On Thursday, on behalf of the Minneapolis City Council, council member Gary Schiff sent a letter to Klobuchar urging her to sign on to the Uniting American Families Act, which would permit gay and lesbian citizens to sponsor their partners for citizenship.

“In Minnesota, many have waited too long to be united with their families. Others are being forced to leave the United States because our laws will not let them stay in their homes and petition for their same sex partners for immigration,” wrote Schiff. “I am writing on behalf of the entire Minneapolis City Council to strongly urge you to support the Uniting American Families Act of 2009.”

Just a day earlier, the Family Equality Council visited Klobuchar’s district office. Kevin Nix, the group’s communications director, said they delivered over 400 notes to Klobuchar urging her to sign on to cosponsor the bill. Nix said that there are an estimated 500 binational same-sex couples who would benefit from immigration reform that includes the LGBT community.

He also noted that both Klobuchar and Sen. Al Franken sit on the important Senate Judiciary Committee that would likely review the bill. Franken is a cosponsor of the Uniting American Families Act.

Here’s the full text of Schiff’s letter to Klobuchar:

Dear Senator Klobuchar,

I am writing on behalf of the entire Minneapolis City Council to strongly urge you to support the Uniting American Families Act of 2009 (H.R. 1025 and S. 424). I have attached a resolution passed by the Minneapolis City Council supporting the bill and adding it to City of Minneapolis’ Federal Agenda.

Under current immigration law, millions of American families remain broken – separated because of inexcusable visa backlogs, unnecessary bureaucratic paper trails and discriminatory policies that do not recognize lesbian and gay families for the purposes of equal immigration rights.

In Minnesota, many have waited too long to be united with their families. Others are being forced to leave the United States because our laws will not let them stay in their homes and petition for their same sex partners for immigration.

Americans with same sex partners who are not U.S. citizens face discrimination that other Americans do not face. Faith, ethnic, labor, education, health and other groups support truly comprehensive immigration reform that includes same sex bi-national couples. They want reform that stops tearing Americans away from parents, siblings, jobs and communities.

Minnesotans need you help to make sure that immigration reform, promised by the President and making its way through Congress, is truly comprehensive and includes fixing backlogs and doing away with the discriminatory process and outdated definitions of family. Comprehensive is not comprehensive unless it includes everyone.

I urge, on behalf of the entire Minneapolis City Council to make swift and comprehensive solutions to this troubling part of American life and make families and their unification the goal in comprehensive immigration reform – and to define American families as they are in all their diversity.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

ST. PAUL: T-Paw references Goethe on Fox. Pawlenty called health care reform a shiny fishing lure and a Faustian bargain (hmm, is he familiar with those?). [Fox News via YouTube]

METRO AREA: Jets scrambled too late, says general. Military planes should have been in the air to protect the Twin Cities when an errant jet with preoccupied pilots passed by this month. [MPR News Cut]

MINNEAPOLIS: Fake folk? A local donor gave the Weisman Art Museum five paintings by folk artist Clementine Hunter that the FBI suspects are forgeries. [Associated Press]

WOODBURY: Dog bites man, hard. A retired cop lost an ear and much of his face. [Associated Press]

ST. CLOUD: Bridge open. The Granite City Crossing replaces the old DeSoto bridge found unsafe in post-I-35W collapse inspections. [St. Cloud Times]

STATEWIDE: Schools go begging. The 57 districts asking voters to approve new tax levies next week are among the 90 percent in Minnesota now levy-dependent to cover operating costs. [ECM Publishers]

Dave Bicking

Quick: What rhymes with Bicking? In South Minneapolis’ city council race, Ward Nine challenger Dave Bicking is rolling out an unconventional campaign tool: the Green Party–endorsed candidate now has a song written about him. And to answer that question, “kicking” is the rhyming word — and it’s followed immediately by the word “ass.”

While musically closer to Mark Russell‘s piano-driven political satires, the tune has more of a folk-music plot line: a champion of the little guy goes head to head with corporate foes, in this case stadium-scamming developers. It was written and performed by Eskit, a local musician who does satirical political numbers, including a few in which Bicking has served as clarinetist and chorus member.

There’s no official plan for the song, Bicking says, which was a volunteer effort by Eskit. “It’s more fun than anything. Not every candidate has a campaign song, but every good campaign should have a song.”

Does it capture all his campaign is about? Not quite. “He can always write another four verses,” Bicking says, joking that few would probably listen all the way to the end if he did.

