Kline’s Town Hall Had Genesis in Constituent Complaints

U.S. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., will hold a town hall meeting from 7 to 9 p.m. this evening at Lakeville South High School. And it’s almost certain that he wouldn’t be if not for some of his 2nd District constituents, who pushed hard for a public discussion.

While the event is open to questions on a variety of topics, its origin started with the complaints of anti-war activists, who spent six weeks visiting Kline’s office, pressing for a public opportunity to air their grievances. 

“We were contacted by the organizers of the Occupation Project,” said Sue Skog, the district’s coordinator for the Peace Alliance, who helped organize the protests. “We said we’d try, but we didn’t know how many [people] we could get.”

Organizers managed to get about 50 protesters to show up at Kline’s office in March, but they weren’t allowed to stay very long.

“We went, and the occupation part of the idea obviously wasn’t going to work, because they called the police,” said Skog. 

The call to remove protesters from Kline’s office was met with an outcry from community activists, as well as a column from the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman, which one activist credited with forcing Kline’s staff to relent.“After Nick Coleman published the article resulting from that [incident], the Kline office modified their stance,” said John Raplinger, one of the protesters. “They weren’t real receptive, but they invited us in and had coffee and donuts for us.”

Eventually, the protesters got a meeting with Kline, in which they pressed for an open town hall forum to address the war. Kline and his staff were less than enthusiastic.

“They kept saying, ‘these never work,’ and ‘you won’t be happy with it,’” said Skog.  “I think they’d probably not do the town hall forum this way; they like the tele-town forum,” she added, referring to Kline’s periodic teleconference with constituents.

Kline did eventually relent, and scheduled a town hall meeting, if for no other reason than the protesters promised to stop visiting his office if he would.  But he soon made it clear that he did not want the meeting to be just about Iraq.

“We relented on that,” said Skog, explaining that they were happy just to get the forum.  “If we can even get a few questions answered