Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Haven. Maximillian. Buster. Blue. Trooper. Teak. Goliath. Rooster. Cabo.
It was late, and the Minneapolis City Council’s deliberations over the 2025 budget had dragged on all day. Yet Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw took the time to intone these seven words with great emotion. “I just wanted to say their names,” she told the room, as though speaking of unsung heroes or victims of injustice.
Horses. These are horses.
Police horses, to be exact. Who, as far as we know, will not be killed, but—if the budget the City Council passed last night with a vote of 10-3 goes into effect—simply retired from the police force. Among the cuts that council made was to the MPD’s mounted patrol unit. (H/T to Wedge Live! for spotlighting Vetaw’s brave stand against horse defunding; also, somehow she forgot Raisin Cain???)
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has already vetoed that budget, saying "We've got to love our city more than we love our ideology" to the 10 Minneapolis-haters on city council. He called the budget "problematic" (much like the HBO television program Girls or Robin Thicke's hit song "Blurred Lines") and alleged “fiscal irresponsibility” on the council’s part—which is interesting, since the council’s budget came in $3 million under the mayor’s proposed budget.
“This is unfortunately part of a larger pattern of unwillingness to work with the legislative branch of the city,” said Council President Elliot Payne in a statement, calling the mayor’s veto “absurd” and "reckless.” (FWIW: A Frey press release sent out late Wednesday blasted the council as "reckless.") Council Member Emily Koski, who’s running for mayor next year, said Frey’s decision “was based on a false narrative.” (I think there’s a less polite way to put that.) And Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai really unloaded, saying “Mayor Frey is so caught up in his politics of personal grievances that all he can say is 'no.' No to the budget. No to doing his job. And no to a city that takes care of its people.”
Frey, you may recall, originally submitted a budget with a levy increase of 8.3%. Last week, upon hearing that the council would submit a budget with a 6.8% increase, he rushed in to suggest a 6.4% increase and began positioning himself as more fiscally restrained than council and less willing to raise taxes. This got him a misleading Sunday morning Strib headline: “Frey cuts back on tax hike proposal.”
It's looking like council will have enough votes to override the veto. But don't worry, the cops will still get a $12 million budget bump in 2025. Even if they won’t be able to ride horses anymore.
St. Paul Has a Budget Clash Too
The budget process isn’t exactly going smoothly in St. Paul either. But if we’d call the head-butting between Frey and the Minneapolis City Council “acrimonious”—not to mention personal—relations between Mayor Melvin Carter and the St. Paul City Council are merely “contentious.” That’s the word Frederick Melo uses in his summation of budget negotiations for the Pioneer Press. This afternoon, council rejected a compromise budget package negotiated between Carter and Council President Mitra Jalali that would have reduced Carter’s proposed 7.9% property tax increase down to 6.9%. The council instead passed a budget with a 5.9% levy. Carter has said that he would have to institute a spending freeze if that low a tax increase is passed, because he doesn't know what would need to be cut. "We expect spirited disagreement," said Carter, who somehow did not go on to call council members ideologues who don't love their city enough.
5 Wolves Games on TV
The official Racket position is that you should be able to watch your local pro sports teams on free broadcast television all season long. So it’s hard to feel too grateful that the Timberwolves will be airing five games on KARE 11 this season, beginning with a December 21 game at Golden State. Still, this is the first time in a dozen years that Wolves games have been on broadcast TV, and something is better than nothing, right? (The piece tellingly links to this related story: “How to watch KARE 11 with an antenna.") “We are thrilled to expand the accessibility to watch Timberwolves basketball in this free over-the-air partnership with KARE 11,” said Timberwolves and Lynx CEO Ethan Casson in a close approximation of human language. And we're sure that Wolves fans are thrilled that their, uh, accessibility to watch the Wolves has expanded, I guess. Following bankrupt Bally Sports transitioning into the FanDuel Sports Network, most non-Vikings local sports teams are scrambling to figure out what the future of their televised games will look like.
Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the East Side
Semi-retired Prof. Peter Rachleff is a Friend of Racket and an invaluable resource on local labor history. So when we heard that students from the Macalester geography department had teamed up with Rachleff’s East Side Freedom Library for a project related to the history of immigration along St. Paul's Payne Avenue, our nerdy little hearts beat a bit faster. Asking the question “How have East Side communities demonstrated resilience through neighborhood investment?,” the geographers created a “digital companion” to a tour that Rachleff had previously put together. The tour itself begins, fittingly, at Wakan Tipi, and concludes, just as fittingly, at the Freedom Library. There’s enough info at the above link to take the tour yourself and learn about the neighborhood. Though if you wait till next spring, we won’t tease ya about it.
