Lessons from Mr. Smith's Time in City Hall

 

Part 1 - Mr. Smith Goes to City Hall

Last year, the city saw an exodus of staff in two of its newest divisions, the office of race, equity and inclusion and the office of performance and innovation, now called The Department of Performance Management and Innovation. Both lost all their staff in 2023.

One of those who left in 2023 was Brian K. Smith.

In 2016 Smith went from being an outsider fighting city hall to becoming the Director of the new city division aimed at innovation and equity, started by then-mayor Besty Hodges.

That ended last year, following a controversial city coordinator appointment, a discrimination complaint, and a lawsuit he and others filed against the city.

On July 7, 2023, just a few weeks after retiring from his position working in City Hall, I met with Smith and talked with him about his experience there. 

He didn’t expect to get the job when he was hired by Hodges.  

“She knew me just like most of the other council members,” said Smith. “Which is why I was surprised when I actually got a job because I would be down there harassing council members for the most part on behalf of community members about policies and practices.”

“I knew people but based on the pushing and fighting for folks in neighborhood and residents,” said Smith. “I had no idea that when they came and asked if I would be interested in that job that I would actually get it.

Smith also served as an alternate to the community mediation team helping oversee the first federal agreement with police department and as a program director with the Bridge for Run Away Youth during a controversial, but ultimately successful, expansion.   

He stepped into the position at a challenging time for the division.  “At that time the office had gone from a team of 7 down to a team of one,” he said.

They functioned as an in-house consulting team that, according to the city’s website “helps the City address complex and pressing challenges that lead to racial disparities,” and to “develop new solutions that move the dial toward equity in Minneapolis.”

They managed a minimum wage study which ultimately led to the city setting its own minimum wage, started a small business navigator program, led with the redrafting of a “conduct on premises” rental license ordinance and helped establish the Behavioral Crisis Response teams as a fourth response to emergencies.

What follows is the first of two columns dedicated to telling Smith’s story, in his own words.

Building A New Division

“I'm proud of everything we did.” Said Smith. “I think there are some things that stick out more than others because of the impact that it may have had for residents that people can see touch and feel. That was the small business team that was created out of our work, that was the Behavioral Crisis Response Teams (BCR), the conduct on premises rental license ordinance amendments.”

“Internally I think we did a lot to help people understand how to use data, how to make strategic plans, how to constantly look at your program and evaluate whether your living up to your mission and vision of your department or your division and to actually come to the innovation team or other people if you have a contract that you can do with other people, to say how can we make something that we had a person who was smart enough to do but nobody listened to I don't want and one aspect and that's continuous improvement which is Jodie who is actually pretty brilliant and hard-working but nobody listened to.”

“We were able to set a culture in the city, to a degree, where people would constantly look at their performance in their department and we built a performance management process which the city never had and we had results which was a good attempt and a start, but as we took that we had that evolved into a more robust performance management system when you tied goals city goals, department goals to attempting the tie it to the budget and things like that but really making people look at training people and working with people so that they could a look at the mission and vision of their department and division and then see whether or not they’re measuring up.”

Being Trusted and Objective

“The good thing about the way I think it worked in the beginning was, we didn't get stressed out with staff directions or overwhelmed with staff directions.  We didn't get overwhelmed with Betsy, when she talked to me she just said, “Hey, we trust that you are able to do the job, we trust that your staff are really smart and hard-working and so we just want you to just look at the policies and practices around the city, listen to community members, mostly residents of the city, and if there's things that you find are things that people are interested in, take deeper dive into it and see if it grows into something and just keep me informed.”  

“She wasn't heavy-handed,” said Smith. “We knew what her policy objectives were and what her platform was, but she trusted us to look at those things that you guys had as council, that she had as a mayor and listen to residents to see what will be the most pressing thing that we needed to address.  Not what was more politically expedient.”

“Sometime some council members would ask for some stuff and it would ruffle some feathers of other the council members, or ruffle feathers of the department heads, because we did our very best to be objective.” Said Smith, “Our job we thought was to find information, inform people so they can make it informed decisions and then it lands where it lands because we're human too and we have a lot of ideas about how things might turn out or how things should turn out, but what we had to do was follow the prescriptive method that we adopted and some of the stuff that we developed to make sure that we didn't let our attitude, our opinions and you know our own experiences get in the way of what actually needed to happen to serve residents better.”

“The only time it would get extremely challenging is when there were people on the inside who had way more authority than us, who wanted to dictate to people how things should be, as opposed to listening to and working with them. By people I mean the residents, like I know what's best for you so we had some electric officials who like them and we have a mayor who's like that now, so it made it extremely difficult for us because people were trying to guide our work or ask the question and guide us towards the answer that they wanted us to have.  That’s why we wouldn't use certain researchers because there are some researchers in town who you can tell them what you want the outcome to be and they will gladly take your money and give you that outcome. So that also presented a challenge sometimes because some elected officials were used to holding things as a genuine question like they had genuine interests, but they already had their mind made up and if we didn't go along with it, it was hell for me to pay.  I protected my staff, but it was hell for me to pay from time to time.”

