Fourth Ward competition heats up

You'd think Barbara Johnson would have no trouble getting elected again to the Minneapolis City Council from the city's far northwestern corner.

The Fourth Ward council seat has been a family keepsake, held by Johnson for 12 years and her mother, Alice Rainville, for 20 years before that. Johnson is the council's president, as was her mother.

Johnson also raised the daunting campaign sum of more than $39,000 this year by Sept. 1. That's far more than most council members and three times that raised by her three opponents combined. She won reelection unopposed in 2005 with 92 percent of the vote.

But three candidates are mounting a spirited challenge to Johnson's bid for a fourth term. One of them, Troy Parker, blocked the sitting council president from gaining DFL endorsement until the 10th ballot of the ward endorsing convention.

Moreover, Johnson's vote totals have slipped since her initial election. She drew 4,461 votes in winning her first term in 1997, slipping to 3,129 in 2005, as turnout fell. A mere $150 of the $23,175 in contributions she itemized on her finance report last month came from her ward.

There's also a subtle subtext of race in the race. Johnson is white, and challengers Parker and Marcus Harcus, who are black, allege that Johnson isn't adequately representing the ward, which registered a mushrooming minority population in the 2000 census. The election comes a year after Barack Obama pulled in large numbers of new voters.

"We need someone who doesn't represent a small segment of the community," Harcus told a voter forum last month.

The most conservative challenger, Grant Cermak, 31, who is white, referenced the city's new ranked-choice voting system in telling voters: "You have the opportunity to put down three choices for change."

"Is race an issue here? You bet. There's absolutely no way to avoid that," Robert Englund, a former DFL ward coordinator and now a Johnson supporter, said. "But here's the other side of the coin: Race may be construed to be an issue, but the solutions to things that are an issue in the Fourth Ward will not benefit one race or another."

If Johnson got a wake-up call in eking an endorsement, she saw it coming at precinct caucuses, where members of ACORN's political arm helped turn out new DFLers.

The community-organizing organization and Johnson have long been at odds. She opposed its unsuccessful push for a city anti-predatory lending law in 2003, saying such regulation was a state and federal matter. She also voted against an ACORN-backed voluntary foreclosure moratorium in 2007, saying the move was only symbolic. She later served on a task force that helped to develop state predatory lending curbs considered a national model.

But the ACORN unit, supporting Parker, circulated a leaflet at the endorsing convention that argued Johnson got major contributions from financial institutions, a claim it later was forced to correct to clarify that the contributions came from individuals at those lenders.

"I hear a lot of negative things, but I think it's great to be celebrating the residential neighborhoods," she said.

Parker, 39, ran a distant fourth in 1997, when Johnson won the seat. A former pipefitter, he touts his service on the Shingle Creek neighborhood board, the Patrick Henry High School council and the city DFL central committee and his experience as a basketball coach. "I've been doing it for 15 years for free, and you don't do that because you want to run for office. You do it because you love your community," he said.

Parker was the best-funded challenger but had the least in the bank going into the campaign's final weeks. He also could be hampered by several arrests as a younger adult, although only one misdemeanor was sustained in court; he said black males are vulnerable to trumped-up police arrests.

Harcus, 31, is a lifelong North Sider who works there as a community organizer on foreclosure prevention and other issues. He has built the longest dossier on Johnson's voting record, faulting her support of a city-county library merger and opposition to ranked-choice voting. He's also the most media-savvy challenger. "I believe the North Side painfully lacks progressive leadership," said the Green Party endorsee. He drew applause at the forum for urging that police patrol outside their cruisers.

Cermak is Republican- and Independence Party-endorsed, but drew only 17.5 percent in a legislative bid last year. He has a software development business, and wants the city to cut a taxing and regulatory burden on businesses that he said deprives them of profits. Helping small business will grow the city's economy, increasing the tax yield and allowing tax cuts, he said.

Johnson lives in the ward's most vote-rich precinct, but the key to the election may be whether any candidate excites those new residents, especially those inspired to vote last year by Obama.

Diane Mountford of the Victory neighborhood is one of the newer voters Johnson hasn't convinced. She was leaning toward Harcus after a candidate forum last month. Johnson "absolutely knows what the job's about, whereas the others don't have a clue," Mountford said, adding: "Twelve years is a long time. I'm thinking it may be time for a change."

To read the Fourth Ward candidate questionnaires, go to www.startribune.com/minneapolis.