Eric Harris Bernstein is hard to pin down. The first-time Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation candidate is a frenzy of energy, running from one meeting to the next, practically developing one idea before the next can come to fruition. At least on the campaign trail.
“I like talking to people,” Bernstein, a New York transplant, says over coffee at Easy Day Cafe in the Kingfield neighborhood. “In Minnesota, you need that aggressive openness to be invited to the conversation.”
The self-described extrovert popped in front of Minneapolis voters at Hennepin Open Streets back in September, excitedly telling them about his candidacy. Bernstein had run into Ward 10 City Council Member and Vice President Aisha Chughtai as they made their way down a lively strip of the event, eventually talking to voters together.
But before the duo could take off, Bernstein pulled Steve Brandt off his own Open Streets campaign trail and pitched him on making a joint campaign video. Brandt, running as an incumbent candidate for the Board of Estimate and Taxation, was happy to play along.
“Steve, you’re killing me out there. I can’t dine on your sloppy seconds forever,” Bernstein improvised in front of an iPhone as Brandt laughed.
“You can’t laugh,” Bernstein directed Brandt, interrupting the video filming. “You gotta be, like, tired of me.”
Bernstein and Brandt are running for the two open seats on the Board of Estimate and Taxation, a citywide body that helps set the maximum tax levies for City Council, Park & Recreation Board, and the Public Housing Authority. The board also authorizes the issuing and selling of city bonds.
In other words, it’s a limited scope position that’s all about taxes, loans, and general finances. Local political blogger Naomi Kritizer describes the people running for the gig as “nerdy about budgets and finance, detail-oriented, and ethical.”
Brandt, Chughtai, Samantha Pree-Stinson (elected), Mayor Jacob Frey, City Council President Elliott Payne, and Park & Recreation Board President Cathy Abene currently serve on the BET. Pree-Stinson is not running for re-election this year due to health issues.
The board handles some significant issues—these are the people whose decisions help determine how high your taxes will be, after all—but it's a race rarely on voters' radars. The candidates themselves are vying for a $400 monthly stipend, which makes this by no means a full-time job.
Bernstein said he isn’t approaching the race as a competition “because there are two seats.”
And yet, there are three people running.
“Honestly, he’s the only candidate I have seen being out and about,” Brandt says over the phone. “We run into each other a lot.”
Bob Fine is the more fiscally and socially conservative third candidate for the Board for Estimate and Taxation this November. He is DFL-endorsed alongside Brandt (Bernstein entered the race after the DFL endorsement process).
And, to make this typically sleepy race all that more juicy, Fine just asked people to rank Bernstein second on their ballots this November, calling him a “fresh voice” on the Better Minneapolis podcast.
On Friday morning, Brandt issued the following statement: "For much of this campaign I’ve answered this way: I’m required by party rules to support my fellow endorsee: Bob Fine. But if you ask me with which of my competitors I’d rather serve, my answer is Eric Harris Bernstein."
Even though Bernstein initially campaigned with a message of “don’t vote for Bob Fine,” he changed his tune after the two had coffee.
“I think Bob Fine has some really important ideas about how we can get better value for the taxpayer dollar,” Bernstein says, though he follows up shortly with the clarifying comment, “I think Steve is the better guy for the job.”
The newest campaign finance report data, published in late October, shows Bernstein has raised $21,000 for his candidacy, with the incumbent Brandt at $10,600. Fine is stagnant at $3,000. While these are relatively small amounts compared to the larger races in the city, which are being flooded with PAC money, that’s still a marked increase from the last BET election.
Most of Bernstein’s earliest and biggest funders are from New York City. At least four donations of $1,000 came from his NYC network in August. “I don’t feel defensive about the money,” he says. “People are excited to see me running.”
Bernstein said he had written to a bunch of his friends’ parents who had become his surrogate parents after his mom passed away in 2017. “They’re excited to see that I’m getting involved and they were happy to show support. When you’re fundraising, you don’t bargain yourself down,” he adds.
He’s also up-front about his East Coast privilege.
“I am very fortunate to grow up in a family that had good careers and did well,” says Bernstein said. “I went to a private school in New York City.”
Continually outspending his racemates, Bernstein’s overall effort in campaigning is typically reserved for higher ballot races. So why is he running one of the most creative and engaged campaigns in Minneapolis this year?
Building Community Through Benches
“The Avengers assemble,” mayoral candidate Jazz Hampton announced as he met up with Bernstein and Tom Saunders of the Minneapolis Public Seating Authority outside of the Hennepin County Government Center Service Center on October 15.
Saunders has been designing and placing benches around the city to raise awareness for the need for public seating. Here on the plaza, amid other construction, Bernstein and Hampton built a community bench.
“Idle hands are the devil’s playground,” Hampton said about participating in the activity just three weeks before the election. He had spent the morning with his children at school conferences and was headed to a mayoral forum at Capri Theater in the evening.
“I like that this is also taking the pressure off of me,” Bernstein said, watching Hampton drill into the bench. According to Saunders, the bench Hampton built was placed in Powderhorn Park near the playground at the Recreation Center building.
This “build a bench with a candidate” schtick came on the heels of Bernstein’s “bench-raising” campaign event on October 4, hosted at Saunders’s house, where Brandt, mayoral candidate the Rev. DeWayne Davis, and Park & Recreation Board candidates Tom Olson (incumbent) and Michael Wilson building benches for the public.
