Thursday, July 9, 2009

City Council Race 2009 - Follow It On Twitter!

Five of our nine City Council Members are currently on Twitter. In addition, seven out of the twelve challengers are on Twitter too. As the election gets closer I expect the tweeting to intensify. Here's a roundup of the candidates Twitter accounts. Please let me know if you know of any that I've missed.

Incumbents

Jeff Berding, D
* http://twitter.com/jeffberding

Chris Bortz, C
* http://twitter.com/chrisbortz

Laketa Cole, D
* none?

David Crowley, D
* none?

Leslie Ghiz, R
* http://twitter.com/Leslie_Ghiz

Greg Harris, D
* http://twitter.com/councilharris

Chris Monzel, R
* none?

Roxanne Qualls, C
* http://twitter.com/RoxanneQualls

Cecil Thomas, D
* none?

Challengers

Anitra Brockman, I
* http://twitter.com/brckman4council

Darryl Cordrey, R
* http://twitter.com/DarrylCordrey

Tony Fischer, D
* http://twitter.com/tonyfischer

Kevin Flynn, C
* none?

Nicholas Hollan, D
* http://twitter.com/NicholasHollan

Amy Murray, R
* http://twitter.com/amy_murray

Steve Pavelish, D
* none?

Laure Quinlivan, D
* http://twitter.com/LaureQuinlivan

Lamarque Ward, D
* http://twitter.com/lwardsr

Bernadette Watson, D
* none?

Wendell Young, D
* none?

George Zamary, R
* none?

Combined Feed

I used Yahoo Pipes to merge the feeds together. There is a pipe for the incumbents, one for the challengers, and one merged pipe with everyone in it. I used yourminis.com to display the merged pipe below:







For more widgets please visit www.yourminis.com

Monday, May 4, 2009

2009 Cincinnati Mayoral Candidates

I believe the "major" candidates for mayor have been announced at this point and I've got them listed over on the wiki at 2009 Mayoral Election. I'd like to get a quality bio for each of them on there. My page for the 2009 City Council Candidates gets a lot of hits, but many of the candidates there don't have their own pages written up yet either. I'd appreciate any help on gathering information on the candidates. November is only 6 months away!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Who's getting the gardens?

I've started to hear some hints here and there that the 11 plots in the Cincinnati Urban Gardening Pilot Program are being assigned. Does anyone know if this info has been published by the city anywhere? I'd like to add that information to the wiki. If you know anything about who is going to run these gardens, please edit the wiki!

Thursday, April 9, 2009

2009 Cincinnati City Council Candidates

The 2009 City Council Candidates page on the wiki has been growing a lot recently. Today (actually last night) the Cincinnati Democratic Committee (CDC) released its endorsements for the City Council election that will take place in November, so I've added that info. Once the Republican and Charter parties announce their endorsements I'll add them as well.

Update:I've updated the article with the Republican and Charter Committee enorsements.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

CSA's in the Cincinnati Area

I spent tonight trying to pull together a variety of sources of information about CSA's in Cincinnati. I've compiled a massive table on the wiki and I'm hoping folks out there will find it useful and help me keep it up to date: Community Supported Agriculture.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

CityBeat on City Council Appointments

CityBeat has a great cover story this week on the subject of City Council appointments (here is the weird "print version" of the article online: http://npaper-wehaa.com/city-beat#c-156416 ).

Ever since the introduction of term limits in 1999, this provision of the city charter has gained in popularity amongst outgoing City Council members. If a councilmember leaves their seat for any reason, they may select other Council members to choose a replacement to fill their seat. This gives any appointed member a big advantage in elections over other challengers that may have wanted to fill the vacant seat.

Republican councilmember Leslie Ghiz has proposed a charter amendment to help deal with this issue that would hold elections to fill seats when most of a departing councilmember's term is left. In odd-numbered years (when only one year remains in the term) the seat would simply remain vacant until the following regularly scheduled council election.

Naturally this has given local politicians an opportunity to give sound bites on their druthers. Councilman and Charterite Chris Bortz likes the idea. Jeff Berding isn't against it, but he is in favor of a system involving some council members elected by districts and other at large members. Democratic Party Chair Tim Burke is naturally in favor of leaving the system as it is. Charter Commitee chairman Michael Goldman would rather see a system with four-year terms instead of two. Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou indicate one way or the other what his or his party's stand would be on the issue. Chris Smitherman was in favor of the measure.

My favorite part of the article though was the chart showing how many recent councilmembers were appointed rather than elected into Council their first time.

(I am going to attempt to embed the image. Hopefully this works:)

(If the image goes away, try this link. )

There have been nine city council elections since 1990 and since that time there have been thirteen appointments to council. This is definitely the type of info that I find interesting and I would like to get it added into the wiki.

On a related note: I'm planning on getting more info on some of the candidates who have announced that they're running in the council election in November and putting it up on the wiki as well.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

City Council Members Update




Today I went in and created articles for those City Council members that still did not have pages. I copied the info from their bio's which can be found on their official web site.

Also, I'm working on a super-secret project for hereincincinnati.net that is separate from the wiki. I hope to be able to say more about it before the end of the month.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Work on the wiki so far this month

Since my last post, I've worked a lot on the wiki. In the past month, I've been doing more work than average. It seems like every time I work on it, there ends up being more work to to. :)

* I added the info about John Cranley resigning and Greg Harris taking his place.

* I rearranged how the In The News page is layed out. This page is really ballooning faster than I would like. I may need to come with a new system.

* An anonymous user added some links to the wiki that lead to Muckety.com, a site which I had not used before. I really like the site and spent a good chunk of time exploring it. Hopefully I can add more Muckety links to other articles on the wiki as it grows.