Generic Edition

Also, if you’re amused by my writing, check out my science blogging at Bitter Empire: http://bitterempire.com/author/naomi-kritzer/

My (kind of low-volume) Twitter feed: @naomikritzer

And my fiction that was published online this year:

Cat Pictures Please (Clarkesworld, January 2015.)
Wind (Apex, April 2015.)
So Much Cooking (Clarkesworld, November 2015.)
The Good Son (Lightspeed, March 2015 — reprint. Originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, 2009.)

And if you just can’t get enough of my writing, you could consider buying:
Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories (short story collection)
Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories (short story collection)
My novels (there are five of them)

Naomi Kritzer’s Fiction, 2015

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Wondering if you missed any of my stories that came out in 2015? Here is a handy list with links!

Short Stories

Cat Pictures Please, Clarkesworld, January 2015.

Wind, Apex, April 2015.

“The Silicon Curtain: A Seastead Story,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2015. You can buy the back issue online.

“Cleanout,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2015. You can buy the current issue online.

Novelettes

“Jubilee: A Seastead Story,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2015. You can buy the back issue online.

So Much Cooking, Clarkesworld, November 2015.

Reprints

The Good Son, Lightspeed, March 2015. (Originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, 2009.)

“Artifice,” ESLI (“If”), translated into Russian. I have no idea how you’d get your hands on this, if you really wanted to read me in Russian. The magazine’s website is here. (Originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2014.)

Election 2015: Endorsements

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These are only for St. Paul, because as far as I was able to determine, there are no elections in Minneapolis tomorrow.

The St. Paul City Council seats are voted on with Instant Runoff/Ranked Choice, which means you can rank your top preferences. I didn’t find any races that I thought were likely to be competitive beyond two people, though. The school board is a “pick four” race, but it’s not ranked choice, so you just vote for the four candidates you like the most and can’t rank them.

The race I feel the most fundamentally undecided about, not surprisingly, is Ward Two (the open seat). I like both Rebecca Noecker and Darren Tobolt quite a bit. Rebecca e-mailed me back about police body cameras (she’s for them) and Darren didn’t, so I’m going with Rebecca, but if you read my analysis of them and decided on Darren, I’m happy to have been of service.

FIRST WARD
Dai Thao

SECOND WARD
1. Rebecca Noecker
2. Darren Tobolt

THIRD WARD
Chris Tolbert (uncontested)

FOURTH WARD
Russ Stark

FIFTH WARD
Amy Brendemoen

SIXTH WARD
Dan Bostrom

SEVENTH WARD
Jane Prince (uncontested)

SCHOOL BOARD
Mary Vanderwert
Zuki Ellis
Steve Marchese
Jon Schumacher

Don’t forget to vote tomorrow, and one of my friends was very startled to find out last week that her polling place had moved, so it’s probably not a bad idea to check yours right now. The polling place finder is here: http://pollfinder.sos.state.mn.us/ and you can also see your sample ballot.

I guess next up is the 2016 Presidential Race. Minnesota doesn’t have a presidential primary, but caucuses, on Super Tuesday (March 1, 2016). I’ve been figuring I just won’t even worry about it until after New Hampshire and Iowa, frankly. I need to catch up on some fiction writing (by the way, I had two stories published today, “Cleanout” in the new issue of F&SF and “So Much Cooking” which you can read online at Clarkesworld!) and think about what I would buy this year if I were gift-shopping for someone I deeply disliked.

Election 2015: St. Paul City Council, Ward Six

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HOME STRETCH. Whew.

Candidates in the Sixth Ward:

Dan Bostrom (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Kevin Bradley
Edward Davis

Kevin Bradley

Kevin Bradley is a libertarian: “My political philosophy is centered on personal liberty, non-aggression, and the belief that the only legitimate function of government is to defend and protect the rights and freedoms of individuals. … I will do everything in my power to make sure taxpayers’ money is spent only on services that are absolutely necessary, or is at least not spent frivolously. Everything else can and should be done by private businesses.” His website is set up on a blog, and you can leave comments, and there’s sort of a hilarious conversation going on in the comments of this page between him and a very persistent local resident.

