taken from the Seward Profile

Five candidates are already in the race for the Ward 2 city council seat now held by Paul Zerby. Zerby has announced he won?t seek re-election next year (see interview, page 4).

Cara Letofsky, Dan Miller, Jerry Stein and Bill Svrluga have said they will compete for the DFL endorsement. Green Party candidate Cam Gordon, who narrowly lost to Zerby in 2001, said he too might join the hunt for that endorsement. The DFL will hold caucuses March 1 and ward conventions in March or April.

Letofsky, Stein and Svrluga said they won?t run against the DFL?s endorsed candidate; Miller said he hasn?t decided yet.

Two candidates in the nonpartisan primary will advance to the November 2005 general election.

At that election, Ward 2 will include Seward, Cedar-Riverside and chunks of the Longfellow and Cooper neighborhoods north of Lake Street. Since redistricting it no longer includes Dinkytown or the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, meaning only Prospect Park-East River Road and much of the Como neighborhood remain in the ward from across the river.

Cam Gordon said he had been prepared for a rematch of the 2001 general election contest, in which he received slightly more votes on the west side of the Mississippi River, and Zerby had the margin on the east side. The ward?s boundary shift south ?theoretically has the potential to help,? Gordon said, as he is probably better known there after years of leadership with the Seward Neighborhood Group. Now he?s also served at a citywide level on the Neighborhood Revitalization Program Policy Board.

Gordon sees a major issue in the growing diversity of the ward, particularly the large immigrant population in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. ?How can we better connect people to decision-making [in the city]?? Gordon asked, promising to use the Internet and regular ?office hours? in the neighborhoods for exchanges with citizens.

Gordon and his wife, Sarah Fehr, operate a home-based childcare center; he also provides music education programs for other schools and is associate editor of an education periodical. His campaign has a website (camgordon.com) and has scheduled a kickoff event for Dec. 30, 7 p.m. at the Spokes Pizza Collective, in the Seward Café, 2129 E. Franklin Ave.

Though he grew up in Golden Valley, Dan Miller said, ?Ever since I was a kid, I took Minneapolis personally.? Miller, 25 (?26 for the election?), a Prospect Park resident, said he would bring the ?energy of a young person? to the campaign. He calls for establishing a ?children?s endowment? to support early childhood education and public schools. He seeks greater citizen engagement through a ?comprehensive information network that would give every person access to the information necessary to affect change.? He advocates making transportation environmentally friendly, with innovations like hybrid electric buses. His website, danmiller2005.org, features several other issues, including ?poverty and homelessness.? ?That?s probably not a winning campaign issue,? Miller laughed. ?But that, to me, is the essence of what the Democratic Party is all about.?

Miller, a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota?s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, has worked as staff to the state senate?s tax committee, and in public affairs for the university?s graduate student organization. He names as role models the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone and Southeast resident and former Hennepin County Attorney Tom Johnson, with whom he worked as a policy analyst for the Council on Crime and Justice.

Shifting ward boundaries practically wrote part of Jerry Stein?s campaign literature for him. The Prospect Park resident has lived in the ward for almost 50 years, including a decade near Brackett Park in South Minneapolis. Stein, 49, teaches community organizing at the University of Minnesota and works in community youth development for the state Extension Service. Those jobs encapsulate concerns central to his campaign: communities and kids.

Stein wants city government to take better notice of how the welfare of communities and kids are tied together. ?It?s been heartbreaking watching the city stand by while 17 schools are closed,? Stein said. He was central in the effort to re-establish an elementary school at Pratt Community Center and to save the program from being closed.

Stein puts great stock in community centers like Pratt and says the city should work formally and across jurisdictions to create and maintain these ?axes of energy.? He helped found the Southeast Minneapolis Council on Learning.

While lean budgets may require streamlining government, Stein sees no need to attack neighborhoods through top-heavy reforms of city government. He likes to quote Thomas Jefferson as saying wards ?have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man.?

Seward resident Bill Svrluga (pronounced ?sveer-loo-gah?) bills himself as a problem-solver who has consistently taken on the toughest community issues. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, and while an exchange student at historically black Johnson C. Smith University, helped integrate restaurants in Charlotte, N.C. He has taught high school and served as a dean of students at Carleton and Macalester colleges, worked in human resources and organization development at General Mills, and run his own business consulting in strategy, planning and effectiveness for nonprofit, for-profit and government organizations.

Svrluga has served as chair for the Greater Minneapolis Food Bank and Sabathani Community Center, and as vice-chair of the Minneapolis Urban League. He founded the Jeremiah Program, a downtown residence and training center where poor single mothers develop job skills, and Twin Cities RISE!, which helps single men get and retain high-skill jobs.

To meet declining budgets, Svrluga wants to engage citizens in deciding which city services are priorities, and what they are willing to pay for those services. The next step is for the city to reinvent how it provides those services with less money.

Svrluga is one of two candidates with significant others in the public eye: his partner is Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Lucy Gerold. Cara Letofsky?s husband is District 62A state Rep. Jim Davnie; they met on Ann Wynia?s 1994 campaign for U.S. Senate. Of the two, ?I?ve always been more interested in the city level?like the stop sign on the corner,? she said. She lives near Brackett Park has been active trying to save its rocket.

Letofsky is executive director at the Lyndale Neighborhood Development Corp., a community development corporation like Seward Redesign, where she served five years on the board, including as chair. She was a founder and is on the board of City of Lakes Community Land Trust, and has been director for two neighborhood groups (Lyndale?s and Stevens Square?s). After earning a master?s degree at the Humphrey Institute in 1993, she worked on policy for the Wellstone Alliance and as director for Progressive Minnesota/New Party.

As a member of the city?s Capital Long-Range Improvement Committee, she?s seen ?a ton more need than there are dollars.? She?d focus on opportunities presented by transit: Ward 2?s LRT stations are isolated from neighborhoods, and a second line along University and Washington avenues ?would run through the heart of the ward.?

last revised: March 29, 2006