Comments on others' CP concerns

There has been a flurry of comment on the state our city’s Citizen Participation system lately. As the next WSCO election approaches, I suspect that we will hear more.

Some people seem unable to accept the turnover at Highland District Council and see some evil influence there. They may be right and the influence may indeed be evil, but I haven’t seen that anybody broke any rules doing it.

I was at last year’s WSCO election along with about 700 others, most of whom [unlike I] had a sufficient West Side connection [as determined by the organization’s working documents] and were participating in the meeting. I was a little disappointed that some people I know of who have good West Side Credentials were not chosen, but it wasn’t my district or my choice and I am already living with a lot of disappointment.

The biggest ongoing problem the Citizen Participation system seems to have now is a sense of blind coolness from city. This comes both from elected officials as well as bureaucrats and my guess as one who hasn’t worked is that it is largely from the latter, although things are never the same in every district and every ward.

A more immediately ominous sign for people in every district ought to be the forced merger in District 13. This was brought on by the elected officials.

When District Council boundaries were established, some boundaries were drawn pretty much on natural factors and others had to be [or at least were] somewhat more arbitrarily. My district [Payne/Phalen, District 5] had pretty natural boundaries. To get into the populated portion from another district in the city, you pretty much had to go under or over a bridge. The West Side was even more naturally defined.

District 13 seems to have been established when the line drawers found that they needed some place to put the stuff which was too far south for Saint Anthony Park or Hamline-Midway, too far west for Summit-University, and too far north for Mac-Groveland. Merriam Park was already fairly well defined and was certainly large enough compared to Saint Anthony Park or Summit Hill to be a District itself, but Merriam Park didn’t cover the whole area and making Merriam Park a District in its own right would leave a parcel too small to be considered a District by itself. So from that situation the three councils in one District system was established.

It looked inefficient to those of us across town, but it seemed to work. But after three decades it seems that the folks in Merriam Park looked to the northwest and the southeast and wondered. A change in how Councils were being funded probably helped inspire this look.

I am not an expert in District 13 things. I have probably simplified this more than I should have. It may well be that in a few years that all will conclude that the new organization has worked wonders for all.

But questions will remain about this hard hand of the city. What will happen when the city decided that it might take less money to have all of the East Side in one District? Or that all of the more-or-less “Midway” area [Districts 11, 12, 13, and the western portion of 10 should be one district and the eastern part of D10 attached to the North End? And to a lot of the city, there really is not much difference between Highland and Macalester-Groveland.

Maybe one or more of these areas would be able to resist, but it would not be a good situation.