Direct elections the best way for the Metropolitan Council to live up to its nation-leading potential

Though I give the group credit for hosting a public hearing in Lake Elmo, long ground zero for toxic relationships with regional planning, the conversation taking place at the Metropolitan Governance Task Force leaves a lot to be desired. I say this as someone who absolutely loves talking about the Metropolitan Council, and is a strong believer in regional government: There’s been little consensus about positive change.

Over the five months of meetings of the legislative task force, there’s not much agreement over reforms to the Twin Cities’ unique regional government system. The task force, set up following the effective 2023 legislative session, was given a mandate to solve some long-standing problems with the Met Council. Instead, the Legislature is likely to be stuck where they left off in the spring, Charlie Brown playing a game of political football with Lucy over regional governance.

You can read all about the meetings via MinnPost’s Peter Callaghan’s thorough reporting, but the basic problem was clear going in: Most people on the committee don’t agree about the problem they’re trying to solve. 

As Callaghan explained, about a third of the committee doesn’t believe the Met Council should exist, or would like to neuter it completely. This is to be expected, partisanship and the rural-urban divide being what they are these days; the Met Council has long been at the crosshairs of groups like the Center for the American Experiment and exurban Republicans. 

On the DFL side of the table, however, there’s similar disagreement. Some people want to see significant change. Others, most notably Rep. Ginny Klevorn, who represents Plymouth and Medicine Lake, seem dug in defending the status quo. 

Underneath the surface a fascinating debate over regional government is taking place. Assessing the Met Council, we have to ask: Is it working? Can it be improved? After years teaching city planning and serving on the unique and complex Met Council Transportation Advisory Board (TAB), my answers are: yes (mostly), and yes (absolutely).

Regional government as a planning tool

For regional government, there’s no blueprint or obvious solution. The one common denominator for U.S. metro areas is that almost every one is deeply fragmented. Our country has more governments at different levels, with far less coordination between them, than others in the Global North. American regional cooperation is, at best, a loose and voluntary patchwork full of inefficient and inequitable consequences. At worst, intra-regional actors are actively hostile.

This leaves U.S. cities in a terrible position when compared to international rivals, including those across the border in Canada. Municipal fragmentation drives steep inequality between wealthy suburbs and everyone else, fuels an intractable national housing crisis, and explains why transit investment in the United States has long been sluggish, expensive and inadequate.

In theory, the Met Council grants the Twin Cities a big advantage over its American peers. Born of our rival downtowns and a cooperative desire for sports, sewers and airports, our regional government, incorporated in 1967, is the an under-appreciated and underused planning tool. It’s important to point out that the Met Council is probably the best regional government in the country, and does an excellent job with the difficult task of transit, sewer and regional planning.

The problem remains that the Met Council hasn’t been living up to its potential. Urban planning works best when staff are given clear mandates for change and political cover by strong elected leaders. Instead, for the most part, appointed Met Council members lack the political ability to push back or shape the circumstances in which they work to achieve regional goals.

Current council structure is inherently averse to conflict

Here’s how the system works in the seven-county Twin Cities metro. The governor appoints all 17 members of the Met Council to operate as a kind of board, including a chair to head the agency that employs over 4,000 staff (mostly in the transit agency). When a new governor takes over, with very few exceptions, the slate of members is wiped clean, along with any institutional knowledge they might have gained. Council members currently earn about $20,000 a year, and do not have any staff capacity of their own, making the job largely voluntary and thankless. Members rely heavily on agency staff to guide them through an often-convoluted and technical decisionmaking process.

In other words, there’s little infrastructure that supports council member autonomy or oversight. They lack the ability to engage with constituents or other governmental partners, or the capacity to deal effectively with the reams of paperwork and studies inherent to regional planning. Instead, the easiest route for an appointed, underfunded, obscure group is to retreat into the background, which they often do.

(It’s a bit ironic that Peter Bell, who served under Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, is still the most high-profile leader the Met Council has ever had.)

In short, the agency has little agency. Without autonomous, proactive leadership, the Met Council can’t really push back against other levels of government. They are understandably reluctant to make waves doing things like (for example) asking for dedicated bus lanes, changing county-led transit plans, or pushing back against exclusionary city housing policies.

This institutional inertia has shifted with the ongoing situation around the Southwest Light Rail, which thrust the Met Council unwillingly into the spotlight. To be fair, there’s a whole lot of blame to go around when a project is wildly over budget and behind schedule. Because most early transit planning happens at the county level, many of the Southwest project problems can’t be blamed on the Met Council. (See also my column on how and why Hennepin County chose a terrible transit route in the first place.) 

But many ongoing construction issues have taken place on their watch. The large nine-figure price tag, which is still unresolved, is exactly why the Task Force is having this conversation in the first place. I’d guess that a more assertive Met Council structure might have mitigated some of those mistakes or contained some cost overruns.

Elected body would give the council its agency

Under a direct elected system, the Met Council board would work and act much like a county government does today. You’d have 17 members representing separate districts with equal population, accountable to voters and given a mandate to act in relationship to city, county and state government. It’s the only idea that would give the Met Council more ability to operate within the messy ecosystem of regional politics. 

The only viable alternative, a “council of governments” structure (COGS) similar to the Transit Advisory Board, has a few flaws. It would place added burden on existing city and county officials, who would then have another big job to add to their agenda. That would make it hard to untangle parochial concerns from the regional perspective that Met Council members ought to have. 

Most importantly, it would be difficult to achieve a true representative balance under a COGS system, where the resulting body would be proportional to population. If there’s one thing that a Met Council should avoid at all costs, it’s a structure that isn’t weighted for equal representation. Hennepin County alone has almost half the metro-area population, 10 times the number of people that live in Carver County (for example), so you can quickly see the scale of the problem. Un-weighted boards are huge political obstacles for transit agencies in places like Denver, Seattle or Philadelphia.

There’s a lot to be gained from a stronger, more proactive Met Council, especially in the realm of transit planning and equitable housing. The current structure is not delivering the goods, especially in the critical fields of transit and housing. Far too little affordable housing is being built in exclusionary suburbs, and the current regional transit projects (especially the ones originally led by the counties) are far from ideal, especially without stronger land-use relationships.

There’s one final listening session tomorrow and anyone who wants to comment on the process can send their thoughts via email or appear in person at Scott County Government Center. The committee is set to meet a few more times before this year’s legislative session, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up for any grand consensus. It turns out that balancing regional political concerns was never going to be easy.