Last year, it seemed as if a new recruitment campaign was underway to change the way the Mayor and Common Council went about choosing appointments to boards and commissions. The open calls, held with council members seemed like a good way to get people outside of the political process involved. Sadly, these open calls haven’t resumed under the 2007-2009 administration, which is too bad. Too bad because most of the acrimony over appointments in the past was based on the struggle to move appointments out of the back room political process and into the more businesslike approach of matching talent to position.

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Maybe the this is a sign that the era of Mme Defarge is truly over. Despite rumours that one of the Wells was going to step in to challenge 4 term incumbent Betty Bondi for the postition of Democratic Registrar, the Advocate is reporting that newly minted Democratic chair Gail Wall says that Betty Bondi will not be challenged.

Betty Bondi has quietly brought change to the office since she began 8 years ago in the role. Unbelievably, the office ran on a DOS based database when Bondi first started. The transition to a modern system proved invaluable once the state system started having problems.

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