Resident: My two utmost concerns are the lack of economic development on Arcade and the need for residents to find and pay for snow removal in alleys. Care to comment on how you would attend to these two issues?

Kevin: The issue underlying both of your questions is the high cost of starting and running a business in Saint Paul. I would work to reduce licensing fees and prohibitively expensive insurance requirements, which are among the complaints that I hear from current and potential business owners. If these problems could be addressed, Arcade would be bustling with new and expanding businesses. There would be enough professional snow removal companies to force competition for customers, which would mean ample advertising and affordable service. Any efforts by the city to remove snow from alleys would required higher taxes, which I oppose.

Resident: I understand the impact on taxes. However, in our case we rely on the goodness of one neighbor to find a vendor, collect for cost and put up with all the calls to complain. Some neighbors refuse to pay so the balance is passed along to others. It is just an archaic system that is wrought with contradiction. The City re-surfaces the alley, charges us a special assessment (i.e. a friendly term for taxes), but refuses to take on the snow removal issue. Mpls is able to do it. I can’t believe there isn’t a workable solution for St Paul.

Kevin: The fact that some of your neighbors do not contribute to removing snow from alleys implies that it may not be as important for them as for you.

I mean it’s basically:

Resident: Working with my neighbors hiring a private service provider is incredibly annoying. I want to just have the government tax everyone and provide this service.

Libertarian: No, you don’t understand. This is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

Resident: I totally understand and this SUCKS.

Libertarian: Well, of course it sucks but the actual problem here is too much government.

etc.

ANYWAY

Don’t vote for Kevin if you’d like to see the city take over alley plowing. It’s definitely not a priority for him.

Edward Davis

Ed Davis’s top priority is term limits for the City Council. He has ties to a group that has a long list of grievances, some legit and some oddball. He’s not accepting donations (although he’s recruiting volunteers) and his Facebook page is just his personal page and one of the only things visible to people who aren’t his friends is about a farmer who got in trouble for selling raw milk (“A victory against the industrial food complex controlling our urban food options and producing sterile food that is responsible for many of the chronic diseases of society today.” You know, I respect the right of adults to drink raw milk if they want, but if you’re convinced that pasteurization causes disease, you’re a weirdo.)

NOPE.

Dan Bostrom

Dan Bostrom is an elderly Eastsider who’s been on the City Council since 1996.

He has a long list of genuinely impressive accomplishments from the years he’s been on the Council. He’s endorsed by freaking everybody, and if I lived in Ward 6, he’s who I’d vote for.

Election 2015: St. Paul City Council, Ward Four

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So, it’s literally the day before the election and I’m feeling like I may have waited a little too long to start my term paper and trying to remind myself that once upon a time I felt no particularly obligation to blog about every damn race in the two cities and just stuck to my own ballot. And my own ballot is done! All the rest of this is gravy.

I could totally get this done if the two remaining races (City Council Ward 4 and City Council Ward 5) were like one serious candidate and a couple of flakes, but they’re both real races.

In Ward Four, the candidates are:
Tom Goldstein
Russ Stark (incumbent, DFL endorsed)

Russ Stark

Russ Stark’s very first accomplishment listed on his accomplishments page is, “championed the creation of a citywide streetcar plan.” I am not a fan of streetcars, which combine most of the major downsides of both buses and trains and cost a truly staggering amount of money. (I went to France this summer and rode buses a whole lot, and you know what, it is possible to build an amazing bus system, where all the bus stops actually tell you what stops there and have maps so you can see where they’re going and electronic signboards to tell you when the next bus is arriving, and the buses can be set up with electronic signboards that tell you what the next stop is, and all the stops can have names like on a train system to make it easier for users who aren’t familiar with the area, and you can have an app that adjusts automatically if you miss a connection — actually, that feature was sort of annoying and it would’ve been nice to be able to lock in a route, but having an app that would navigate you to your destination was pretty cool. Anyway: you can do all that for your whole metro area for like the cost of half a streetcar line. I really think we under-rate buses in part because we’ve done such a crappy job with buses for years and years and instead of saying “let’s have something cooler and more expensive!” we could do buses WELL, instead.)

