Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

Minneapolis’ first try at instant-runoff voting (IRV) Tuesday went well, judging by a low number of spoiled ballots. But the number of ballots cast was also low, spoiling the system’s otherwise successful debut.

An Election Day that turned cold and rainy dumped water on IRV’s promise as a boost to voter turnout, which failed to match (let alone exceed) the 30 percent figure from the last city election in 2005.

“It worked pretty well,” said Council Member Cam Gordon, a Green Party leader who has fought long to bring IRV to Minneapolis. “People seemed interested in having a variety of choices [in candidates].

Still, he conceded, “I wish we had a bigger voter turnout.”

Gordon, who lost and then won in consecutive nail-biters in the last two city elections, coasted to victory Tuesday in Ward Two over Republican challenger Allen Aigbogun with first-rank votes on 85 percent of the ballots cast – the high water mark in all the contests for city office this year.

Only Anita Tabb, who ran unopposed for park board, won with a greater proportion of the vote (97 percent). Mayor R.T. Rybak gained 77 percent of the vote to best 10 rivals for a third term.

Gordon told the Minnesota Independent that he might have won the first time he ran in 2001, when DFLer Paul Zerby narrowly edged him in the general-election contest, had IRV had been in place then.

DFLer Allen Kathir, who placed a distant second Tuesday to DFL-endorsed incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede in Ward Three, had an opposite reaction.

The old system of holding early-September primary elections — for which turnouts were typically microscopic — might have given him a better shot.

Had he gotten 348 votes – the number he received Tuesday — in the ward’s 2005 primary, he would have earned a higher-profile berth to take on Hofstede one-on-one in the general election.

A surprise newspaper endorsement gave Ward One DFL candidate Susan Howitz Hanna enough of a boost to place third in first-rank votes in an open-seat race that appears to have narrowly skirted a runoff.

DFL endorsee Kevin Reich squeaked by with barely 14 more votes than needed for the 50-percent-plus-one threshold for outright victory in a single-seat contest.

Hanna holds out hope that the race will be sent into a runoff by the hand count that’s required for every race because the city’s tally machines aren’t certified for IRV elections. But by randomly assigned sequence, Ward One will be last among the city’s 13 wards to be counted, putting that date with destiny off by as much as a month.

Mark Fox, an independent who finished last in the five-way Ward One race, would be the first candidate eliminated in a runoff. In Fox’s view, Reich’s bare-majority support, from “less than 12 percent of the people,” means “Minneapolis government is pretty evidently non-representative.”

“If this [election] were a council meeting, I would ask for a quorum call,” Fox wrote in a morning-after email.

The Green Party's Cam Gordon and Allen Aigbogun, who's endorsed by the GOP and Independence Party, are vying for the Ward Two seat.

The Minneapolis City Council’s lone Green Party member, Cam Gordon, is used to anything-might-happen electoral outcomes in Ward Two, which straddles the Mississippi River and includes the city’s sprawling University of Minnesota campus.

But in this year’s race, Gordon knows one thing for sure: He isn’t going to finish within 150 votes of a DFL Party candidate, as he has twice before. That’s because the only barrier to his re-election is Republican- and Independence Party-endorsed Allen Aigbogun.

For the first time in memory — and probably in DFL Party history — no Democrat is on the ballot for city council in Ward Two.

That makes this election a watershed for a ward that launched the political careers of such DFL Party titans as Hubert Humphrey and Don Fraser (Minneapolis mayors who served in City Hall, the halls of Congress, and — in Humphrey’s case — beyond).

Gordon, the only non-DFLer on the council, would seem a ripe target for the party that dominates politics in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. When Gordon was elected in 2005, his two Green Party predecessors on the council, first-termers Natalie Johnson Lee and Dean Zimmerman, lost their seats to DFLers by narrow margins after unfavorable redistricting.

