Local forum covers many issues

By Dan Linehan
The Free Press

MANKATO October 28, 2008 10:51 pm

— Six candidates in three local elections answered questions about the economy and other student interests Tuesday in what will likely be the only public meeting of the candidates prior to Nov. 4.
There are a pair of contested races for the Mankato City Council — for council president and Ward 4 representative — as well as one for the 3rd District of the Blue Earth County Board.
Chris Frederick is challenging incumbent Mike Laven for council president, Jason Mattick is running against incumbent Charlie Hurd for the ward spot and Mark Piepho is seeking to replace Katy Wortel on the County Board.
The Minnesota State University forum, co-sponsored by the Minnesota State Student Senate and Southern Minnesota Advocates, put the same questions to each candidate — all of whom have a degree from the university.
The first: “What do you feel is the community’s most pressing issue and how would you address it if elected,” drew several responses about the economy. The county’s role in economic development is limited, though.
Hurd said he’d prefer to see the city levy rise no faster than inflation, given concerns about the economy.
“Yet, we’re in a business that a lot of it (the cost) is employees and their health costs go up at a rate much higher than that (inflation).”
“We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place,” Hurd said.
Laven had an analogy different from the budget hatchet and scalpel references most politicians fall back on.
“You know you’re gonna go to that wedding in a few months and you wanna lose that five or 10 pounds, and how are you gonna do that?” he said.
“We don’t necessarily just want to stop eating,” he said. “Maybe it’s just we plow a little later in the day instead of right as soon as the snow flies.”
Piepho said retaining students after they graduate, job creation, diversification and economic development are important goals.
He also said his experience as a state legislator would be a bonus.
“I know how they think, so hopefully we could put that to work for the county,” he said, to help legislators “realize what they do on the state level has an effect on this level.”
Wortel said there’s an atmosphere of “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” but he gave a more complete answer after a subsequent question about retaining MSU students. Answers to that question focused on creating job opportunities for graduates.
Wortel said self-sufficiency should be the goal — she called it “re-localizing our economy” — by making our own energy and selling it to ourselves.
“Just in general, renewable energy brings a lot of local jobs for those engineering graduates as well as highly skilled trade jobs,” she said.
She called the financial crisis a “a failure of the free-market system.”
Piepho answered right after Wortel, and his position demonstrated a clear difference.
“We are in a global economy though, despite rumors to the contrary,” he said.
Renewable energy growth is good, Piepho said, but those windmills in southwest Minnesota are manufactured by an Indian company, and the county’s goal should be to entice employers with low tax rates.
There was a question about the social host ordinance recently passed by the city that makes it a crime to provide a venue for underage drinking.
Frederick jumped on the issue, calling it “a prime example of where the city of Mankato kinda didn’t do all of its homework and didn’t talk to all the constituent groups in Mankato.”
He repeated the concern, often expressed by students, that innocent people would be held responsible for roommates who hold parties and invite minors.
Laven countered that “a lot of people weighed in on that issue ... landlords did, renters did, the business community did, the bars did.”
He went on to say that the council listened but can’t expect to please everyone.
Wortel said the County Board didn’t act because there was a “mixture of opinion” among commissioners, but she supported it.
Piepho stressed personal responsibility, saying “we have to treat young people as adults.”
Mattick said he wouldn’t have supported it for reasons similar to Piepho’s, and Hurd said he was absent during that vote but would have opposed it because he wanted it to be tested elsewhere.
The next question was about improving relations between students and other city residents, and most responded that more communication would help.
Mattick went a step further: “As a city we should be bending over backwards to do what the university needs if it’s warranted, if it’s not unreasonable.”
On a question about social services, most candidates agreed that this is a time for prioritization and creativity, not growth, in services.
An audience member asked about a city rental policy, which he called “ridiculous,” that prohibits new rental licenses on a given block if the proportion of existing rentals exceeds 25 percent.
Incumbents Laven and Hurd defended the measure, saying it preserves single-family neighborhoods, and challengers Mattick and Frederick said they would have opposed it.