He also “championed the creation of the City’s first sustainable transportation coordinator,” who led the citywide bike plan. I’m more of a fan of the citywide bike plan.

I have to say, I’m struck by how non-accomplishment-y some of his accomplishments are. He “championed” a bunch of things, he “encouraged” Public Works to apply for bike-friendly city status, he “was a leading voice” on some committee. He “championed the creation of a new City position to work solely on development along the Green Line,” which despite being solidly liberal made me think “oh good, because an additional city bureaucrat is definitely the best possible use of tax dollars” (I think the “concierge” system for making it easier to get all the necessary permits and stuff that Rebecca Noecker is suggesting might be better than someone whose job is to be “out on University Avenue every day connecting developers, property owners, and business owners, to ensure we achieve the University Avenue we envision.” (That … honestly makes me think about the Wandering Librarian system, where they’re supposed to bug you while you’re browsing for books like a retail salesperson to see if you need help finding anything, instead of being at a desk where you can find them if you need them. But maybe this works better than it kind of sounds to me?)

He “helped secure the 3 missing stations on the light rail project at Hamline, Victoria, and Western Avenues” — yeah, so, here’s the thing. Adding endless additional stations is why it takes a truly absurd amount of time for that train to get from one downtown to the other. And if we want to get to the Green Line from my house, which is just east of Hamline, we have to walk to Snelling to get to the north-south bus line that’ll take us up to University. But God forbid anyone right up by that line have to walk that half mile to get to their light rail stop. (People who ride the line seem generally happy with it, though, so… maybe those stops were a terrific idea.)

He “championed” improvements to the recycling program, and that’s a plus (I like single-sort, even though I actually still put all my paper in one box and everything else in another). He “led an effort to ensure that every vacant or foreclosed house that the City is investing in be made more energy efficient, ensuring long term-affordability for those moving into the housing and a smaller carbon footprint for our community.” This is the sort of thing that I wonder what the actual ramifications have been. I support energy efficiency; I wonder whether this means that there are vacant/foreclosed houses that have sat rather than being fixed up or sold, because there wasn’t the money to do the energy improvements and, like, putting the pipes back in after they got stolen for the copper, and whether there’s anything in this regulation that says that if a house already meets some benchmark you don’t have to try to push it even higher (there are some very energy-efficient houses! And sometimes the low-hanging fruit has been grabbed already.)

Under Neighborhood Livability he mentions leading the effort to create a new Affordable Housing Trust fund but also this hilarious bullet point: “Developed a sidewalk snow-shoveling doorhanger so that people who walk in their neighborhoods could give a gentle reminder to others to shovel their sidewalks.” Do I need to get into the hilarity of developing new ways for Minnesotans to be passive-aggressive?

His goals for a third term include changing the city’s “process for dealing with icy/snowy sidewalks so that clear sidewalks are expedited in order to improve mobility for families, the elderly, transit users, everyone!” — I’d be in favor of that, though the city is already in charge of plowing the actual streets and reviews are mixed, to put it mildly. He also wants to work on municipal trash collection. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. I swear this was tried a few years ago and went down in flames.

Tom Goldstein

So here’s a nice quote that sums up a lot of what I’m seeing from Tom’s materials: “People in St. Paul don’t want more tax-subsidized development [like the soccer stadium], [Tom Goldstein] said. They want potholes filled and their alleys plowed.”

Tom’s website hits those two themes pretty hard. (a) You’re spending our money on stupid stuff (like stadiums) and (b) what people actually want is everday stuff like alley plowing. His goals are heavily pragmatic, which admittedly is easier to push for from the outside. He’s one of the people pushing for a citywide broadband initiative. (I’m all for it! In Minneapolis we used the municipal Wi-Fi and it was terrific. Here in St. Paul my options are Comcast and CenturyLink, i.e., the faster and more expensive evil vs. the slower and cheaper evil.) He wants alley plowing — so, in addition to not picking up our trash, St. Paul doesn’t plow our alleys. Instead, you’re supposed to get together with your neighbors and all chip in to pay for the plowing, which is problematic in all sorts of ways, like someone has to organize it, and if you don’t pay up they get stuck covering the gap, and sometimes people just freeload on their more community-spirited neighbors since it’s not like you can plow just part of an alley. (I feel like in some cities, you could probably find an alley plower who would work with you on the goal of demonstrating to the freeloaders the many disadvantages of not participating in the cost-sharing. I mean, the snow has to go somewhere, right? That doesn’t seem to happen here.) Also, I am pretty sure that the city could add alley plowing to the to-do list for a less than what we pay per year for our alley, but even if they couldn’t it would eliminate a lot of hassles.

