Finding a Green Way to Govern

This morning, the Council approved a staff direction I worked on with Council Member Blong Yang that will give the Council better access to data on low-level arrests and police stops in our city. Here's the direction: Motion by Gordon and Yang Directing the Police Department and City Attorney’s Office to provide data on misdemeanor arrests, charging, prosecution and diversion by race, gender, age, geography, and offence for the years 2010-2014, and report back to the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Emergency Management committee in the second quarter of 2015. Further directing the Attorney’s Office and Police Department to make recommendations concerning the development of a policy and potential protocol for the recording and reporting of demographic information, especially race and location, of police stops that do not necessarily lead to an arrest, and to report back with recommendations regarding this in the second quarter of 2015. This appears to be a very careful, sm...

Last night, after a boisterous public hearing and some more contentious, 7-6 votes, the Council adopted the 2015 budget.  Here are some key takeaways: The community came out in force.  In addition to tens of emails and phone calls to Council Members, more than sixty people came to speak to the Council about the importance of investing in clean energy and equity.  Only one person spoke in favor of the levy reduction. We won back most of the losses from last week.   The Council voted unanimously to restore many of the cuts that were made last week.  Most importantly to me, we restored all of the funding for the Clean Energy Partnership, most of the funding for the One Minneapolis Fund, and a small amount of the funding for homeownership counseling and foreclosure prevention.  I do not think these wins would have been possible without all of the pressure the community brought to bear. This budget includes a lot of progressive wins.  There is ...

This week, the White House made public that the City of Minneapolis has won designation as a “Climate Action Champion. ”  We are one of sixteen cities and counties to be given this designation, along with San Francisco, Seattle, and others. This is somewhat ironic, given that we’re in the middle of a rather public debate about whether we want to fully fund the commitments we’ve made to climate action.  I’m hoping that this will help remind my colleagues of the importance of the Clean Energy Partnership – which was one of the key arguments we made in our successful application for this honor.  In order to retain our reputation for being a leader on climate policy, we have to continue to actually lead. It’s also important to note that the work of the Partnership is not the limit of our work on climate change.  The Council has also adopted a set of short-term, two-year priorities for implementing the Climate Action Plan.  This is the existing work of our t...

Yesterday, the Council’s budget committee made what I think was a terrible decision to make cuts in three critically important priority areas in order to make a very minor reduction in the tax levy. These three areas represent longtime priorities for me and, more recently, adopted priorities for the Council: fighting climate change , ending racial inequities and improving community engagement . This was accomplished on a narrow 7-6 vote for a change to the budget proposed by Council Member Linea Palmisano.  To save the median homeowner about $2.50 in 2015, we gutted our commitments to equity, clean energy and support for neighborhood engagement. Here are the details.  Council Member Palmisano brought a change to the budget that limited the amount of the levy increase.  This levy reduction on its own is a bad idea .  Why?  Because the City’s budget prospects – given the fact that the Republicans have retaken the Minnesota House, which threatens future ...