The same fate might have been expected to befall Gordon. After all, he’d lost his first council race to DFL maverick Paul Zerby, in 2001, by only 106 votes. When Zerby declined to run again in 2005, five DFLers sought to succeed him, a fight that carried through three ballots at the DFL ward convention that year, from which Cara Letofsky emerged with the endorsement. Gordon then triumphed over Letofsky in the 2005 general election by a mere 141 votes.

Yet this year the DFL was loath to oppose Gordon. Rather, at their convention last spring, Ward Two DFLers resolved to support Gordon, in language just short of endorsement:

WHEREAS, Council Member Cam Gordon has done an excellent job serving Minneapolis’ Second Ward, and
WHEREAS, Cam Gordon has represented us in a manner consistent with the progressive values of the Democrats of the Second Ward, and
WHEREAS, the rules of the party do not allow for an endorsement of anyone who is a member of another political party, therefore
BE IT RESOLVED that the Democrats of the Second Ward do not endorse anyone for 2nd Ward Council Member, but do support the re-election of Cam Gordon to the Minneapolis City Council in 2009.

That action came in the wake of the strange unraveling of the candidacy of Charles Colson, the only DFLer to announce for the Ward Two seat this year. He dropped out March 1 after the Minnesota Daily revealed that much of his biography — education in England and at Princeton University, a childhood Hillary Clinton connection, experience officiating at the 2008 Beijing Olympics — was false.

On top of all that, Minneapolis is holding its first instant-runoff elections this year, a process that lets voters rank their preferences among a field of candidates. It’s a kind of electoral reform that Gordon has been a leader in pushing for more than a decade, and it’s supposed to help produce majority winners in political districts like Ward Two that have closely divided elections.

Yet Ward Two is the only council race in the city in which only two candidates are on the ballot — meaning it’s the only ward in which instant-runoff voting (IRV) cannot come into play.

“There’s a different feel to the race,” observes Gordon. “A different rhythm, with no primary.” By this point in past election cycles, he recalls, “we would have put more pressure on the campaign.” Still, door-knocking is underway, lawn signs are going up, and he’s making the rounds at neighborhood meet-and-greets.

“It’s going to come down to voter contact,” says Aigbogun, Gordon’s rival. The first-time candidate announced he was running early in the year but sees the campaign just now getting into gear, as voters he talks to say they’re beginning to pay attention.

Aigbogun has lived in the ward for seven years, through student years at the U of M and at William Mitchell School of Law in St. Paul, where he earned a law degree last spring. He is awaiting results of his bar exam, with hopes of working as a public defender (but as that profession is in decline in Minnesota, he’ll look for work as criminal attorney.)

Meanwhile he has kept the customer-service job he held as a law student, but has found that not returning to school for the first fall season in more than years leaves him time for campaigning.

Aigbogun is a former Democrat who finds things to like in many political parties, including the Green Party, and he says his core philosophy — “grassroots democracy” — knows no party. Still, his commitment to free market economics and limited government were attractive enough to garner endorsements from first the Republicans and then the Independence Party.

“The city needs a lot of reform,” Aigbogun says, citing fiscal mismanagement. He lays the responsibility for that at the door of the city council, which he says is supposed to “set policy and set the vision.” But in Minneapolis, he says, the council has set a “terrible vision that’s not working.”

Increasing taxes year after year is not a long-term solution to the city’s perennial problems with its budget, Aigbogun says: “Let’s fix it.” He favors a thorough audit leading to a restructuring of expenditures, likely sacrificing some “services people like for things it’s government’s job to guarantee.”

Is he out of step with a ward that has a reputation as among the city’s most liberal? Aigbogun looks at Gordon’s victory and sees “voters who are independent, who vote for the person” rather than the party.

Gordon sees some of the same financial problems in the city but broaches a solution that’s diametrically different from Aigbogun’s. “If the Minnesota Miracle isn’t working, and we can’t rely on local government aid,” Gordon says, “maybe we need to be able to raise a local income tax.”