He wants to ban free plastic bags from stores, which I would find annoying. (I re-use my high-quality paper bags with handles every week, but I like plastic bags for stuff like raw meat, and also the small plastic bags from the produce department for things like green beans.)

He wants to create “an ‘Office of Enterprise Development’ that will encourage businesses to locate in St. Paul, identify barriers to making that happen, and provide technical assistance to start-up ventures so that they can find funding sources and successfully navigate the St. Paul municipal code,” which makes me wonder if he likes Russ Stark’s guy who is “out on University Avenue every day connecting developers, property owners, and business owners” so much he wants an entire office of these people.

My biggest concerns about Tom come from reading through this somewhat contentious Facebook thread about bike lanes on Cleveland Ave. He said that he’d run into a lot of opposition to the bike lanes (but apparently was unaware that there’s been a concerted effort on the part of a few of the businesses to quash the bike lane striping). Someone posted to say, “I’m a Midway resident, I work at St. Kate’s, I bike, and I strongly support bike lanes on Cleveland. You shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that I’m supporting Russ because of his leadership on these issues.” Tom replied, “if you’re going to vote for a candidate based primarily on whether or not he supports putting bike lanes on a street that even avid bicyclists have told me they won’t ride, there’s nothing I can say to change your mind. I don’t think the St. Paul Bike Plan falls apart simply because people might need to take another look at whether Finn or Prior works better than Cleveland. That a few bike zealots are willing to take such umbrage over the fact that I’m willing to consider the opinion of Ward 4 residents that might differ from yours is a pretty sad commentary on the state of democracy in this country–and this city.”

Which….wow. I mean, if you get that bent out of shape when someone disagrees with you, I don’t think you have the temperament to be on the City Countil. (If you read the whole thread, there’s a fair amount more: “If the bike plan is a superior document and the process for selecting Cleveland Avenue without any significant flaws, then winning over detractors shouldn’t be difficult” — ugh, that’s a recipe for Madisonian-style paralysis, actually. You have to strike a balance between listening to residents and saying “yeah, you’ll adjust” and pushing something through. I mean, everyone wants bike lanes somewhere that they will never inconvenience cars in any way, and that may not be possible, and that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have bike lanes.

“Mike, this became a campaign issue because it was clearly a concern that neighbors expressed when I knocked on their doors this summer. That’s called representative government. I realize your preference would be that I should have ignored all the people who expressed concerns because they are not well informed or under the influence of ‘parking enthusiasts,’ but I give people more credit than that” — I am basically unable to read this in a non-patronizing tone.

Endorsement: Russ Stark. Not because I’m entirely satisfied with him, but because I think his opponent isn’t really ready for prime time. Also, St. Paul desperately desperately needs better bike routes, and someone who will push for them.

Election 2015: St. Paul City Council, Ward Two

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Open seat! So there are a bunch of people running and no one’s endorsed by any party.

Sharon Anderson
Patrick Fearing
Bill Hosko
Michael C. Johnson
Rebecca Noecker
Darren Tobolt

Sharon Anderson

Man, it would suck to be any other person named Sharon Anderson who wanted to go into politics and lived in St. Paul. Because at this point, everyone would assume that you were this particular unhinged weirdo with the worst eye for website design this side of 1997.

Patrick Fearing

Patrick Fearing considers it a selling point that he has lived not just in St. Paul but in Ward 2 for his entire life (he’s fifty.) In fact, I think every single job he lists (Mancini’s Char House, Pearson’s Candy Company, Schmidt’s Brewery) is in Ward Two. I don’t find that endearing, I find that unnerving. Is there some reason he can’t cross water?

