It doesn’t seem like it’s asking much, as this writer points out, to expect accountability from municipal and state government.
“The Met Council is a state agency. It is controlled by the governor,” author Nick Magrino writes. “To put a point on it using a different example, the ‘guys smoking fentanyl on the train at two o’clock in the afternoon’ buck stops with Gov. Tim Walz. We voted for him, and I’m confident that a majority of Minnesotans know who he is.
“Perhaps local TV news reports could make it more clear whose fault it is that guys are smoking fentanyl on the train at two o’clock in the afternoon. In any case, adding another layer of effectively unaccountable third-tier elected officials to the mix is absolutely not going to make any of this work better.”
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By Nick Magrino
For the Reformer
Voters in the Twin Cities region may soon have a new item on their ballots: Metropolitan Councilmember.
For decades, there have been complaints about the Metropolitan Council, the state agency that serves as a partial regional government for the seven-county metro area. The Met Council runs Metro Transit, manages wastewater treatment, signs off on city plans, and does other things that should be administered regionally — you probably don’t need 170 sewage plants.
The complaints are often related to the unelected nature of the 17 councilmembers. Being a state agency, they are appointed by the governor, and confirmed or rejected by the state Senate.
Last year, the Legislature created a task force to come up with ideas to “reform” the Met Council, perhaps by electing the members, or maybe electing some of them and then having other local elected officials on the council, or keeping it the same way, or something else. The task force was not able to agree on a specific proposal. The Legislature may pick one of the six options they suggested.
This is all pretty funny, because the main problem that everyone associates with the Met Council — the enormous, multi-billion dollar, years-long debacle of the Green Line light rail extension project from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie — did not originally have a lot to do with them.
But first: Let’s talk about elected offices.
I live in downtown Minneapolis. Not counting the spring political party caucus and convention process, and August primaries, in a six year period I am able to cast votes for the following offices:
- president
- United States senators (2)
- United States congressperson
- governor
- attorney general
- state auditor
- secretary of state
- state senator
- state representative
- mayor
- city councilmember
- Board of Estimate and Taxation member
- Park Board commissioner (district and at-large, I believe)
- School Board commissioner (also district and at-large?)
- Hennepin County commissioner
- Water, Soil and…Conservation (?) District commissioner (?)
- Many judges
While I consider myself a fairly well-informed guy (topical deep cut: I know what CTIB stood for) I could tell you, for sure, the names of nine of these 17 (plus judges) people. I could have done better two years ago, but we moved to the other side of downtown and that must have changed some of the districts.
How do you fare when reading through that list? How about your uncle in Andover who complains about the unelected Met Council? Does he know who his state senator is?
It’s easy to make fun of our uncles, but I am pretty skeptical that a full 1% of Minneapolitans could tell you the name of their elected Park Board commissioner. And the Park Board has taxing authority. They have a police force. With guns! Is it, technically, a good thing that voters are picking the oversight body for a police force based on how much they like the sound of the names on the ballot? I would say that it is not.
If my “under 1%” guess seems wrong to you, maybe reflect on that for a minute. I encounter intelligent, well-informed people all the time who don’t know who their city councilmember is, and the Minneapolis City Council makes it into the national news with some regularity. It doesn’t always seem like it, but there are hundreds of millions of people in this country, and a solid majority of them have not spent 14 hours a day making themselves sick on local politics Twitter for the past decade.
You could say that I am ignorant — a real rube — for playing video games for [redacted] hours a week instead of developing a strongly-held position about the extent to which neoliberalism has influenced the Park Board of a medium-sized Midwestern city. I am aware that in the 2000s, there was a charter amendment proposal to roll the Park Board (and Board of Estimate and Taxation) into the City Council, and it lost in an election with sub-20% voter turnout. If we voted on it again today, it would lose.
But again: Is this actually good? People reflexively support having an option, and then forget about the whole thing as soon as they leave the middle school gymnasium.
When it comes to the Met Council, perhaps some assume that party affiliation could serve as a proxy for paying attention to who we will elect, and their positions on the issues. There could be some upside in not having the members appointed by the governor, who is from time-to-time a Republican. You could assume, say, a 75-25 split in favor of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
But I don’t think that really works, here. Local government actually does stuff — or at least that’s the idea. The stuff they do that people then disagree about — e.g. bike lanes, land use policies, whatever — do not really map well onto the national political party platforms that normal voters have a vague idea about and then use to pick the City Council. Democrats in the Seward and Kenwood neighborhoods of Minneapolis turn out to have different politics on local issues, and I suspect that they might have even less in common with a Minnetonka Democrat. Except, no one is going to look into any of this, and it will just become another box you check after the candidate is effectively decided at a political party convention six months earlier.