But he’s quick to add that such a tax would have to have state approval and be part of region-wide reform so as not to make Minneapolis uniquely tax-heavy.

Both men support maintaining the city’s Board of Estimate and Taxation. A ballot referendum asks voters whether the city should dissolve the board, which sets tax levy limits for Minneapolis. Gordon said he would be meeting with a group that plans to campaign to keep the board, and Aigbogun said the board “provides a function and doesn’t cost us a lot of money — $70 [per month per member] plus parking.”

And while municipal financial woes can seem intractable, other issues that once were peripheral have found traction. Gordon marveled at how parts of the Green Party platform have come into vogue, citing his Homegrown Minneapolis effort to promote the local food economy (pdf) — an idea, he says, that “10 or 15 years ago seemed so far out.”

This is the fifth in a 13-part series on Minneapolis City Council races.

The full series:

Ward One: Five seek open seat in northeast Minneapolis
Ward Two: Gordon, Aigbogun and … no DFLer
Ward Three: Hofstede tries to hold off four challengers
Ward Four: Trio of challengers take on political dynasty
Ward Five: Crime and economic development dominate North Side race
Ward Six: South Minneapolis contest draws crowded field of contenders
Ward Seven: Despite full campaign coffers, lawsuit clouds Goodman’s prospects
Ward Eight: Glidden faces four rivals in south Minneapolis
Ward Nine: Schiff, Bicking vie again
Ward Ten: Four candidates vie for Uptown council seat
Ward Eleven: Three vie for Benson’s South Minneapolis seat
Ward Twelve: Colvin Roy faces three challengers
Ward Thirteen: The independent ward could see fireworks in November

The most obvious dark-horse challenger is the Independence Party. Ever since Jesse Ventura blew up the political conventional wisdom by winning the gubernatorial contest in 1998, the IP has been a formidable factor every four years.

Former U.S. Rep Tim Penny

In 2002, former U.S. Rep. Tim Penny brought broad name recognition and moderate policy credentials to the contest. He ultimately pulled just 16 percent of the vote, but was likely hurt by heightened partisanship in the wake of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death.

“The final week of that campaign everything changed,” recalls Penny, now president of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. “I went from being as likely a victor as the other two to being the odd man out in just a number of days.”

Four years later the IP endorsed Peter Hutchinson, a former state finance commissioner, foundation executive and deputy mayor of Minneapolis. But his broad resume didn’t ultimately hold much sway with voters: He managed just six percent of the vote.

Despite these declining fortunes, the IP has retained its major party status, meaning it’s guaranteed a spot on the ballot. So who else might be looking at the party’s endorsement for 2010?

Penny says he’s not interested, noting that foundation work and other endeavors keep him plenty busy. But he’s optimistic that the IP will run a credible candidate.

“Every year there’s a path for an independent candidate to get from the starting gate to the winner’s circle,” he says. “I think there’s a path this year given the fact that it’s going to be wide open.”

Another perennial contender, Dean Barkley (pictured), isn’t ruling anything out. Outside of Ventura, Barkley has been the most visible face of the IP over the last two decades. Most recently, he siphoned off 15 percent of the vote in the (still ongoing) U.S. Senate bloodbath between Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

“I have some mild interest in it,” Barkley says. “I wouldn’t call it a great deal of interest, but I’m at least looking at it.”

In other words: Barkley will fall on his sword and run again if no other credible candidate emerges. The IP is currently in the process of gauging interest among other potential challengers.

Rep. Jim Ramstad. Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke, WDCpix

Heading up that effort is Jack Uldrich, the party’s chairman. Among the folks he’s contacted about the contest: former U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad (pictured), Metropolitan Council Chair Peter Bell and Minnesota Chamber of Commerce President David Olson. Uldrich argues that the decision of Gov. Tim Pawlenty not to seek a third term provides an opportunity for the IP to become a larger factor in the contest.