His primary issue seems to be that he’s opposed to parking meters on Grand Avenue.

In a questionnaire he filled out, he gets asked for his top three priorities, and lists five. He must have filled that out before the parking meter issue blew up, because the first thing he says is, “I want to get the Bay Island Station area back on the map. It used to be a great place to go down and fish off the dock, until the city put a fence up. I want to bring back the dock and open it up for the community to go and fish, possibly open a boat launch there.” He also thinks St. Paul is too boring and needs more of a night life, and he is very proud of the fact that he’s raised no money (“Unlike Darren and Rebecca I haven’t had my hand out for two years asking the people of Saint Paul for their money to run my campaign.”)

Bill Hosko

BilL Hosko appears to be an artist and a political hobbyist. A search on his name turned up a Facebook page for a Ward 2 race, last updated in 2011. The Facebook page has a link to a website other than his current website, which is now entirely in Japanese. His principle issue seems to be parking meters, which he opposes.

So since that’s the ISSUE DU JOUR for Ward Two, I just want to say, as someone who lived in Minneapolis for seventeen years, I am baffled by the lack of parking meters on Grand Avenue and also by the willingness of St. Paul to post “permit [i.e., resident] parking only” signs on any streets near a popular shopping area.

There are large sections of Grand I won’t even try to shop on anymore because it is such a pain to park. I am totally willing to pay to park. I am totally willing to park a block away and walk. What I am not willing to do is to circle endlessly, like a vulture, hoping that something will open up so I can park and get my errand done. LIFE IS TOO SHORT.

Years ago in Minneapolis, I used to have to go to the Lake/Minnehaha post office once a week. That post office has a ridiculously small parking lot and I pretty much never got to park there. There’s also angle parking along the street outside the post office, but that was also nearly always full, so I had to park an annoying distance away and walk for my two-minute errand. One day, Minneapolis installed parking meters for all the angle parking. They were super cheap parking meters — 50 cents an hour — but this meant that suddenly, parking in those spots was nearly always available and for a mere 25 cents I could get my errand done efficiently. BLISS. I am a huge fan of metering high-demand parking; it works really well, and it makes money for the city. There’s been all this kvetching about how those proposed Grand Ave meters aren’t really trying to ration the parking, they’re trying to raise revenue for the city — even if that’s true, so what? On-street parking spots are not plowed and paved and generally maintained using magical coins pooped out by unicorns. That money comes from somewhere. Why not parking meters?

So all the “oh, I am SO TOTALLY against parking meters, I was against them before anyone else was against them, I was basically BORN opposed to the ENTIRE CONCEPT of parking meters” is not actually a selling point for me. YMMV.

Michael C. Johnson

Michael Johnson has a Facebook page that says he’s running but no other website, or any positions to speak of (someone asked him what he stood for and he said, “I am working on coming out with some bullet points to hammer out… I just made the decision to jump about 24 hours ago. I am for small business, civil liberties, and public safety. I would like our community to keep going down the right path.” That was in August.) He did not fill out any of the candidate questionnaires that I could find, and there are a grand total of four posts on his campaign Facebook page, one of which is a family picture and one of which is a “Michael Johnson for City Council” graphic.

And now we come to the two people who are actually running for the position: Rebecca Noecker and Darren Tobolt.

Rebecca and Darren both tried for DFL endorsement and the convention deadlocked. The problem I have making decisions in contests like this is that the differences between the candidates tend to be pretty subtle. Everyone is pro-transit, pro-living-wage-jobs, and pro-youth-development; everyone wants to be YOUR representative in all caps and they will listen! and respond! and by the way they hate parking meters just like you do.

