Monday, October 29, 2007

New Week Rising

Tomorrow night (tonight by the time I finish writing this) at 7:00 pm, there's a Bexley School Board Candidate Night at the Cassingham auditorium. I know I keep promising School Board posts, but now I'm actually working on it. In the meantime, I did a sit-down over coffee with Bexley Mayoral candidate Bill Minckler today. We talked about his new campaign video, and the questions I had after watching it.

Nobody would ever accuse me of being a hard-hitting journalist, but the audio turned out pretty well, so (why not?) you can listen to the whole half-hour interview here (mp3, 4Mb).

Some highlights - Mr. Minckler believes that from a marketing standpoint, a community becomes attractive by being different, distinctive, even unusual (within bounds). I later asked him, how will the typical Central Ohio resident view Bexley after four years of a Minckler administration, and actually I really liked his response "an intellectual and cultural center... a center of ideas, influence, and art."

Of course, of course, this is in the context of a well-maintained city, with good services, and the line held on taxes, etc. We talked about management, with Mr. Minckler emphasizing the need to have projects analyzed in complete and meaningful ways before committing resources, an approach he would also employ with consultants. This came up in the context of one of my pet topics, the Woodland Meadows property, which Mr. Minckler was uncomfortable expressing an opinion on due to what he felt are unknowns in the situation. Reasonable enough. We also discussed multi-level parking structures. It's a topic he's obviously spent more time thinking about, and he outlined the benefits of underground structures, of rooftop community gathering spaces, etc.

I asked if he saw this as a Bexley-owned structure, a partnership, or a Bexley-facilitated private structure. It's apparently a good question. I'm always getting ahead of myself.

So anyway, if you'd like Mr. Minckler's platform as he himself presents it, check out his video on www.bexleyforward.org, and if you want to hear me blather, check out the audio.

More of this sort of thing forthcoming. And rumors of OH-12 news to boot.

1 comment:

Saltone said...

I had an interesting meeting with Mr. Minkler this weekend. I was outside of my home and he approached handing out his literature. I quickly got to the point, and told him that I had not made any decision as to whom I was going to vote for mayor, and asked why I should vote for him. He responded with "Just look at my website, it should answer all your questions. Do you have any other questions?" I was a little confused, but said no, and Mr. Minkler headed on down the street.

The more I thought about this meeting, the more it rubbed me the wrong way. Here I was an undecided voter who was willing to give this candidate time to explain and convince me why I should vote for him. And more or less I was refered to his web site. Then I was asked if I had any other questions? Well, since my first one was never really answered, there was no reason to ask another.

The image this encounter left, was that Mr. Minkler did not seem to have time for me when he was running, so why should I believe that he will have time for me if he becomes mayor?

On another note, I use the web in my buisness, and look at numerous other city websites from around the country. Personally, I have always felt that the Bexley web site is not very user friendly.