The Metropolitan Council has long been a target of legislative Republicans who have complained about everything from cost overruns and delays on the Southwest Light Rail Transit project to limits on growth and development in suburban cities.
Rarely do they reference the chair and the members of the council without the preface “the unelected.”
But a new effort to impose sweeping changes on the regional government body isn’t being spearheaded by Republicans. Instead, the chairs of the House and Senate Transportation committees, Minneapolis DFLers both, want the Met Council members and its chair to run for office, rather than be appointed by the governor.
Sen. Scott Dibble Monday outlined his Senate File 1624 before the committee he leads. It would create 17 new districts across the seven-county Twin Cities metro area. Elections for four-year, nonpartisan positions would begin in 2024. Once elected, the 17 members would select a chair from among themselves who would serve a two-year term.
The House version is sponsored by Rep. Frank Hornstein. Both Dibble and Hornstein, though strong supporters of transit and the light rail program in general, have been critics of how the Met Council sited SWLRT, how it treated residents along the route and how it has managed the project. SWLRT has seen an explosion in its budget and has delayed completion several times. The 14.5-mile, $2.74 billion line between Target Field and Eden Prairie is now set to open in 2027.
[image_caption]State Sen. Scott Dibble[/image_caption]
Dibble told his committee that the Met Council is unique — a paradox — among regional governments across the U.S. and unique among any governmental entities in Minnesota. Only the Portland, Oregon, region has a similar council, but its council members are elected. Dibble said the council is both a political subdivision of the state like a city or county but also a cabinet-level agency with a full-time chair appointed by the governor. It also has broad authority over land use, housing, wastewater and transit with some taxing authority, as well.
“Such substantial powers should be subject to … those who hold elective office, who are accountable for such power,” Dibble said. Instead they take their lead from governors and their appointed chairs.
“I’ve had conversations with the council members. They feel constrained from stepping outside the lane that’s been prescribed to them by the governor, the chair and the regional administrator,” Dibble said.
Also testifying Monday was Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor who has written about regional governance and was a state senator and author in 1994 of the current Met Council structure.
[image_caption]Myron Orfield[/image_caption]
Orfield said that both he and then-Rep. Tim Pawlenty wanted the council to be elected but couldn’t find the votes for any governance model. A bill with such an elected council did pass by a single vote in the Senate but was vetoed by then-Gov. Arne Carlson. Finally, a plan to have governors appoint all members including the chair was raised. Carlson thought that was a fine idea and the bill passed in that form. That structure, however, made the council a function of the administration with council members appointed anew each term and chairs serving as though they were a member of the cabinet.
Most issues brought before the part-time council are adopted unanimously or with a single negative vote.
An illustration of that comes amidst the Dibble/Hornstein bills. The Met Council and Chair Charlie Zelle did not take a position on the bill, perhaps because Gov. Tim Walz is supportive of the concept of an elected council.
“The governor is open to governance reform and any efforts to make the Met Council more accountable,” said spokesperson Claire Lancaster. Writing for “the Walz-Flanagan Administration,” Zelle wrote the committee primarily to raise a technical issue raised by the bill. The Met Council serves as the Metropolitan Planning Organization under federal transportation law that decides how various federal dollars are distributed in metro areas. While federal law requires those regional bodies to be elected or be filled by elected local officials, the Met Council benefits from a unique statutory exception. That exception allows an unelected body to make the decisions as long as it relies on a Transportation Advisory Board to make recommendations.
Any new body would need to meet federal requirements and also figure out a way to include portions of Sherburne and Wright counties that are part of the region but not within the geography of the Met Council.
“Any potential governance change adds complexity and uncertainty in federal grants,” Zelle wrote. “If the redesignation process is contentious or delayed this could slow or affect discretionary grants … Federal agencies look for stability and cohesion in any region seeking competitive grant awards.”