“He was difficult for both Peter Hutchinson and Tim Penny to run against because he appears more moderate than he actually is,” Uldrich says. “That will make it easier for us.

Uldrich further argues that the potential of wealthy Democratic candidates (i.e. Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza) to bypass the endorsement process and run in a contested primary could provide a further opening for third-party candidates. “They’re going to have really a bloodbath on that side,” he says. “They’re going to go to a primary and they’re going to come out of that pretty weak.”

While the IP is almost certain to be a factor in the 2010 gubernatorial contest, other third parties will have to scrap mightily for any electoral clout. The Green Party of Minnesota previously was accorded major party status, but lost that pedigree after failing to garner five percent of the vote in any of the statewide contests in 2006. Even with guaranteed ballot access the Greens have never won more than two percent of the vote in a governor’s race.

According to Cam Gordon, a Minneapolis City Council member and Green Party activist, the party has formed a committee to explore options for 2010. But so far no candidates have indicated that they’ll be seeking the party’s endorsement and the Greens are likely to focus on local contests.

“I’m feeling somewhat hopeful,” says Gordon of the party’s overall prospects in 2010. “But I think it’s been a hard time for the Greens the last few years. It will really be a turning point for us if we can get somebody elected to the state House.”

At least one candidate will be running as a Green — but has no intention of seeking the party’s official backing. Richard Klatte says he grew tired of the party’s disorganization and lack of candidate recruitment strategies.

“I’ve gone to the meetings and they’ve totally ignored me and my ideas,” says Klatte, who hosts a cable-access program called Third Party Forum and has made unsuccessful runs for office several times previously. “It’s a waste of time.”

Further undermining the Green Party’s prospects are the plans of Ken Pentel (pictured). The environmental activist was the party’s official nominee in both 2002 and 2006. But Pentel has split ties with the Greens and is in the early stages of building his own political organization called the Ecology Democracy Network.

Pentel has been traveling the state by bicycle and recruiting supporters for the fledgling coalition, with roughly 150 people currently in the fold. The organization will advocate for radical changes to economic, agricultural and electoral policies in order to avert what he believes is looming environmental devastation.

“There is no political party, there is no political movement that is literally dealing with this,” he says. “Everybody’s scared. We sit around on our hands rationalizing it.”

Pentel expects to develop a political party sometime this fall and hopes to have 100 candidates running in the 2010 elections, with himself at the top of the ticket. The break with the Greens comes after mounting frustration at the party’s lack of electoral success.

“The people who got into the decision-making positions were not that interested in building a political party to power,” argues Pentel. “They didn’t want to develop candidates, recruit candidate and get on the ballot line.”

While Pentel’s political organization is still in its embryonic stages, at least one 2010 hopeful is eschewing party politics all together. Chris Wright registered with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board in December to run for governor. He’s a computer technician and former activist with the (now defunct) Grassroots Party, which focused primarily on marijuana legalization.

“What I really wanted to do is raise some issues that are simply not being raised by either of the two major parties,” says Wright, citing energy independence and drug legalization. “The only ones who make money on the prohibition of narcotics are the cops and the gangs. Let’s stop doing this.”

Of course, Wright will undoubtedly find it extremely difficult to get these opinions heard without the backing of a political party — major or minor. His previous run for Governor, in 1998, doesn’t inspire confidence in his prospects: he garnered 1,727 votes, or .1 percent of all votes cast.

Photo: tomconlon.org

When Republican Tom Conlon leaves the St. Paul School Board this summer, he’ll also be leaving Minneapolis and St. Paul with only two elected city officials not from the DFL Party. Conlon announced yesterday his resignation from the office he has held since 1991. He will leave the school board July 6 to run an inn in Asheville, N.C. St. Paul will hold a special election in November to fill the vacancy for the remaining two years of his term.