The lyrics:

Dave Bicking keeps on ticking, he makes the big boys frown.
He lets the developers know that they don’t own this town.
And when they pull a stadium scam he says, “By God, you know I am
tired of robbery, corporate robbery. Stop that robbery once and for all!”
Cuz Dave Bicking will be kicking ass at City Hall.
I said that Dave Bicking will be kicking ass at City Hall.

Listen:

For more on the race: Ward Nine: Schiff, Bicking vie again

Incumbent Gary Schiff and Dave Bicking, two of three candidates vying for the Ward 9 council seat

Voters in Minneapolis’ Ward Nine would be justified in feeling a sense of déjà vu as they scan lawn signs this fall — or when they are handed their ballots on Election Day, Nov. 3. This year’s contest for city council features a rematch between incumbent DFLer Gary Schiff and his Green Party challenger from 2005, Dave Bicking.

A third candidate, Todd Eberhardy of the Independence Party, adds a fresh face to the race and something new to the Minneapolis campaign season: He is likely the only candidate in the city who can print his own lawn signs. Like Bicking, who owns a one-man car-repair shop, Eberhardy has a small business: a sign company.

As for Schiff, last year he was mulling a run for mayor if R.T. Rybak didn’t run again. But Rybak is running for re-election this year (and, it seems, for governor in 2010), so Schiff is seeking a third term representing Ward Nine in south Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, Bicking has gained name recognition since his run last time — in part due to his daughter, Monica, being one of the RNC8 activists who were pre-emptively arrested before the 2008 Republican National Convention and charged with terrorism.

For father and daughter, it used to be the other way around: Monica would complain that everybody seemed to know her from her dad’s activism and campaigning, but she didn’t know who they were. Now, with the RNC8 defendants still in the news as they await trial a year after their arrests, Dave Bicking says he is getting used to people saying, “Oh, you’re Monica Bicking’s dad.”

Shades of 2005

It was also a three-way race in 2005, when Schiff won with 59 percent of the vote to Bicking’s 30 percent. Dave Shegstad, a third-place finisher in the primary that year, mounted a write-in campaign for the general election under the slogan “Smoke Out Gary” (a slam on Schiff for his backing of the city’s anti-smoking ordinance) and drew 10 percent.

This year, Sept. 15 is technically the city’s primary election day, but it will pass without an election and without winnowing the field. That’s because the city’s new system of instant runoff voting (IRV) eliminates the need for a separate primary election. Even DFLer Khalif Jama — who decided not to mount a campaign in Ward Nine and tried to withdraw from the race after the deadline to do so — will last past September.

For Minneapolis voters, it will be their first time using IRV since they approved it by ballot referendum in 2006. The new system means voters will rank their choices among the candidates in each race. If no candidate gets 50 percent of the first-place votes, the second- and third-rank votes of the lowest-placing candidates will be distributed among the remaining candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate can claim the votes from more than half the ballots cast.

That’s gone some way toward Schiff’s challengers replacing competition with a measure of cooperation. In 2005 the primary forced Bicking and Shegstad to battle each other for a place on the general-election ballot.

This year, Bicking and Eberhardy have rubbed shoulders at gatherings of candidates who call themselves “Unified Insurgents,” and Bicking wants the supporters of each to rank the other as second choice. Eberhardy’s game but says some of his supporters won’t do it.

A progressive patch

Ward Nine has some of the most Democratic-voting precincts in the state, judging by ballot-box support for Barack Obama last year that reached into the 90-percent range, and the percentages backing U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (in the 80s) and Al Franken (in the 70s).

Greens can fare well there too. In 2005, the Green Party’s Annie Young, an at-large park commissioner, garnered the most votes in eight of the ward’s 11 precincts.

It’s also a politically aware place, with the highest rate of voter-turnout (73 percent) among wards in the central part of the city.

Bicking calls Ward Nine “very progressive” — a term he voluntarily applies to Schiff as well. Schiff is “one of the better council members,” Bicking says, as well as “one of the most progressive.” Schiff’s resume includes work for the organization once known as Progressive Minnesota (now TakeAction Minnesota).

Schiff is also one of the council members who most frequently votes with Cam Gordon, the only Green Party council member and the only Green office-holder in Minneapolis besides Young.

Bicking touts his own progressive activism on international, national and local issues dating back to opposition to the war in Vietnam. He links problems that extend far beyond ward boundaries, like the United States’ pace-setting rate of incarcerating its citizens, to local efforts like restorative justice.