Dibble’s bill was endorsed by Hennepin County Commissioner Marion Greene, who also chairs the regional rail authority that is funding much of the SWLRT project in partnership with the Met Council. Greene has been battling the council over where the money will come to cover the latest $500 million budget shortfall. While she said she values the role the Met Council plays in transit, water quality, affordable housing and regional services, “the council’s current structure makes it beholden to statewide politics and statewide interests.
“An elected council will be more accountable to the district and the voters and to the region that it serves,” Greene said.
But the bill was opposed by some suburban mayors, including those from Edina, Savage and Minnetonka as well as by the Association of Metropolitan Municipalities known as Metro Cities. Savage Mayor Janet Williams said the current system under which local government officials interview and make recommendations to the governor on the council members for each area works well.
“The process is rigorous, balanced and consistent with the Met Council charge to provide regional service,” Williams told the committee. In a letter, Edina Mayor James Hovland said the current model “is a true and distinct regional governance model, free of the clashes of partisan loyalties, party politics and parochialism.”
Republicans on the committee, including some longtime critics of the Met Council, had kind words for the bill.
“I don’t know of any other taxing authority that’s not elected that spends this much money,” said Sen. John Jasinski, R-Faribault. He said given the politics of the Twin Cities, elected members might not change the overall direction of the Met Council, “but I think it does make more sense to have it elected so there’s some accountability.”
[image_caption]State Sen. John Jasinski[/image_caption]
Hornstein’s House File 2092 is identical to Dibble’s bill.
“I think there’s a lot of momentum building for it,” Hornstein said Tuesday. “We’ve had too many issues, Southwest is one of them, but there are issues that have accumulated over a number of years that support that the agency needs more transparency and accountability. We feel this is a really appropriate time to raise this issue.”
Related story: https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2014/10/can-met-council-be-tamed/
Yes, yes, to the Dibble/Horenstein bill! It will indeed bring better accountability and transparency. At present, for most citizens of the Metropolitan Region, the identity of their Met Council commissioner is unknown and the important responsibilities of that commissioner and the council a mystery.
Under the existing system the Met Council has shirked its responsibility to the region and kow-towed to local fantasies about LRT as development tool (St. Paul and putting the Green Line train on the street) or to the wishes of private real estate interests and developers (the Gold Line). The Met Council’s planning and procedural process itself deserves scrutiny; certainly local interests should be able to propose ideas for projects and raise concerns, but sensible central planning for the region should prevail!
About time Met Council be held accountable. So tired of their mandates and ridiculous asks from cities and townships that are all built out.
With elections, is there really any way that this will be non-partisan? How many people really want to subject themselves to an election and do they really represent broad public interest? Politics tend to create opposition, while with a metropolitan area, we need common solutions.
Every election, we vote for slates of judges. Very seldom do any have opposition and it is very difficult to cast an intelligent vote, but nothing like a public record is available, unless they have made a widely reported and vastly unpopular decision.
Here is an alternative option. Appoint one person per district. Four year terms. Every two years, half of the representatives would get a public vote of confidence. If people don’t like how they are being represented, a replacement is named at the end of their term.
Examine the makeup of the Minnesota House districts in the Met area: overwhelmingly DFL.
Interesting that Hornstein & Dibble are proposing sweeping changes to the Met Council after the SWLR massive $750 million budget overspend. Good idea . While they’re at it , they should propose new chairs of the House & Senate Transportation Committee.
If the goal is transparency and accountability we need to include them and not just the Walz appointed Met Council. The poor planning , costs and operating losses of our failed mass transit system should be shared by our elected officials. These two supporters of mass transit continue to promote unnecessary projects with little regard for past failures and future taxpayer funded operating expenses.
Hornstein is also a proponent giving the Met Council taxing authority with a metro transit tax, increased gas tax , increased motor vehicle registration & motor vehicle sales tax ….. to build more transit and bike lanes.
His vision as a non-driver is not in sync with a track record of poor results …. which includes a lack of ridership. Watch for how the $750 million SWLR over spend will be paid for. How ironic that the elected officials seeking accountability take no accountability for themselves.