With doors to knock on and phone calls to make, why would any candidate spend a slow burn weekend afternoon and evening with a few dozen people, especially just a month before the election?
Bernstein says he thinks politics should be joyful and connected.
“I did the bench thing because I wanted to have a fun gathering and I wanted people to have fun,” he says. “But I wanted to do something that was a little different and was a way that people could engage in local politics that would be fun and feel good.”
Bernstein’s bench-raising event in early October led to Davis and his husband, Kareem Murphy, adopting one of the benches for North Commons Park. Other benches built that day have popped up at Bryant Square Park, Mueller Park, Longfellow Park, and at a Seward bus stop after a campaign event at Bench Pressed.
“I’m getting tons of pictures from people every day of people sitting on those benches,” Bernstein says.
The whole bench thing started when Bernstein reached out to Saunders, long before his candidacy days, about building a bench into his retaining wall. When Bernstein launched his campaign, Saunders reached out, asking how he could help.
Saunders said Bernstein is a “unique fit” for this position not only because of his “experience and expertise” at the State Capitol (Bernstein is the Coalition Director for We Make Minnesota with a special interest in state tax and budget policies), but because he can talk about taxes in a way that’s easy to understand.
Ok, but Can He Do the Job?
Saunders is right. In the fleeting moments when Bernstein is less frenzied, he’s talking about taxes. His wonky expertise is an odd pairing with his typical uniform of a Modern Times hoodie, Ceasefire hat, and black leather work boots.
“I just see a lot more hope and excitement about what we could have than I do frustration and fatalism about some of the way we are doing things,” Bernstein says.
He’s also quick to call out our society’s reluctance to talk about taxes.
“Taxes are such a third rail in our politics,” Bernstein says, which “makes people uncomfortable discussing the money that we raise and spend together.”
He argues that the city of Minneapolis is not an “effective agent” of the taxpayers’ best interests.
“We spend too much on things that we could do more cost effectively,” Bernstein said. “We don’t maximize the use of our publicly owned assets. We see them as just sort of stagnant burdens that we should maintain.”
Bernstein said his take on city assets puts his values more in line with Fine.
“He did some really impressive things for the Park Board,” Bernstein said. “And honestly, in some ways I feel that Bob and I have more of a connection about how the city should be managed in the long run than I do with Steve.”
Fine was an at-large Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board commissioner for 16 years and ran for Minneapolis mayor in 2013. Fine told MPR that the Park & Rec Board was able to limit its tax levy increase by “increasing efficiency and finding new sources of revenue.”
Alternative revenue sources, like a city income tax, are a cornerstone of Brandt’s candidacy this year, something Bernstein isn’t too jazzed about.
“Eric is less enthusiastic about a city income tax, applying only to higher earners. He sees it as difficult on a one-city basis,” Brandt says. “It’s something important to look at.”
Bernstein doesn’t disagree with Brandt’s assessment, but says adding another small-to-medium-sized income stream while maintaining the status quo won’t work.
Bernstein says he’s more interested in tapping into the “bevy of revenue” at the state level and tightening up the city’s fiscal strategy.
When Bernstein worked at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City, he started to understand taxes and public spending as an underlying metaphor for “how much we care for one another.”
Bernstein says he developed an interest in taxes when he recognized that there are some things people will never be able to afford. Those things have to be taken care of together.
“There’s no amount of money we’re going to earn as individuals that’s going to give us a clean environment, safe neighborhood, good infrastructure,” Bernstein says. “We do these things collectively by nature of what they are.”
More broadly, and perhaps beyond the scope of the Board of Estimate and Taxation, Bernstein theorizes about government in a hopeful manner.
“We’ve conceived of government as something that deals with the worst off people in our society and the hardest problems. The government can also be a place where we build parks and trails,” Bernstein says. He believes in funding what some would call "superfluous" amenities, like skating rinks alongside crucial social services.
“If you make people choose between joy and survival, we have lost the plot entirely. It is joy and social connection that help us survive and thrive as a city,” he says.
Yes, a lot of what Bernstein talks about is politically romantic. Collective governance and how we care for one another through taxes are heartwarming to talk about, but may be above the board’s paygrade. Even Brandt has called him out on this.
“Eric has a more expansive view of what the role of being a BET member is than the city attorney would advise us is allowable under the City Charter,” Brandt says.
There’s another factor behind Bernstein’s dreaming-big campaign, which may answer this article’s entire premise: young people.
“A lot of what has powered the positivity has been the young people involved in the campaign,” Bernstein says in a follow-up phone call. (He prefers to talk on the phone; don’t text him.)
The young people involved in his campaign and others have “built a culture around city politics, city elections, and state elections and the importance of a Minnesota and a Minneapolis that cares for people and that cares for the future that we are going to share.”
Bernstein credits Sean Lim for his bold black-and-white graphic design, “a good part of what got me traction early on,” and Rudy Funk Meyer for producing important campaign videos.
He also says the young people in Minneapolis politics have created a culture where his ideas are easy to cultivate.
“The soil that we planted that seed in was so rich and ready,” Bernstein says.
Early voting for the 2025 Minneapolis city-wide elections is available at the Early Voting Center every day until election day, November 4. You can find out where your polling place is and see what is on your ballot on the Secretary of State website.