Eberhardy isn’t convinced the ward is the progressive bastion it’s cracked up to be. “It’s not too liberal of a ward, from people I’ve talked to,” he said. He finds people respond to his gripes about slack city services, lack of support for small businesses, fee hikes and tax increases.

Taxes, et cetera

On that last point, Schiff agrees. “The biggest issue is property taxes” for Ward Nine voters, he says. “It’s a problem the city’s going to have moving forward.” In contrast, he points to crime trending down and progress on populating homes made vacant by the foreclosure crisis, which he acknowledges has hit the ward hard.

(Eberhardy says he’s living proof such properties can turn around: He lives in a formerly condemned house that his renovation “saved from the wrecking ball” 14 years ago.)

For Schiff, a key indicator about the ward is one word — “quiet” — that he says he hears from a variety of quarters, including from parents now unafraid to send sons and daughters to the corner store because drug-sellers no longer hang around.

But Eberhardy and Bicking both question how long that corner store will hang on, in a city that they see as unsupportive of small business. Expensive assessments, for example, are especially grating when an urban makeover is ill-suited to the area.

“East Lake Street is not Eat Street,” Bicking says of the ward’s main thoroughfare that got a recent re-do but in his view still lacks the pedestrian cachet of restaurant-themed Nicollet Avenue. It’s unlikely, he says, that “while I’m waiting to have my heavy equipment serviced at Peterson’s, I’ll go across the street and have my cat neutered.”

Eberhardy, who also drives a school bus, only has to look down at the city’s streets for a reminder of what inspired him to seek elective office for the first time. He sees “potholes that have been there all summer” and clogged gutters that he recalls being clean when he was growing up in the ward. He’s not fond of new fees like the one for stormwater runoff. “They charge extra money to drain the water and then they can’t drain it,” he says.

The fall campaign

Bicking and Eberhardy will have to take a much bigger bite out of Schiff’s support even to send IRV ballot counting to a second round in which one or the other might hope to sweep past the incumbent on the strength of second-choice votes.

Schiff says he keeps up his door-knocking every night — even if he hasn’t kept up his campaign website since last spring. Bicking has updated his site, expanding beyond the issues of police accountability and stadium subsidies he ran on last time, and has closed up his repair shop for a month to devote more time to the race.

Eberhardy doesn’t have a campaign website or, he confesses, many resources. “Money for campaigning, I don’t have any,” he says. “Volunteers are far and few between.” A demanding work schedule doesn’t afford him many leisure hours, but, he says, “All my free time goes into the campaign.”

This is the second 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

Minneapolis and Cuernavaca have a longstanding bond.

Minneapolis recently entered into a “sister city” agreement with Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos, a small Mexican state that is the homeland to nearly 30,000 immigrants who have resettled in the area. That pre-existing relationship, which is unusual for sister cities, was cemented in a signing ceremony in Minneapolis on Sept. 13.

Ricardo Hernandez, who heads the Mexican Consulate in St. Paul, explained that the trend began years ago, sort of informally, with people who trickled in gradually at first and then called for their family members and friends to join them. After that, the next generation comes. “That’s a pretty common way for an entire village to move,” he said, terming it an “immigration shift.”

Part of the reason for coming to Minnesota as opposed to places that are closer to the nation’s border is that immigrants have been “pushed to move somewhere else, where labor is needed and immigration isn’t so aggressive,” Hernandez explained. Here, there’s a good standard of living and a sense of community among the immigrants and “everyone knows each other.”

Over the past 50 years, more and more arrivals from Cuernavaca and its neighboring areas have landed in Minneapolis, with a marked influx just in the last 15 years or so, while the city’s overall Hispanic population more than doubled from 1990 to 2000. (They set up shop, for instance on Lake Street, where the word “Morelos” appears in business names such as in Morelos Taxi, Video Morelos and others.)

It’s part of a larger movement of immigrants flooding into Minneapolis from Laos, Cambodia, Latin America, Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and other places, in contrast to the wave of northern European immigrants that redefined the city’s demographics at the turn of the 20th century, a city staff report states.

Currently, Minneapolis’ social network includes eight other cities. Some of those are Eldoret, Kenya; Uppsala, Sweden; Kuopio, Finland; and Ibaraki, Japan. Its first sister city was Santiago, Chile; that connection was established in 1961 (it’s no longer active). The Cold War-era program, which is administered by the Washington, D.C.-based Sister City International, started out as a government-aided initiative to promote peaceful international relations with elementary school students who corresponded with overseas pen pals. The program fosters “educational exchanges, tourism, arts and culture, and economic development,” according to a city report.

