Correction Appended: An earlier version of this story inaccurately reported that Patricia Lesko previously worked as a political reporter for The Ann Arbor News.

Longtime Ann Arbor resident Patricia Lesko’s resumé is a little different from that of the average mayoral candidate.

Though she’s running for mayor of Ann Arbor, Lesko — a Democrat, who filed paperwork yesterday to officially enter the race for mayor — doesn’t have a background in local politics. Instead, she’s spent the past several months scrutinizing Ann Arbor city officials on her blog, A2Politico.

Lesko started the blog last August after The Ann Arbor News closed its doors.

In an interview last week, Lesko said her idea for the blog stemmed from an interest in covering the local political scene, despite the loss of one of Ann Arbor’s print newspapers. She said she felt the Ann Arbor City Council needed a committed critic who would provide “a counterweight to how issues were being presented by council.”

Many of her posts on the blog focus on what Lesko considers the city’s poor management of funds. In a Feb. 8 post called “The Politics of Priorities,” Lesko criticized the city’s proposed plan to cut 37 positions in the Ann Arbor police and fire departments to alleviate a $5.2 million budget deficit.

“Cutting emergency and other citizen services is an absolutely unacceptable and unnecessary solution to closing this projected gap in the budget,” Lesko wrote in the post.

Inspired by the anonymous political writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, whose anonymity enabled them to focus solely on issues, Lesko decided to make her blog anonymous.

“The point of political writing is to focus on the issues and not the person who’s writing on the issues,” Lesko said.

According to Lesko, reader responses to A2Politico were both positive and widespread, with up to 7,500 visitors in a given month.

By tracking visitors to her blog, Lesko said she found people logging on from the University, Ann Arbor’s city hall and even Washington D.C.

“What I found is that thousands of others were equally interested in the issues facing our city,” Lesko said.

Lesko said writing the blog convinced her to become more active in local politics, and from there, she began to consider the possibility of running for office.

On Feb. 2, 2010, Lesko revealed her identity on the blog and announced her plans to run for mayor.

Since then, she’s been working to pull together a campaign in preparation for the Aug. 3 primary, during which she’ll run against fellow Democrat and current Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje.

Lesko said she faces tough competition from Hieftje, who has served as the city's mayor since 2000.

Nevertheless, Lesko said she’s confident about her chances of winning the primary and plans to start campaigning door-to-door in April. She added that her door-to-door campaigning will target University students first — a sector of the population Lesko said other local politicians frequently overlook.

“I know that most of the students will be gone (by the primary) and only a very, very small percentage will vote, but that won’t keep me from going door-to-door,” Lesko said.

University alum Hatim Elhady, who was an LSA senior last year, similarly targeted student-heavy areas, including South Quadrangle and East Quadrangle, in his campaign for a City Council position last November.

Elhady lost and, according to a Nov. 3, 2009 Daily article, East Quad and South Quad saw only 3.06-percent and 2.64-percent voter turnouts, respectively.

Nevertheless, Lesko is confident that the student voice matters and that with a little prodding can be heard.

“It’s shortsighted to look at students and say, ‘I will get nothing from them,’” Lesko said. “That’s not leadership.”

Lesko added that the goals of her campaign center around public service.

“I’m not a career politician.