Aaron Johnson, left, and Grant Robertson.
My story about mayoral candidate Aaron Johnson and City Council candidate Grant Robertson ran Saturday. If you missed it, click here to read it.
Aaron and Grant are filmmakers, so in the grand tradition of DVD releases, here are a few deleted scenes from the story:
Aaron Johnson on political fundraising:
“We run two very, very small businesses (here and here — and also this one) that have been struggling a log with this economy, and you know how to count every single dollar. There’s not a dollar I spend without thinking very hard about it. And I’ve learned those habits of being careful with money.
“I don’t take it lightly at all when someone gives me five bucks, because five bucks is a lot of money to me. … I’ve had to very seriously consider whether I should go to Arby’s or McDonald’s because Arby’s is an extra $2 and pay-roll is tomorrow.
“And then the other candidates, if you just look at the money they’ve already spent, they are spending thousands of dollars on out-of-state web designers, when there are web designers in town who will do it. I’m not even talking about my company, you’ve got Mad Monkey, got Period Three, got some of the best web developers in the country right in your backyard who would do it for half the price.”
Johnson on his and Robertson’s campaign style:
“We’re pooling our resources because we’re so small, and we can’t play the same game they play because first of all I find a lot of those strategies to be disingenuous, not that the candidates themselves are disingenuous, they’re working in the parameters of the system they’ve been told to work in by their advisers.
“I know I have to work harder as a candidate to earn people’s trust because of that. I recognize that. I recognize because we are having to use these non traditional methods it’s going to make a lot of people wonder about us.
“We have to prove ourselves.”
Johnson on his style:
“I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan when I was a kid, so I was really into Victorian and I’m a big history buff, so that may have something to do with it. But there’s not really like a message behind it. I think that we’ve kind of been adopting the tuxedos and the top hat kind of thing to kind of like beckon back to the whistlestop days when people would stand up on the stumps and speak, because that has a lot to do with what we are trying to do. Back in those days, you didn’t have sound bites and pull quotes and stuff like that. The way that you reached your audience was by writing extensively long newspaper articles that they would print in full or you would literally stand up in front of a group of people and give a long speech and they would listen to what you were saying and they would have a long debate with people you know and it wouldn’t be on television, it would be right there in the room with them.”
Johnson and Robertson exchange on their Internet talk show, Drinking in the Morning:
JOHNSON: Grant, we forgot to change our clothes
ROBERTSON: Dammit
JOHNSON: Hey, watch your language (slaps Robertson with a bow tie)
ROBERTSON: We can edit it out
JOHNSON: You can’t edit it out of your filing cabinet in heaven.
Adam Beam covers the City of Columbia for
Why district 4 is the ‘district of no’
Columbia City Council district 4
I’m working on a story for Sunday previewing the race for City Council district 4 (yes, there are other races going on besides the mayor’s race.)
Specifically, I’m trying to write about the interesting trend of the district 4 council person usually voting “no.” Whether it’s Kirkman Finlay or Hamilton Osborne, more often than not the district four representative is usually the person voting “no.”
Why? One of the theories I’ve stumbled across is that district 4 residents have higher valued homes. Because of that, they pay more taxes than other district residents, so they are more concerned with how the council spends money. Hence, their usual “no” vote.
There is some data to back up this claim. According to data from the Richland County Assessor’s office, district 4 has the highest average owner-occupied home value of any of the four council districts:
Some notes on this data: It only shows owner-occupied homes. That means it excludes rental homes, commercial properties and some condos and town homes (because the assessor’s office counts them differently). Rental homes are taxed at a higher rate, and the owner often times does not live in the city limits.
Notice, too, that district four had the highest number of owner occupied homes. Other districts have more renters, who are less likely to vote in city elections than home owners.