Isn’t this an example of what everyone means when they talk about “systemic” issues? In theory, we could spend a lot of time researching all 20 elected offices we have a say on.
In practice, no one does this. So what are we doing?
There is effectively no accountability for obscure elected positions. When there is something approaching accountability, it tends to show up in those political party caucuses and conventions, in the spring before an off-off-year election, when dozens of the most fanatical or retired among us gather to endorse candidates. It is not a healthy system.
But, all that aside, the irony here is that the main issue raised about the Met Council does not really appear to be rooted in a lack of citizen representation — the problem is a lack of accountability. Do you know why the Green Line Extension is such a mess? Like 15 years ago, the elected Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, a group that absolutely no one keeps track of, planned and managed the process for picking the route for the Green Line Extension, before the project was handed off to the Met Council to actually build.
The route they picked avoided the denser parts of South Minneapolis with lots of transit users, and instead shot right out the side of the city through some parkland, co-located with a railroad and a bike trail. The land had been bought by the county decades earlier, when Eden Prairie was still half farmland. But it turned out (!) there was not enough space to fit all three things in the same corridor, and no one wanted to be in charge of buying out and tearing down the private residences that had been built along it, so we decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a light rail tunnel under a bike trail between two lakes in a park.
This is…not a complete list of the mistakes made with this project.
And not only did no one experience a consequence for this, the elected Hennepin County Commission made essentially the same mistake three years later with the Blue Line Extension, which they also decided should go through parkland on the periphery of the city, co-located with a railroad in a swamp. But this one was even better — they spent over $100 million on engineering before they had permission from the railroad to use their property. Surprise! The railroad did not let them use their property. The project is now being redesigned.
This is real money — hundreds of millions, billions of dollars — and years and years of delays on critical projects. Did anyone get in trouble for either of these decisions? They did not. Why? Because you don’t know about it!
For one thing, it’s too complicated to explain the overlapping and at times conflicting responsibilities of two different governments that few even keep tabs on. But more importantly, you’re a normal person with normal things going on, and probably don’t even know who your county commissioner is, and even if you do, you sure as hell don’t know what they’re up to. Several hundred people who are doing local politics as a game on their phone may know more, but there are literally a million other, more normal people in Hennepin County.
So I do not think that adding an item to your ballot is going to make the Met Council work better. Like a lot of other stuff lately, it feels like the public conversation about this topic is all just window dressing to avoid having a serious conversation about why it feels like nothing works anymore.
Go to enough public meetings in Minnesota, and you will eventually find yourself sitting in a community center folding chair, listening to two elected officials from two different units of government explain that they’re unfortunately not able to fix a simple problem due to jurisdictional issues between the two units of government. They are the people in charge of figuring that out! Does anyone expect them to?
What are you going to do, vote for the Republicans? Probably not. So the DFL maintains a slim majority largely based on screenshots of GOP state legislators’ unhinged Facebook posts, and ever more money is shoveled into the government/nonprofit/advocacy/social services/academia blob, while conditions stagnate, or in some cases get worse. We need a task force! No, a whole new department! Quick: Pay some politically-connected consultants $150,000 to produce a PDF outlining how to dump bodies onto a problem with zero expectation that the problem will be fixed.
Does anyone want things to get better? Does anyone care if any of this stuff is actually working? The only thing we know how to do anymore is add more layers to broken processes, and then stuff those layers with our friends from graduate school.
Unfortunately for people who are dependent on public transit, you’re generally not able to use a well-polished PowerPoint presentation to get to a doctor’s appointment.
The Green Line Extension will ultimately cost something like $3 billion to provide transit service slower than the already existing, not-full suburban express buses. It has been well-documented for decades that American transit projects take much longer, and cost way, way more than comparable projects in other countries.
In Italy — not known for good governance — they build fully-automated subway lines under 2,500 year old cities in seismically-active areas for an amount comparable to what it costs us to build a mostly-surface level light rail extension to parking lots in a second ring suburb. I’m not sure what my distant relatives are spending on “community engagement.”
The Met Council is a state agency. It is controlled by the governor. To put a point on it using a different example, the “guys smoking fentanyl on the train at two o’clock in the afternoon” buck stops with Gov. Tim Walz. We voted for him, and I’m confident that a majority of Minnesotans know who he is.
Perhaps local TV news reports could make it more clear whose fault it is that guys are smoking fentanyl on the train at two o’clock in the afternoon. In any case, adding another layer of effectively unaccountable third-tier elected officials to the mix is absolutely not going to make any of this work better.
Nick Magrino has written about land use and transportation topics for a bit over 10 years. He lives in Minneapolis and previously served on the City Planning Commission.
