One of the most powerful and least understood Twin Cities governmental organizations is being reformed. Ever so slightly.
In the chaotic final hours of its 2023-24 session, the Minnesota Legislature passed a transportation budget that limits how the Metropolitan Council can spend money from a new regional transportation sales tax and that requires it to consult with the Minnesota Department of Transportation on major new transit infrastructure projects.
These new rules are less ambitious than Met Council reform suggestions from Sen. Scott Dibble and retiring Rep. Frank Hornstein, two Minneapolis DFLers whose overlapping districts will (eventually) be served by the beleaguered Southwest Light Rail Transit extension. They only modestly check the 56-year-old, 4,000-employee regional governance and service organization, which is tasked with overseeing large-scale infrastructure and services across the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Nevertheless, the legislature’s action suggests the conversation around the Met Council’s role in regional governance isn’t over. Earlier this year, an official state task force chaired by Hornstein put out six proposals for more substantial reforms, like direct elections to fill an executive council currently staffed by 17 gubernatorial appointees.
“There is widespread agreement that the Met Council governance needs to be fixed,” Hornstein told the Star Tribune in February.
Taming the Population Growth Tiger
The $2.86 billion, decade-late Southwest LRT project might be what finally spurred Met Council reform, but it’s not an unprecedented undertaking for the organization. As the parent organization of Metro Transit since 1994, the Met Council oversaw planning and construction for the Twin Cities’ two completed light rail lines and continues to manage its growing bus rapid transit network. The Met Council oversees planning and execution for other critical regional services, too: wastewater treatment for 90% of the region’s population, affordable housing for more than 7,000 low-income households, and a regional park system that draws over 65 million annual visitors.
Private industry and individual municipalities aren’t very good at doing this stuff, or at least weren’t during the Twin Cities’ breakneck postwar growth period. That's why, in large part, the Met Council exists. As a privatize bus network struggled to stay afloat and hastily built septic systems polluted suburban groundwater, Minnesota’s Republican-controlled state government came around to the idea of a powerful regional planning authority. They reasoned it would be the best hope for maintaining quality of life (and, crucially, ensuring orderly suburban growth) in a rapidly changing region.
The eventual result was an organization (almost) without parallel in the U.S. Portland’s Metro, with a purview nearly as broad and an even more hands-on approach to managing suburban sprawl, is the Met Council’s only real peer.
Other fast-growing central cities across the Midwest, South, and West sought regional economies of scale by annexing their suburbs, which is why places like Jacksonville, Florida, Columbus, Ohio, Charlotte, North Carolina, and San Jose, California, are among the 20 largest U.S. cities by population, despite anchoring metro areas much smaller than MSP. (Minneapolis is the 46th largest U.S. city in the 16th largest U.S. metro, not that we’re keeping score.)
But annexation was largely out of the question by the 1960s as inner-ring suburbs like Robbinsdale and Richfield turned against it. The (seemingly logical) idea of a Minneapolis-St. Paul merger was long dead by then, too.
“Aside from being so large, St. Paul and Minneapolis had such different histories, cultures, economies, bases of power and often mutual disdain, it's hard to imagine they ever would've considered merging,” Dr. Hannah Ramer, policy fellow at the U of M’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, tells Racket.
And so, in 1967, the Metropolitan Council was born. Its initial remit, in its own words: “To plan for the orderly and economical development of the seven‑county metro area, and coordinate the delivery of services that couldn't be provided by any one city or county.”
What Does the Metropolitan Council Do, Anyway?
The Met Council began life as a sort of clearinghouse for regional planning efforts. Its original responsibilities included developing a regional growth plan, reviewing plans produced by metro-area cities and commissions, and laying the groundwork for a modern wastewater treatment system, according to a 2017 Strib retrospective.
The Met Council’s oversight of metro-area growth planning expanded in 1976 with the passage of a state law requiring local governments to submit long-range comprehensive plans for council review and approval at least once per decade. Those documents cover 20 to 30 years’ worth of general land use, housing, surface water, and open-space planning.
The Met Council does its own comprehensive planning, updating what’s essentially a seven-county master plan for housing, transportation, water resources, parks, and open space every 10 years. Local comprehensive plans must align with the council’s current corporate-sounding master plan—that’s Thrive MSP 2040 right now, to be replaced by Imagine 2050 sometime next year. The Met Council has also overseen regional wastewater, transit, and parks for most of its history and (the Southwest light rail debacle and legitimate issues with its post-pandemic transit service notwithstanding) is recognized as a national leader in each domain.
Affordable housing is another apparent bright spot for the Met Council. Thanks to that 1976 law, it’s able to nudge metro-area communities, including upscale suburbs that otherwise might not play ball, to develop inclusive housing policies. It pairs that legal stick with fiscal carrots known as Livable Communities Act grants, which will dole out more than $25 million across nine programs focusing on affordable rental housing and homeownership, transit-oriented development, environmental remediation, mixed-use communities, and other Met Council planning priorities.
The Met Council’s housing work has drawn criticism (and at least one recent lawsuit) for not going far enough to promote affordable housing development in affluent communities like Lake Elmo, which has skirted its guidelines for years. But it’s likely a factor in the MSP metro’s reasonably good showing on a key measure of regional housing segregation. MSP ranks No. 121 out of 230 U.S. metropolitan areas, far ahead of Midwest peers like Chicago (No. 1), Milwaukee (No. 3), Detroit (No. 4), Cleveland (No. 8), and St. Louis (No. 20).
Your (Elected) Met Council Representative?
Though Met Council critics face an uncertain path forward in the short term, the organization’s legacy of competently managing urban growth and basic regional services probably won’t be enough to quiet calls for reform. The best option for those who’d like to see the council run differently is to authorize direct elections for council seats, according to Zack Taylor, an Ontario-based urban governance expert. (The Met Council didn't respond to interview requests from Racket.)
The Met Council’s mostly Republican creators rejected legislative appointments and direct elections in favor of gubernatorial appointments because they envisioned it “as neither a form of local government nor an intermunicipal coordinating body—but as a state agency [that would be] accountable to all Minnesotans through the directly elected state government,” Taylor wrote in 2018. A board composed of local politicians would be much less likely “to set aside their parochial agendas and act in the regional interest,” he wrote.
Two of the six proposals advanced by the legislative task force earlier this year call for some or all members of a reconstituted metropolitan authority to be popularly elected. If that idea gains the force of law, perhaps as soon as next year, it’ll mean longer ballots for Twin Cities voters—but could breathe new life into a uniquely Minnesotan governing body showing undeniable signs of age.