Conlon’s announcement came two days after he cast the only vote against letting Webster Magnet Elementary change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary,” St. Paul Public Schools spokesman Bret Johnson tells the Minnesota Independent. 

Conlon opposed the renaming as premature (an opinion in line with Arizona State University’s decision not to award President Obama an honorary degree). It was another in a long line of lonely votes Conlon has taken in conflict with the board’s prevailing DFL majority. 

With Conlon gone, two Minneapolis Green Party members — Cam Gordon on the city council and Annie Young on the park board — will constitute the remaining bulwark against total DFL domination of elective offices in the state’s two biggest cities.

Gordon appears set to win re-election this fall in a walk. His only announced challenger so far, DFLer Charles Carlson, dropped out amid a welter of unhelpful revelations.

Young is another story. She’s in competition with three DFLers to keep her spot as one of three at-large commissioners on the Minneapolis park board. Her opponents are the two other current at-large incumbents and a former commissioner — all three of whom won the party’s endorsement by acclamation at the DFL city convention last weekend.

Beyond the challenge of running citywide campaigns for low-profile seats, the at-large candidates must contend with what’s being billed as the world’s first multi-seat election to be conducted via ranked choice voting (also known as instant runoff voting, or IRV) — without computers that can do the counting.

The Minneapolis City Council heard yesterday that counting ballots in that election is expected to be so complex that voters may not learn who they elected until after Thanksgiving.

The previous night, a group of supporters said they were asking for a criminal investigation against the former candidate and had yet to hear from Carlson.

“I’m very sorry for what I’ve said,” said Carlson.

“We do hope to refund the money to people who asked for it back. I never meant for this to happen like this, and I’m very sorry for everything that’s happened. My goal was to make life better for the city of Minneapolis, and I’m very sorry it turned out like this.”

Meanwhile, City Council member Cam Gordon, whom Carlson was attempting to unseat, told Star Tribune gossip columnist C.J. that he is hoping the whole ordeal is over.

“I’m ready to move on,” Gordon told C.J. “I don’t think we’re going to hear from him for a while. I think he probably had some good intentions and thought he was going to make a difference and get involved. It [the Daily story] made me feel a little bit sorry for the guy.”

Four years ago, the same candidate-training program did the trick for three other council hopefuls who went on to win election later that year. The best-known graduates of Camp Wellstone’s January 2005 session are U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, now in his second term representing Minnesota’s First District, and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who has gained a national profile during the recent U.S. Senate election recount.

But it’s the local victories by three members the Camp Wellstone Class of 2005 — Minneapolis City Council members Ralph Remington, Diane Hofstede and Elizabeth Glidden — that offer the most direct inspiration to council aspirants from this year’s camp: Charley Underwood, Doron Clark and Kenya McKnight.

All three find themselves in crowded fields: Underwood in Ward 12, the last to send a Republican to the council; Clark in Ward 1, where the retirement of DFL incumbent Paul Ostrow is creating one of three open council seats this year; and McKnight in Ward 5, where a number of others are also said to be mulling efforts to oust DFL incumbent Don Samuels.

Two others attended the recent candidate camp with the Minneapolis City Council in mind. Charles Carlson just announced that he has dropped out of contention for the DFL endorsement in Ward 2 for the seat now held by the council’s lone Green Party member, Cam Gordon. And Peter Eichten said last month he was still considering whether to enter the Ward 9 race as the second Green Party challenger (after Dave Bicking) to Gary Schiff, the DFL incumbent.

Carlson had been looking to get farther than Bill Svrluga, a 2005 Camp Wellstone grad who vied for but didn’t win the DFL endorsement in Ward 2 that year. Svrluga’s fellow camper Kevin McDonald took his race all the way to the November 2005 general election, when he drew nearly 40 percent of the votes in the city’s 12th ward, losing to DFL incumbent Sandy Colvin Roy.