Having lived for half a century in the Land of the Parochial Interest – St. Louis County, MO, which has 90+ municipalities and no centralized authority – I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, the prospect of a regional authority with the clout to slap the wrist, at least, of the most egregiously racist and social class-directed suburbs is appealing, and I very much applaud the philosophical rationale of putting regional interests at least on a par with local/parochial ones, while on the other hand there’s the genuine specter of the regional authority taking on dictatorial methods (as some would say it has already done) without any sort of accountability.
Everyone – especially local elected officials – wants to protect their own narrow political and economic interests. Their constituents expect no less of them, and this is a primary factor, in my view, in favor of a regional authority like the MET Council, which seems less subject to localized prejudices and temper tantrums than other governmental structures, and is tasked with thinking and planning with regional, rather than local, interests at the forefront. St. Louis County, MO, hasn’t been able to agree on anything in decades beyond a single light rail line and the need for establishing a regional sewer system. Everything else gets caught up in the meatgrinder of local, parochial interests, and very little gets done that might have regional benefits.
But, after that half-century in St. Louis County (MO), I retired to the Colorado Front Range for a dozen years, and then moved here from metro Denver, where the Denver Regional Council of Governments (locally known as DRCOG or “Doctor COG”) has a structure and rationale similar to the MET Council, but was given much less authority by the state legislature. In some important ways, those limitations have hamstrung efforts by DRCOG to promote equitable housing and other quality-of-life issues in the Denver region, but in other ways, the same limitations have the support of many local officials and citizens who are leery of centralized authority.
As an ordinary citizen, I mostly experience regional governance in terms of the transit system. In that context, my own take is that Denver has – by a wide margin – the superior transit system, with multiple light rail lines serving multiple compass points in the region, and a bus system that actually works. I used both bus and light rail with some frequency, and the cost was moderate. There are both bus and light rail connections between numerous “hubs” in the metro area and both downtown Denver and the airport, which is at least 10 miles away from downtown, and farther than that from my suburb on the west side of the city. I was able to get to Coors Field for baseball games and the airport for travel in about the same time it would have taken me to drive, but without the wear and tear on my vehicle, as well as the environment, and not to mention the fees incurred for parking. Twin Cities residents can only dream about such efficiency – and, I should add, such levels of safety. There were no free rides or riders on either buses or light rail cars when I moved away to Minnesota.
So, as I said at the beginning, I like the concept of the MET Council being able to do things that not every municipality would endorse because those things might offend the sensibilities of some local residents (e.g., spreading affordable housing throughout the region). On the other hand, the MET Council does seem uniquely unaccountable for its mistakes, the Southwest light rail line’s cost overruns merely being the most recent (and possibly most expensive) example. At the moment, I’m not sure what the middle ground would be on this issue of regional authority – or even if there IS a middle ground.
Lets hope that we actually get some people with technical backgrounds into the Met Council positions. What we have a pure politicians making highly technical decisions, with no understanding how things work.
Exactly; the commissioners tend to be appointed because they did political party work–for the governor or governor’s political party: a sort of political spoils operation. Better to have the voters choose the best commissioner candidate.
Elections have become chaos, not accountability. Maybe there is a better form, but yet one more elected government layer in this state of too many elections people stopped paying attention is a default choice that is dumb (I’m looking at you judges and water and soil conservation districts).
Please not another outlet for conspiracy-brained flash mob to overwhelm.
The leading examples of alternatives are dictatorial: for example, the reign of Robert Moses in New York. Not one man, one vote, but one man and that one man only.
We have an abundance of legislators. IMO – far too many for such a State with declining population. Let them do the job of Met Council.
If we do have a MC – at least have it be accountable to our Democracy. You would think the DFL would be in favor of that!
Yes, I’m sure some State Rep from Worthington would do a heck of a job on Met Council interests…