I attended the League of Women Voters candidate forum last night for candidates for the two open City Council positions. There are four candidates for the two positions. All four candidates were at the LWV forum last night. Sherry Butcher and Brad Aho are running for reelection. The other two candidates are former long time City Council Member Ron Case and first time candidate Jeff Meyerhofer. Their terms expire on December 31, 2008. The new terms start January 2, 2009. The terms are four years in length.
Eden Prairie City Council positions are at-large positions. There is no residency requirement for a candidate for an at-large position, except that one must live within the corporate limits of the city of Eden Prairie This is different than a city government that elects its members from wards. In a ward based system, a candidate must live within the geographic boundaries of not only the city, but also a subsection of the City called the ward. If you want to represent the people of the 8th ward of Minneapolis on the Minneapolis City Council, you must live in the 8th ward of Minneapolis. But if you want to represent the people of Eden Prairie on the Eden Prairie City Council, it doesn’t matter where you live, as long as you live in Eden Prairie.
The LWV forum went very smoothly. The questions came from the audience. The forum facilitator did a nice job of framing the questions into a non-personal, neutral format. The candidates were quite civil to one another. Maybe this is what we’ll see for the rest of the local campaign season. Click here to see the forum on our Web site, it’s filed under Archived Video: Other Programming.