This year Colvin Roy faces another newly minted Camp Wellstone grad in Underwood, who tells the Minnesota Independent he’s now been through all three tracks the camp has to offer. He completed the campaign-staffer track while working on Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s 2006 bid for Congress, and later the track for citizen activists.

That’s the role Underwood says comes most naturally. This is his first time running as a candidate himself since he lost the race for Macalester College student body president in 1968 to Tim O’Brien, now a well-known author.

But three days of role-playing over the last weekend in January primed Underwood for tasks like phoning for campaign donations. That chore got easier for Underwood with this Camp Wellstone advice: “Ask for a certain amount of money, then pick up your coffee cup. Let the silence be there. Don’t bargain them down.”

McKnight concurs: “I enjoyed the hands-on learning, which helped me become much more comfortable with my approach talking with people, my 90-second speech. … It was a great start for me.”

For weeks leading up to the March 3 precinct caucuses, candidates spend evening after evening dialing not only for dollars but also for the support of prospective delegates. Once elected on Caucus Night, DFL Party delegates will choose candidates at ward conventions held later this month, with contenders for citywide offices (including mayor and at-large park commissioners) selected at the city convention in the spring.

The Green and Republican parties conduct parallel processes, though they’re conducted in a much more compact manner than those of the DFL.

Camp Wellstone is part of the St. Paul-based organization Wellstone Action (named for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone and his wife, Sheila), which offers eight training programs in all. Communications Director Elana Wolowitz says the camps are held throughout the year and across the country, often at the request of local groups. Since 2006, more than 300 Camp Wellstone alums have won elective office.

Wolowitz says most participants are progressive-minded, and the organization describes itself as progressive — but also nonpartisan and non-ideological, with at least one Independence Party candidate on its graduation rolls.

Might wound-licking Republicans now flock to Camp Wellstone for tips? Wolowitz is dubious, since conservatives have their own institutes — on which Camp Wellstone is modeled in part.

Graduates are more likely to run into each other in places like Minneapolis where the two-party system means DFLers and Greens. Underwood, a DFLer who counts many Greens among his circle of friends and fellow activists, says it’s only by chance that no city council race this year pits two Camp Wellstone grads against each other.

Competition to represent the area around the University of Minnesota campus has been hot since the 2001 primary loss by longtime incumbent Joan Campbell:  The 2005 contest to replace Campbell’s retiring successor, Paul Zerby, attracted four DFL rivals who battled for three ballots at the party’s endorsing convention   — has cooled off considerably.

“There obviously must be confidence” in the job he’s doing, Gordon said of his vanishing opposition, though he admitted he could improve and said he looks forward to suggestions from voters when he knocks on doors this year.

Coming from the Green Party, which unlike the city’s dominant DFL often takes a pass on endorsing in local races, Gordon said “it wouldn’t seem strange and unusual to me” for there to be no DFL endorsement in his race.

The lack of a credible DFL opponent “is a testament to Cam’s hard work and the fact that he represents the values and needs of the Second Ward,” says Michael Guest, a political consultant and campaign manager (most notably for DFL incumbent Don Samuels in the city’s Fifth Ward). But Guest (who I asked to comment after running into him just as I started to write this post) downplayed the differences between the two parties: “What DFLers are not [also] Green?”

One way the parties differ is the process by which they select candidates. While the DFL holds precinct caucuses to elect delegates to ward and city endorsing conventions, the Green Party gathers for citywide meetings on March 22 and again in April to discuss city election endorsements they’ll finalize at a May 9 meeting.

Mayor R.T. Rybak announced this afternoon that Minneapolis would conduct a series of reviews into the Minneapolis Police Department’s (MPD) actions in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention, including a standard “after-action report” that will look into related security measures and the development of new policies for dealing with the media. A City Council member who has urged a blue-ribbon, multijurisdictional review said the mayor’s statement was “good” but appeared to fall short of “a public, independent, transparent process.”

