Bloomington City Council

[Kilroy003]

A close one! Peterson is up on Algeo by 50 with only Ward 1, Precinct 30 left to go - and Nordstrom looks likes she'll beat the upstart conservative kid by just a few hundred votes.

Results

[dflprincess]

1. Bloomington cable access channel has all 32 precincts reporting

Peterson has won as well as Nordstrom and Hulting. Though Hulting won by only 11 votes and Steve by 74.

I wish they'd rank the school board candidates by vote total - I know there were a couple nuts running though it looks like they both lost.

Of 53,767 registered voters only 8,676 voted today. One of the big problems in Bloomington is there is no good source of information about city government or the school board. I haven't seen a Sun/Current in months.

[Kilroy003]

3. School Board

Halvorson Wicklund, Culver, Bush and Hibbs are winners.

Here's the results on SoS site. School Board Results District 271

I googled a few phrases this afternoon and was able to read a questionnaire given to School board candidates. I developed a general ranking based on the answers they gave. It looks like it was mostly incumbents who won. The candidate who's answers impressed me the most, Marcie Coval, appears to have lost. (I hope she wasn't one of the nuts you mentioned.)

Bloomington Sun Current had a nice endorsement op-ed, http://www.mnsun.com/articles/2009/10/22/opinion/bl22endorsement.txt a few weeks ago.

[dflprincess]

4. I did something I've never done before with the school board race

I based part of my decision on a lawn sign.

The guy who lives across the street from my mother is just a crackpot and always has signs in his yard. Last year he had a huge "Michelle Bachmann for President" sign up. He occassionly flies a U.N. flag on which he has painted a red circle with a line through it on the U.N. logo. Currently, he has a couple that read "say no to socialism" - and he had one up for school board candidate Bill Reichert. I immediately decided Reichert was not my kind of guy.

I did go out to his website: http://www.reichertforschoolboard.com/ and, in addtion to what he had to say about himself, ("Your Conservative Candidate") found the following information which let me know who else not to vote for:

Other Candidates Bill is Endorsing for School Board
Matthew Pawlowski (1563 votes)
Julie Frankhouser (1843 votes)
Larry Frost (1518 votes)

Reichtert made a scary showing coming up with 2,123 votes which put him in 6th place, only 136 votes behind Hibbs who won the 4th seat on the board.

I know both the council and school boards races are nonpartisan, but we need to find some way to organize so that we can get out and work for the less insane candidates and make sure their supporters get to the polls. Having Bloomington cut into 3 different senate districts and 2 Congressional districts does not help either party when it comes to organizing for city wide races.

[Kilroy003]

2. Peterson pulled it out!

Final Results

Good for him, he's a pretty smart guy. I have a great deal of respect for Jim Algeo, he sounds like a very engaged citizen and an active member in some quality organizations but I'm glad Peterson will have another term. The other council members really seem to listen to him when he has something to say. Seems that GOP endorsement has resulted in a good number of election losses in these parts the last few cycles but you can tell the city is poised to go either way. I couldn't make it to the polls today, it's first election I've missed in a very long time. I was very nervous watching the returns, the margin of victory was only 5 points apart after 75% of the precincts had reported.