David Brauer used to cover the local media for MinnPost, edit the
Southwest (Minneapolis) Journal, write for City Pages and the Twin
Cities Reader, and talk on KFAN, KSTP-AM and MPR. The views expressed are his own.
“Maybe it’s time to end the Minneapolis experiment and simply fold the city into St. Paul, Bloomington, or Edina,” thundered a Star Tribune commenter on Tuesday.
But this angry proposal didn’t come from some anonymous troll like WalzLied69 or MplsExile1970. It was lead Strib editorialist Rochelle Olson channeling her inner Soucheray, her grandiloquence aimed primarily at the paper’s favorite target, Minneapolis City Council progressives.
Their city-imperiling sin? Failing once again to acquiesce to Mayor Jacob Frey; in this case, denying reappointment to the city’s public safety commissioner, Todd Barnette. “The vote to jettison Barnette will fuel skeptics outside City Hall who long have questioned whether the council is capable of sustained focus or even understands its role,” Olson wrote.
That’s a little like decrying arson while holding a freshly emptied tank of kerosene.
It’s Olson, not the council, who misunderstands roles. In the city’s (still-new!) strong-mayor system, the council lost its management power but retains policymaking, budgetary, and—especially at the beginning of its term—appointment-review authority.
The Minneapolis Police Department, under Barnette’s watch, racked up an eight-figure budget overrun in the last cycle. Worse, Barnette, who's paid over $300,000 to look after things, testified he wasn’t aware of this gargantuan scale until the year was nearly over. Search “Wedge Live” and “Barnette” and you’ll find numerous clips of the commissioner’s often feckless council testimony on department matters.
Rather than accept the council’s Barnette rejection, Frey vetoed the action. But can you veto a no and turn it into a yes? The city attorney rejected that absurdity, but noted the veto creates a loop in which Frey can repeatedly re-submit the nomination during a 210-day transition period.
Frey’s veto message asked the council to “work with me to find solutions,” as if he, not the council, had been begging for this for months. But instead of selecting a new, unifying public safety leader, Frey effectively said, “Swallow my status quo.”
The council does its business in open hearings, so its more histrionic moments are journalistic catnip. But the mayor’s office has a door that shuts—sometimes to council members. It’s not too tendentious to note Frey is a notorious power-hoarder, abetted by Strib columnists incurious about the mayor’s petty instincts.
These journalists seem more comfortable with the council’s DFL moderates; if nothing else, they’re foxhole buddies facing lefties’ disdain together. Frey hasn’t needed lefties to win, but he is obsessed with his image among the cohort resembling the Strib’s remaining subscribers. Strib columnists misleading readers about City Hall roles only emboldens the mayor’s performative instincts, while squandering a call-out that would actually encourage collaboration.
The Strib’s Maureen Dowd-like fixation on drama criticism often obscures the city’s actual accomplishments. Even with a veto-proof council majority allied against Frey last term, the frenemies passed cop raises, added preventive functions, and (coincidentally, perhaps) saw crime fall.
Olson is right to worry that Barnette and Police Chief Brian O’Hara might be ejected nearly simultaneously, but O’Hara’s so-far-non-public problems are so concerning that a Frey ally, Council Member Latrisha Vetaw, is a declared “no” vote. Barnette shouldn’t get a pass for his own failures because O’Hara’s exist.
As he does after defeats, Frey ascended the soapbox Wednesday, proclaiming, “We can’t keep messing around with issues that aren’t related to the core functions of our government. We’ve gotta be focusing on safety, we’ve gotta be focusing on business development growth and retention, not Cuba and bathhouses and [legalizing] drug paraphernalia.”
Barnette and drug paraphernalia are both public safety issues, of course, but Frey has adopted a framing that the Strib has already generously provided him with.
Olson and news columnist Eric Roper have dragged knuckles over a gay bathhouse legalization push as frivolous. In fact, this is a legislative request that came from the community, with complex historical roots, for a change so unremarkable that Cleveland and Duluth allow it. Even Frey supported the move a week ago! Will anyone at the Strib note the mayor’s hypocrisy?
Frey and his council bluenoses piously whine about the Death of the Legislative Calendar even as they floridly belabor normal legislative actions. Global social justice resolutions have been a regular fixture of council business since before I was a cub reporter in the '80s. They’re trivial, but not meaningless; if you felt a stirring when other jurisdictions expressed solidarity during the ICE invasion, you know what I mean.
This stuff doesn’t keep anyone from filling potholes or Funding Our Brave Public Safety Warriors. In my day, trained TV and radio seals would bark, but now creeping Soochism has experienced reporters getting worked up about minor issues even as they proclaim themselves the adults in the room.
City Hall is no exemplar of comity right now, but 40 years ago, I covered a Minneapolis City Council that included the seething Steve Cramer, stem-winding Tony Scallon (dubbed “The Big Baloney” by my Twin Cities Reader colleague David Carr), bloviating Walt Dziedzic, Kenwood mess Barbara Carlson, and the council’s first out gay member, Brian Coyle, who never saw a pot he didn’t want to stir.
Their tiffs made headlines. Hell, I might’ve written a few. But they ultimately advanced the city that keyboard nostalgists like MplsExile1970 now pine for. The challenges may seem bigger today (I’m not sure they are), but we sometimes forget that in his 12 years as mayor, Frey will have only had a compliant City Council for two.
Minneapolis is authentically divided; resolving those divisions is messy. Disputes are a story, but not THE story, and a lot of this stuff would slide by if not for the Strib’s groupthink. After two world-historical events in six years, Minneapolis deserves some grace, not a call for extinction.