According to a statement from Rybak’s office (see pages 1, 2, 3), the police review — which will focus on the Critical Mass ride, the Media Party, the Liberty Parade and the Rage against the Machine concert — will assess police officers’ training prior to the RNC and identify areas for improvement. It will be completed by the end of October.

Minneapolis officials will also cooperate with St. Paul in its outside review of public safety, which that city’s mayor recently announced would be conducted by attorneys Andy Luger and Tom Heffelfinger.

In addition to the police evaluation, the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office will examine the protocols used for arresting and citing people at the RNC. It will also consult with the Hennepin County courts about the financial burden the RNC’s arrests/citations posed, given that the courts didn’t receive national security dollars to process them.

Civil Rights staff will make sure that processes for accepting complaints from the public are clearly laid out. A summary of complaints from each of these departments (plus the Office of Risk Management) along with recommendations and other analysis will be presented to city officials by February 2009. Rybak adds that “a six-month review will at least give policy makers a sense of the scope of issues to be addressed.”

Furthermore, given the “significant evolution in how the media covers stories and even the basic question of how media is defined … we think it valuable to try to develop a model policy for how to work with the media during large crowd events,” Rybak said.

The Minnesota Independent contacted the two Minneapolis City Council members who issued a call for Minneapolis and St. Paul to jointly form a blue-ribbon panel to investigate police conduct during the RNC.

Council member Cam Gordon had had a quick look at it. “It’s good we have the [mayor's] statement but it doesn’t necessarily meet what I’m hoping to get to … the kind of public, independent, transparent process that I would hope for,” he said.

“We might benefit from more of an opportunity to have a public hearing and take some public testimony,” Gordon added. “It might take Minneapolis and St. Paul working together.” He sees as “positive” St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune’s planned “community conversation” hearing.

“The thing that gets me is this sort of a ‘National Security event,’” Gordon said. “What does that mean?” He said if the Super Bowl and baseball’s All-Star Game now fall in that category, “we need policies … to decide if we even want those kinds of events.”

UPDATE: In an email announcement Friday afternoon, Council Member Gary Schiff wrote that he supports the city’s review but hoped the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would also review federal agents’ actions. Schiff also recalled that he and Gordon had been the council’s lone dissenters last year on the city’s contract for the RNC that put Minneapolis police under the control of the feds, adding at the time that “safety should not be used as an excuse to limit a free press or stifle free speech.”

Reports of media suppression by local law enforcement have activists concerned that their message might not get heard — and that a free press at the Republican National Convention (RNC) will be trumped as police throw homeland security in front of the cameras.

“A Channel 5 reporter was pushed back into the elevator and was told by the police and homeland security that he was not allowed to be there,” said Sheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. The campaign protested a decision by Housing and Urban Development to cancel an appearance at that group’s protest at the RNC, so they took their message to HUD offices on Tuesday. That message was hampered by efforts of police to block reporters access. The only reporter on hand was from Sweden.

“So we had to go by way of Sweden to get news on the television,” said Honkala.

She said she is concerned about the RNC. “Hopefully we’re going to have freedom of the press, and that reporters will not be manhandled just because they want to cover the story.”

Vlad Teichberg of the Glass Bead Collective had his cameras confiscated by Minneapolis Police on Tuesday, an event that prompted the press conference. “We are calling on all of you people, members of the press, and the public in general, to immediately address this issue,” he said. “If this is allowed to continue in this way, the basic rule of law is going to be in doubt.”

He said instead of protesters and Republicans being the story at the RNC, the police could become the focus. “The Minneapolis police run a big risk because they are going to be the central story,” he said. “I do not know if they want to be on national television accused and maybe even implicated in blatant attempts at suppression of public events by seizing people’s cameras.”

Daryl Robinson of Communities United Against Police Brutality said he had a more violent confrontation with police. “A few weeks back I was doing cop-watching down at the shelters downtown and I was viciously attacked by the Minneapolis police. My cameras, my video cameras, my cell phone camera, all that was smashed to the ground and broken,” he said. “I want to put on notice that there will be documentation and cop watching and photographing at the Republican National Convention. There will be accountability for all the law enforcement agencies working the RNC.”

