This fall, Saint Paul is going to have a referendum authorizing Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) for municipal elections on the ballot. Under this proposal, choices in an election would be ranked, rather than simply selected, and in successive rounds candidates with fewer votes can be dropped off and the votes allocated to the voters’ second or third choices.
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Category Archives: Urban Life
Life in da big city, and in Saint Paul as well.
Convention Wisdom
This September, my neighborhood will host the Republican National Convention. It is not an event I am looking forward to largely because I expect it will be something like a large frat party – a celebration of failure made up of drinking and whoring by a lot of white guys.
500 Year Floodplain
The great bubble of water that mushroomed out of the banks of the Iowa River has moved on into the Mississippi, causing even more devastation as it moves south. Farms and towns have been flooded, roads have been closed, and barge traffic has ceased. Can’t something be done to prevent this, if not stop it?
In a word, “No”.
Urban Return
I called up an architect recently to get the name of a good carpenter who can be trusted with a 150 year old house. But this friend, who is heavily involved in our community, had a serious beef to air first. What got him upset was a recent policy change here in Saint Paul. Since the downturn started we suddenly faced a tremendous number of properties that have become a bit neglected due to foreclosure and general hard times. There are over 1600 properties on the city’s registered vacant property list, for example. The Mayor’s office has responded to this growing problem by clamping down hard on code enforcement, citing people for small issues that they would have let slide in past years.
Strategic Planning
If you volunteer for a nonprofit, and you should, you’ve probably been through a strategic planning process. This is where the organization sits down and draws up a plan for the next five years or so that directs where the organization is going and how it will achieve goals beyond the daily grind of doing the work. By “sits down”, I mean that often everyone sits and sits and sits and the plan eventually reflects whoever has the strongest bottom more than anything else. It needs to be done, but how many things in life as so literally a pain in the rear?
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 