Rebecca Noecker

Rebecca grew up in St. Paul, but attended Harvard, taught in Louisiana, and lived for a few years in Pune, India, which seems like a respectable amount of exposure to broader horizons. (She tells a story about standing endlessly in line in an office in India to get her visa renewed, and how this gives her empathy for non-English-speakers interacting with the government in St. Paul.) She now lives in the West Side neighborhood and notes her dissatisfaction with the fact that some of the core neighborhood businesses have closed in the last year, transit and bike connections are problematic, and they saw a spike in crime over the summer due to teenagers with nothing to do. (“And I know I’m not the only one who has felt infuriated at the lack of basic city services as I drove over horribly rutted streets last spring.” Actually, this past spring wasn’t nearly as bad as the year before. But the year before was the stuff of which legends are made. The road horrors of St. Paul that year were EPIC. There was this one pothole in Randolph Ave that I swear was the size and depth of a bathtub. They did at least patch that one quickly. I should probably add “bitching about road maintenance” to the list of issues that unite absolutely everyone in the city, though. I mean, it’s a cheap way to score political points but she’s also probably absolutely sincere.)

She’s got a little expandable section at the bottom of her About Rebecca page (easy to miss!) that counters claims that she says are being made about her. One of the claims is that she’s anti-teacher, which got me wondering if her Louisiana teaching experience was with Teach For America. She did, in fact, teach with TFA. I am not a TFA fan, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold the program against the recent college grads who get suckered into working for TFA (especially when the graduated in a recession, which I’m guessing she did). Under “Claim: Rebecca supports keeping incompetent teachers in the classroom,” I appreciate that she subtly but clearly points out that the St. Paul public schools are the domain of the school board, not the city council, and adds, “She also believes the City can support our schools by ensuring kids have outstanding enrichment opportunities during their out-of-school hours, at parks, rec centers and libraries.”

I do think it’s a little funny that under the claim “Rebecca thinks feminism is radical and outdated,” it doesn’t counter by saying that she’s a proud feminist, but rather, “Rebecca is a strong female leader who has worked tirelessly throughout her career to ensure that all people – women and men – are heard and valued. Rebecca has been endorsed for her pro-feminist positions by womenwinning, the DFL Feminist Caucus, and MN-NOW.” Apparently the “not really a feminist” accusation comes from an essay she wrote as a 17-year-old college freshman.

Over on her Issues page, she says she stands for transparency, inclusivity, and courage. (Transparency is big this year. I predict that in the next year the City Council and the school board will make some genuine efforts to be transparent, which will then slack off as they realize that most of the citizens really don’t want to see how the sausage is made.)

She goes on to break out four key issues: city services, economic development, investing in youth, and social justice. Under city services, she comes out strongly in favor of snow plowing and road repair, and on safety, says “Endorsed by the Police Federation, Rebecca has advocated for fully funding a model of policing where the police are a part of the community.” Community policing is one of those things that I’m strongly in favor of when it means what it meant in Madison when I was growing up. Depending on how it’s implemented, it can be just as problematic as any other model. This also made me wonder where she stands on the issue of body cameras for police: I didn’t find anything on her site about it, and Google didn’t help me here, so I tried e-mailing her.

Down in her “social justice” category she says she wants to set up “an advisory board of citizen leaders that reflects the racial, socio-economic and linguistic diversity of our community.” She also says, “Rebecca’s personal journey from the ivy-covered walls of Harvard University, to dilapidated school buildings in Baton Rouge, through the slums of India, and to the diverse West Side community has taught her to seek out different perspectives in order to appreciate the complexity of every issue.” Which … hmm. I don’t know, this is the sort of statement that sounds like a privileged kid’s college essay.

Although Rebecca is clearly a Democrat, if you’re one of the six Republicans voting in Ward Two, she’s probably your candidate. She’s endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, she worked for TFA (which the teacher’s union loves to hate), and she’s endorsed by the Police Federation. That said, she’s not actually particularly conservative. (She doesn’t talk about taxes anywhere on her site, which is also kind of interesting and makes me realize that none of the candidates I’ve looked at yet have talked about taxes. It’s not actually a particularly conservative stance to complain about property taxes, though, since they’re regressive and St. Paul’s are some of the highest in the state.)