Minneapolis City Council member Cam Gordon was disturbed by the reports. “The health of our democracy, the city, our society depends on people being able to watch and observe and share the stories of what’s going on,” he said. “To have these things come up now … that there’s even the appearance and the impression that the government and police are trying to suppress this kind information is of great concern for me.”

Katrina Plotz of the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War told everyone not to be intimidated by the recent reports. “There seems to be a pattern of targeting journalists and people with cameras who are there to document demonstration or record police behavior. We are not going to be intimidated by their concerns about ’security threats,’” she said. “I would encourage everyone out in the public who is hesitant to come out now or who doesn’t think it’s safe, to have courage and realize that it is more important than ever to get out there and have your voice heard.”

Gordon said this behavior is nothing new and the community has to be vigilant in fighting back. “What is happening in Minneapolis is reflecting a larger trend in the country in general. We heard today homeland security mentioned and there seems to be a trend of what’s been happening lately,” he said. “Security and safety are being used to tip the scales away from freedom of information and right to assemble and freedom of press. We are not fighting perhaps as hard as we should be and working to preserve those rights that are so valuable and are also valuable to our safety and security.”

Both issues hit the fan Wednesday at the Public Safety and Regulatory Services Committee meeting. Gordon (pictured) appeared exasperated at Remington’s full-throated fulminations on the threat of one protest group “bum-rushing” another during the Republican National Convention — unless the city starts granting permits making one group’s occupancy of public space official and enforceable. Thursday, within hours of a Minnesota Monitor mention of Garwood’s post, three or four negative responses on City Hall’s third floor had Gordon removing the post from his Blogger site, because, he tells the Minnesota Monitor, “I value my relationship with my colleagues.”

Whatever the future holds for the 2nd Ward blog following what Gordon terms its “first and biggest burp,” the Web site’s difficult birth is documented in early entries at the blog itself. Gordon — the council’s lone Green Party member, who came into office in 2006 on promises of greater openness and novel forms of constituent interactivity via the Internet — writes that he expected setting up a blog would be easy: “Someone on the Council must already be blogging, I thought. Some system must exist. Wrong.” Four months went by before his colleagues and the city attorney’s office signed off on an arm’s-length blog that could never be linked or even mentioned on official city Web pages. A required disclaimer promises a tight rein on expression. Perhaps it’s no surprise that, even as the online world explodes around them, no other council members have attempted anything like it.

Continued: Click “Read More”Citizens who were grateful to be addressed as adults by Barack Obama in his speech on race in America will find Gordon’s blog — with its long, reasoned analyses and frank assessments of political reality — good reading. Two years of blogging has created a parallel public record of Gordon’s service, a record that’s much more extensive, accessible and intimate than the narrative to be extracted from annotated agendas, video logs and newsletter pabulum.

An example: Using the search function on Gordon’s blog can quickly tell the tale of his working relationship with Remington. The two have agreed on a long list of issues, many of which fit the “progressive” agenda: voting reform, tenants’ rights, civilian police review, condo conversions, an animal circus ban and new regulations on heat in rental housing, as well as extramural items such as opposition to the Big Stone II coal plant and support for a federal Department of Peace. An earlier split (in which Remington also joined Ostrow) over a proposed ordinance on aggressive panhandling is also there for the world to read, in serial form.

Gordon’s direct approach, as it appears in black and white (and green, appropriately) at his blog, can shock even working journalists who daily fish for dish about pols and their views. His online take on a proposed alley ordinance in 2006 seemed to take aback the Strib’s Terry Collins, who labeled it “a harsh blog post” for its argument “that the ordinance will be used as ’selective enforcement’ mainly against the homeless, poor, those with mental issues and minority group members.”