City Council member Gary Schiff, who has been leading the charge along with Mayor R.T. Rybak, summed up: “We consciously chose [Cuernavaca] based on immigration. I hope it sets a framework with regions of the world where the people have already chosen us … I hope it raises awareness about where people come from and that we’ll learn about our future.”

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.”

“In 2004, the Minnesota Health Access Survey indicated that 22 percent of LGBT Minnesotans do not have health insurance compared with 7 percent of the total Minnesota population,” said Gary Schiff, openly gay Minneapolis City Council member. “The fear of discrimination and stigma cause many LGBT Minnesotans to postpone or decline seeking medical care and once in care often withhold critical personal information from providers.”

Schiff said that this leads to poorer health outcomes and access to care: “We want to ask ‘why?’ And we want to eliminate the barriers to care.”

Dr. Simon Rosser, an HIV prevention researcher at the university said the top concern for gay and bisexual men remains HIV and added it will take new and innovative strategies to prevent an explosion in new cases. 

For other segments of the community, there are other unique health issues. “For lesbians, we have a number-one health problem that includes disproportionately high breast cancer [rates], where at least part of the problem is lack of adequate screening,” said Rosser. “For transgender people, the problem is getting specialized services and competent service providers” who understand the unique health issues facing transgender Minnesotans.

Communitywide and among LGBT youth, “increased rates of depression, suicide, and alcohol and drug use” are prevalent problems, he said. 

Dr. Eric Meininger, an internist and pediatrician, provided some perspective on the provider side of the problem. “When I completed my medical school training in 1995, most students got no cultural competency training on LGBT patients. The only context we learned about homosexuality was in the context of AIDS,” he said. “The [University of Minnesota] is a very progressive place. Students now get a number of trainings on LGBT issues.”

While Minnesota is on the cutting edge, “many students around the country still get minimal training,” he said.

But beyond provider responsibilities lie societal barriers to health care. “There are acts of legislation and policy to block our families from accessing health coverage, and as a result surveys of the LGBT community show lower rates of being insured,” said Meininger. 

“Here’s the problem,” Rosser agreed. “When health care is tied to marriage and employment, the people least able to access and who end up not getting into health care are those for whom it is illegal to marry, such as gays and lesbians, and those who frequently find it more difficult to find jobs, such as transgender people transitioning.

“The people who most need the care and, from a public health standpoint, who we most want in care, are the people who the system disproportionately discriminates against,” he said. “We need to recognize our system is broken. We need to recognize health care is a right.”

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Health Awareness Week was created by the National Coalition for LGBT Health and locally is sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Health, the Rainbow Health Initiative, University of Minnesota GLBTA Medical Students, the Queer Student Cultural Center, the University of Minnesota GLBTA Programs Office, and OutFront Minnesota.

The project has faced heated opposition from neighbors and air quality activists, and now Council Member Gary Schiff tells the Star Tribune he opposes the project because of residents’ concerns about the cumulative health impacts. I get a feeling that both sides are probably guilty of blowing a little smoke in recent months as the debate has escalated. From a public health perspective, the plant’s emissions would be a statistical blip, I’m told, compared to what’s routinely spewed from car traffic on nearby Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue. However, the Phillips neighborhood where it would be situated is already home to several polluters, and no study has been done to measure the big-picture impact off adding to existing pollution levels.

Council Member Gary Schiff has proposed an ordinance amendment (pdf) that would cap towing companies’ fees at the amount the city charges for comparable “services,” around $150. Right now, the fees are unregulated. A public hearing was held at Wednesday’s Public Safety and Regulatory Services committee meeting.

Al Garcia, an attorney for Cedar Towing, handed out a list of expenses that go into the magic number, things like fuel, taxes and payroll. But the breakdown was vague enough that it raised more questions from the committee than it answered. Said Council Member Don Samuels: “These figures don’t mean anything.”

People paying towing fines, as Council Member Paul Ostrow noted during the discussion, aren’t “customers” in the traditional sense. When you leave your car where it’s not supposed to be, you don’t get to comparison shop which tow company hauls it off. So the only real incentive to maintain reasonable rates, it appears, is to avoid being so outlandish that too many angry tow victims call their council members to complain and demand action. And here we are.

Garcia argued the city’s rate isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, because private towing companies have more expenses. Private impound lots, for example, are required to be open 24-hours-a-day and need to hold vehicles 45 days before auctioning them off. The city’s lot isn’t open all day and it can sell unclaimed vehicles after 15 days. Schiff moved to continue the towing discussion after the city can do more research about how private companies’ expenses compare to those of the city.