Looking for her stance on taxes brought up the East Metro Voting Guide questionnaire. Her bio on that one rather neatly sums up some of my issues with TFA. She got a BA from Harvard in Social Studies, which is sort of a generalist approach to the Social Sciences, I think. She taught 8th grade Earth Science (without a degree either in Education or in Geology or in fact any natural science) and notes in several places that a lot of these kids could barely read. (The argument against TFA is that the kids they’re sent to teach really need educated, experienced teachers and instead they get bright-eyed college kids with marginal credentials who are there for two years, max. Yeah, yeah, she went to Harvard. She was teaching 8th grade Earth Science with a Social Studies degree! That’s a marginal credential, right there.)

Anyway, she does get into taxes in that questionnaire: “Expanding our tax base is essential because generating additional public revenue can not be done solely by tax increases – residents and business owners have already seen their taxes skyrocket in the last decade. The way to address this challenge is to attract more businesses to Saint Paul and to prioritize commercial/industrial uses of available land. Commercial/industrial land use is the only type that gives more in revenue to the city than it takes in services. Because Saint Paul is a fully developed city, with little additional land available for redevelopment and 33% of its land untaxable, we need to use our available land for commercial and industrial uses whenever possible.” She goes on to suggest that St. Paul expand its business incentive program to cover small businesses, make it easier for businesses to navigate city hall, and “overcome our persistent reputation for being an unfriendly place to do business.” She’s on the Planning Commission, something that doesn’t get a lot of play on her campaign website but she mentions several times in the questionnaire.

See, that’s the sort of insider understanding of the details that makes me think someone could be really effective on the City Council. The risk is that she could be the next Jackie Cherryhomes (former Minneapolis City Council rep MADE OF PURE EVIL.)

Darren Tobolt

I just want to note that if he gets elected, there will be a Tobolt and a Tolbert representing adjacent wards, which is going to be confusing as heck. I don’t think Noecker has brought this up, and maybe she should consider pointing it out?

Darren has worked as a community organizer and a DFL Party Chair, and he’s been a legislative aide to a Ramsey County Commissioner. (I bet he knows our water comes out of the Mississippi.) He worked in a blue-collar job when he first graduated from high school, then joined the National Guard to pay for college.

Rebecca and Darren both have a long list of impressive endorsements, FYI. Rebecca is endorsed by several sub-groups within the DFL (the Stonewall DFL Caucus, the Feminist DFL Caucus, and Young DFL), State Senator Sandy Pappas, and the Police Federation; Darren got most of the Labor endorsements, Mayor Chris Coleman, and the Firefighters. Rebecca was endorsed by the Pioneer Press; Darren was endorsed by the Star Tribune. The Pioneer Press takes note of Rebecca’s pragmatic attitude toward business, and the Star Tribune likes Darren for his prior experience.

On Darren’s Issues page, he calls out:

* Citizen Engagement (“To build an active engaged citizenry, I will hold office hours throughout the ward during off-business hours, will return every phone call, and will be where I’m needed when I’m needed.”)
* Economic Development (“I will work to eliminate the complicated work of opening and running a small business by streamlining city processes across departments and expecting faster turnaround times. … I will put forth and passing an earned sick and safe time ordinance to support families who do not have the option of taking time off work if they or a family member are sick or in need.”)
* Public Safety (“Safety is more than police budgets; public safety is also about providing positive opportunities for all. I will fight hard to ensure all of our rec centers, parks and libraries are open and staffed when working families need these resources. … I will grow Saint Paul’s role in ending gender violence by focusing on early violence prevention, police and prosecutor training, and by providing cross-jurisdictional resources where people live.”)
* Public Services (“As a community-elected board member of the Fort Road Federation and a member of the Saint Paul Long Range Capital Improvement Budget Committee, I have worked side by side with other concerned neighbors to successfully advocate for [a long list of nice amenities including a rec center renovation and improvements to the 35E bikeway]… I am an advocate for curbside organics collection.”)
* Safe Streets (“A healthy transportation system for all means more sidewalks and safer crosswalks so that all people feel comfortable walking from their homes to schools and local businesses.” This is also where he stashes his opposition to Grand Ave parking meters.)

So, okay. I guess I’m seeing some differences showing up, at this point.

