Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …  

WHO KNOWS WHERE: President said to speak in state Saturday. The topic: health care. The draw: Mayo Clinic. The place: Who knows? [MinnPost]

ROCHESTER: Walz lukewarm on Afghan troop surge. Just back from Afghanistan, the First District DFLer said he won’t support more boots on the ground “simply to increase our footprint.” [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

STATE CAPITOL, EDEN PRAIRIE: Doom and boom. At separate summits on the state’s economy, leaders said things are worse than they look or better than they seem. [Star Tribune]

MINNEAPOLIS: Separate and unequal. Disrepair and decay haunt parks in poorer parts of town, and the park board can’t prove it’s not redlining because it doesn’t track its own spending. [City Pages]

DULUTH: School board candidate endorses opponent. He’s already a board member but filed to run for another seat in case a judge kicked him off … it’s complicated. [Duluth News Tribune]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: One in three will get flu soon. The H1N1 virus will strike 30 percent of the student body in the next three to four weeks, an expert says. [Minnesota Daily]

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

Lawyers for each side called the other’s case “absurd” in a court hearing Thursday into whether the Minneapolis City Council was out of line when it denied a place on the November ballot to a charter amendment that would make the city’s park board more independent.

Referendum backers say greater autonomy to levy taxes would get the parks off a path to financial — and possibly existential — ruin.

Others (notably an 11-member majority of the city council and the city attorney’s office) say the referendum (see below) would effectively — and unconstitutionally — give birth to a new unit of local government, and for that reason shouldn’t be on the ballot.

“If they can do this, any charter city can go out and create another government subdivision,” said Assistant City Attorney Peter Gindner. “It’s an absurd result.”

But turnabout is fair play. “That’s an absurd reading of the [state] constitution,” said University of Minnesota School of Law Prof. Fred Morrison in defense of the proposed referendum.

Hennepin County District Court Judge Cara Lee Neville heard an hour of arguments from Gindner, who defended last week’s council action, and Morrison, who appealed that decision on behalf of citizens who signed a petition to put the referendum before voters.

Gindner and Morrison engaged in legal and sometimes semantic combat over the park board’s current quasi-independent status within city government and how to describe its new status should the referendum gain a place on the ballot and pass.

But after hearing the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board variously described  as a unit of government or a city department, Neville still had a basic question for Morrison. How should she think of the park board, as a unit or a department?

Morrison rose to answer. “As a park board,” he said.

Neville accepted that and explained her question: “Sometimes the language squishes around.”

Gindner offered the judge a few alternative descriptions for what the park board would become under the proposed charter amendment: “some kind of hybrid creature” and “a very strange beast that you cannot tell what it is.”

Neville adjourned the hearing promising to reach a decision “as fast we can.” A Sept. 11 deadline for finalizing the ballot looms.

Here’s the city charter amendment as proposed:

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board shall be a separate and independent
governmental unit of the state of Minnesota with an elected board of commissioners. The Park and Recreation Board shall preserve and protect park land, lakes and open spaces as a public trust forever and shall have all the powers and rights of a separate and independent governmental unit of the state was determined by the state legislature. The Mayor of Minneapolis shall have the right to veto the Park and Recreation Board’s legislative actions and budget, subject to the ability of Park Board to override a veto by a two-thirds (2/3rds) vote.

Elsewhere in Minnesota headlines today … 

BEMIDJI: Collin Peterson holds another town hall. If the 25-percent-loon quotient that the congressman dreads was in attendance, those folks were booing long-winded questions and the guy who called Obama “the boy king” along with everybody else. [Bemidji Pioneer]

FIRST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Tim Walz warms up with telephone town hall. It was like an old-fashioned party line as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the congressman took questions on health care Tuesday; he’ll hold an in-person town hall in Mankato on Thursday. [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

STATEWIDE: Honey, it’s Amy Klobuchar on the phone. Minnesota’s senior senator and a doctor from the Mayo Clinic will be taking your calls on health care this Sunday at 7 p.m. [West Central Tribune]

MINNEAPOLIS: Park-tax petitions sufficient. An amendment to give the park board independent levy authority will be on the ballot in November, as long as the charter commission agrees to meet on its “off week” to okay it. [Star Tribune]

KANDIYOHI COUNTY: Officials see ordinance as “tool” to halt homecoming pranks. A regular victim of such hijinks already greets pranksters with a tool of his own: a squirt gun loaded with fox urine. [West Central Tribune]

ALEXANDRIA: Big Ole gets helmet-wings reattached. It was only a coincidence that repairs to the wind-damaged 28-foot fiberglass viking took place the same day Brett Favre flew into Minnesota on the wings of Zygi Wilf’s purple-and-gold airplane. [Alexandria Echo Press]

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.

Lost amid the news accounts and watchdog reports: some of the lesser line items that suggest their own story lines. Here are a few, after the jump.

Among the host committee’s expenses:

$112.36 to TLF Country Florist, South Bend, Ind. The date on this item: on Feb. 14, 2008. While the RNC played Valentine’s Day mischief with Barack and Hillary, was someone’s honey made happy at RNC expense?

$20,000 to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board for a “permit for media party.” Looks like there was a Republican big-tent windfall after all.

$50,000 to John Zweifel of Orlando, Fla., for “attraction exhibit expense.” Zweifel brought a 60-foot-by-20-foot scale model of the White House to the CivicFestevent in Minneapolis. Also listed: dozens of $2,500 fee refunds to exhibitors at the CivicFest flop.

Among the host committee’s smallest receipts:

$100 from well-heeled Republican donor (and two-time candidate in statewide elections in Minnesota himself) Wheelock Whitney of Maple Grove, Minn., George H. W. Bush’s chum from their prep days at Andover Academy. It’s an oddly meager donation to a $58 million convention fund for a man who’s given $50,000 to Republicans since 2002. Would he care that he covered the better part of someone’s Valentine’s flowers in South Bend, Ill.?