For the first time in nearly 30 years, there won't be a woman on Rochester's City Council
Nov. 11—ROCHESTER — The recent Rochester City Council elections set the city up to have its first all-male council in nearly three decades.
Since Carol Kamper was elected in 1971 as the city's first female council member, Rochester has only seen two periods without a woman voting on city policy.
"The gender really mattered back in the '70s and '80s, because women had a different perspective," said Amy Caucutt, contributing author of the League of Women Voters' "Taking the Lead: Rochester Women in Public Policy, 1970-1990."
She said women brought a more progressive voice to the council, as well as other local government bodies, but that might have lessened in recent years.
"I don't think it's quite as meaningful as it certainly was when women broke in," she said.
Marcia Marcoux, who was appointed to serve Ward 2 in 1996 and continued to be elected to serve through 2008, said she also sees a shift in what it means to have a woman on the council.
"Times have changed a bit," she said. "I think maybe more of it now is what they bring to council."
She said knowledge and ability to work with others can outweigh the importance of gender, since it's more common today to have female voices and insights in many government roles that were once exclusively male.
Mayor Kim Norton said the gender shift on the council remains notable.
"This is a big change, and it does kind of return us to a place we were decades ago," the city's first female mayor said.
At least one woman has been seated on the council since 1996, when Marcoux started serving what would become 12 years in office.
Sandra Means became the Ward 6 council representative in 2003, overlapping Marcoux's terms and maintaining a female presence on the council until she retired at the end of 2016.
The Ward 6 seat was filled by Annalissa Johnson in 2017 and then current council member Molly Dennis in 2021, when a new slate of council members brought four years of gender balance between Rochester's elected officials.
With Norton and Dennis, Council President Brooke Carlson and council member Kelly Rae Kirkpatrick, women filled four of the city's eight elected offices.
Carlson opted not to seek a second term in the recent election, Dennis failed to win enough votes to make it to the Nov. 5 ballot, and Kirkpatrick lost by a 190-vote margin on Election Day.
Norton said she believes voters selected a solid slate of new council members, but the lack of a female voice among the elected officials that vote on city policy will likely be noticed.
"I do think women sometimes bring a different perspective, sometimes a different thought process," she said. "I just think we will miss having that there."
The two past gaps without a female council member were slightly more than a decade after Kamper resigned in 1979 to become an Olmsted County commissioner and approximately 18 months before Marcoux took office.
Between the two gaps, Nancy Selby served as council president from 1988 to 1994, becoming the first of only two women to serve as the council's only citywide representative.
While Selby was council president, the seven-member body saw its first election to result in a nearly gender-balanced council.
In 1991, Ruth Crawford was elected to serve the First Ward, and Mary Petersson was elected as the Fifth Ward council member. Both served a single two-year term.
The council wouldn't see another similar composition until 2005, when Amy Blenker landed the First Ward council seat in a special election. She served through 2006, alongside Marcoux and Means.
It adds up to a total of 11 women who served on the council throughout more than six decades.
Norton said the local election process can make diversifying the elected body a struggle.
"It's hard in a ward system to encourage diversity, because it means multiple people in each ward need to run with hope of getting more diversity," she said.
In the recent election, the primary started with four women out of 14 candidates spread across the four races. The single female candidate in Ward 2 and the two in Ward 6 failed to get enough votes to appear on the general election ballot.
It left Kirkpatrick as the only woman on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Caucutt said Rochester residents will have the opportunity to return a woman's voice to the council in two years.
"The first, third and fifth wards will have to start scouring," she said.
Eleven women have served on the Rochester City Council since 1971. Here's a timeline of their terms:
* 1971 to 1976: Carol Kamper served Ward 6 as the city's first elected female council member
* 1988 to 1994: Nancy Selby served as the city's first female council president
* 1991 to 1993: Ruth Crawford served Ward 1, and Mary Petersson served Ward 5
* 1996 to 2008: Marcia Marcoux served Ward 2
* 2003 to 2016: Sandra Means served Ward 6
* 2005 to 2006: Amy Blenker served Ward 1
* 2017 to 2020: Annalissa Johnson served Ward 6
* 2021 to 2024: Brooke Carlson is serving as council president with Kelly Rae Kirkpatrick serving Ward 4 and Molly Dennis serving Ward 6