* Both Rebecca and Darren talk about streamlining stuff for businesses opening but Rebecca puts more emphasis on making the city more business-friendly (and gives some good reasons for it, i.e., you can tax them); Darren puts more emphasis on requiring paid sick time, though Rebecca is also a supporter. (I am a big fan of mandatory paid sick time; I think it’s a win/win. I don’t want my sandwich made by an employee who was barfing in the bathroom five minutes ago but can’t go home because he’ll get fired or because he really needs to get paid. I mean, this is just basic epidemiology: if sick people can go home they are a lot less likely to share their germs. It’s also the right thing to do as decent human beings, to make sure people can take time off when they get sick, but even aside from “basic human decency” factors, there is a self-interest element here you’d think would be obvious.) Both support living wage ordinances.

* They are both fans of transit and eager to get better transit options into Ward 2, which is good because the situation right now is kind of ridiculously terrible. (I don’t live in Ward 2, but it’s where my kids go to school, and I’ve looked to see what would be involved in having my high schooler ride the bus to the U. I was not impressed with the options.) Darren avoids talking about amenities for cars as much as possible; Rebecca puts a lot of emphasis on basic street stuff like patching potholes and plowing snow. (I will note that those are not just services for cars. Potholes are potentially lethal to bikers, and a lot of Minnesotans bike year round. Buses also use those streets.) Both Darren and Rebecca filled out a questionnaire about transit for the Smart Trips voter guide. In that, I was pleased that Darren specifically noted that St. Paul is riddled with spots that don’t have sidewalks and that we needed to fix that. I was happy they both talked about pedestrian safety but a little dismayed that even though Ward 2 includes the West 7th neighborhood, neither got into pedestrian safety on West 7th. (West 7th cuts diagonally across a lot of streets and creates all these five-way intersections that are nervewracking to cross on foot and frankly pretty irritating even in a car.) If transit is important to you, it’s probably also worth noting that Darren and his wife own only one car between them and use transit for a lot of their trips; they have genuine skin in the game. (Rebecca says she gets around by car, bus, and bike, which is exactly what I’d say. I don’t actually ride the bus very often at all and my biking is purely recreational.)

* They both talk about public safety but Rebecca puts more emphasis on policing than Darren does. (They both talk about providing productive activities for teenagers to keep them out of trouble.)

* Darren wants curbside organics collection; Rebecca doesn’t show any particular interest in it. (For the curious out-of-towners, I will note that one of the really odd things about St. Paul is that the city doesn’t picks up recycling but not trash. You can theoretically haul it to the dump yourself, but most people hire a company to pick up their trash weekly and sometimes also their yard waste. There are six different companies that come down my alley picking up people’s garbage. I think some mayor tried to implement municipal trash pickup a few years before I moved to St. Paul and that went down in a flaming mass of aversion to any sort of change. St. Paul also does not plow the alleys; you have to get together with your neighbors and hire a guy. It does at least plow streets to the curb, rather than expecting you to shovel out the parking lane.)

* Rebecca makes a point of her willingness to disagree with the mayor; Darren is clearly long-time friends with Chris Coleman and has his endorsement.

* Both of them claim they’re running a positive campaign but being attacked by their opponent. In Darren’s “News” section he objects to the “unfair criticism” of Rebecca in the most passive-aggressive sideways way possible: “my opponent was unfairly criticized simply because she has the endorsement and financial support of an organization that is fighting against the paid family leave and living wage ordinances.” (In context, I don’t think it’s intended to be sarcastic.) There was an article in the Press that noted that the swipe at Rebecca came from the AFL-CIO (the organization that opposed living wage ordinances is the Chamber of Commerce, which endorsed Rebecca); the Police Federation, meanwhile, sent out a flier suggesting that Darren would be Chris Coleman’s yes-man.

* Darren has strong ties to Ramsey County government, which will definitely be a plus in terms of getting things accomplished. Rebecca’s experience is on the City Planning Commission, which is not bad, either. (Hilariously, Darren’s wife is also on the planning commission.)

Anyway, I e-mailed both of them to ask about body cameras. The election is Tuesday, though; I’m not going to be surprised if I don’t get a response.

I am leaning toward Rebecca Noecker.