“Everybody felt a little bit of relief in knowing that this was this new body of folks in the city that weren't completely caught up in the everyday politics of everything and actually took pride in just been as objective as they possibly could in giving the information.”

“We could be that liaison, we could be that technical assistance provider, we could be that support not only for residents but also for departments and elected leadership in the city.  And I didn't know what would come of it, but I knew that's what I was going to go there and try my best to do. Maybe it was timing, but it seemed like that's what a majority of elected officials wanted.  Residents definitely wanted it.  Department heads were more leery than people think, partly because it would have been the first time where somebody would be telling a story about that shot other than them,  but I would say over the years we got to a place where the majority, not a heavy majority, but a majority of the departments in the city knew that our would do nothing but help them, even though some of them still feared a process sometimes pulled the cover off of things in order to shed light on it, not embarrass anybody, but to shed light on it and so that we can see where we need to make improvement and for some people that was extremely scary. Scary because they knew it would mean change, some scary because they were doing some shit they shouldn't have been doing, and they thought it would create a level accountability, that just didn't exist in the city for departments.”

What A Difference A Mayor Makes.

In 2017 Hodges was not reelected. Jacob Frey became mayor and, said Smith, “for the most part the appreciation of the work was gone and I never met with Jacob once.  I met with Betsy every 2 weeks.  …but the only time I ever met with Jacob was one budget meeting and whenever I was bringing a national conference into town where he would be speaking. I've never had one meeting with Jacob about our work in five years, not one, he wasn't interested.”

 

 Part 2 Mr. Smith Leaves City Hall

In the fall of 2022, Smith seemed to be thriving in his role as Director of the Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) for the City of Minneapolis. In October he had won a Pollen 50 over 50 “disruptor of the status quo” award for his work as one of the “most inspiring and accomplished leaders from across the state.”

In the award announcement, and elsewhere, he was noted for helping transform public safety in Minneapolis. The work he led examining the city’s 911 emergency response resulted in the establishment of the acclaimed unarmed Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) program that has received national as well as local recognition. Smith and his team also created an overnight parking enforcement program so that police didn't have to respond to parking calls at night and a change to transfer theft and report-only calls from 911 to 311.

Smith resigned 7 months later after he had testified against the appointment of a City Coordinator, formally complained about discrimination within the city, and filed a lawsuit against the city.   

Through the settlement discussion over the lawsuit, the city offered to pay him to leave. He agreed, and resigned effective June 23, 2023.

“I was about to go anyway,” said Smith. “I was tired. I had other options.” He said that the work had gotten so stressful that he took an unplanned leave because of “how toxic the place got.”      

“I knew I wasn't appreciated. I knew our work wasn't appreciated,” he said. “It was just a bad environment for people who really wanted to serve residents. It was a super bad environment for black people.”  

“All of the black folks who were in any position of leadership, those who went along with the status quo, as well as those who didn’t, are gone,” said Smith. “Anybody who was trying to do anything to change the status quo and make the city live up to what it says and writes on paper but doesn’t do, they’ll all gone.”

Concerns, especially among black employees, became very public in May of 2022 when a group of former and current staff from the city coordinator’s office held a press conference opposing the appointment of Heather Johnston, who was interim City Coordinator at the time, for a 4-year term.  Many of them were supervised by Smith, who was himself supervised by Johnston.  Johnston has since also resigned.

In a letter shared at the time, 17 current and former city staff, many who worked in the division Smith directed, outlined concerns and a “toxic, anti-Black work culture that has been perpetuated by past and current City Coordinators, both Interim and appointed, for several years.”  “City leaders,” they wrote, “claim to uphold values of racial equity and justice and acknowledged racism as a public health crisis. However, these claims have failed to result in tangible actions that substantially support employees, especially Black employees.”

“To be a director, your job is not only to supervise, give your staff the resources and the tools they need and support they need to do a great job, it’s also your job to make sure that they come to work and be their full selves,” said Smith. “So, when they took the time to organize, to speak out and to do all those things, to have no black folks in leadership at the city say anything, what do you think that says for that group of people? How vulnerable and long-suffering do we expect people to be? To have no director stand up would have been pretty much everybody in the city's saying, you’re on your own.”

“I wasn't planning on going up there.” He added, “I did it because everything they said was true and I experienced it daily.”

“I felt compelled to get up and say this is really happening, this is very personal. You have people getting sick, scared at work, feeling like they are going to be retaliated against, not getting raises, not getting promotions, getting fired, getting disciplined.”  

Despite being assured publicly at the hearing that there would be no retaliation against anyone who testified, when asked if there was retaliation, Smith said “Yes, constant. They did it.  I got a letter of reprimand maybe 2 months after and it included all the stuff from when I spoke out.” 

Concerns about racial discrimination were perhaps most evident in the work he and his team did with 911 which ultimately resulted in the discrimination lawsuit Smith and Gina Obiri filed against the city.  Obiri worked with Smith in the OPI.

Many complaints focused on Kathy Hughes, the 911 director at the time, who has since resigned her position with the city.

“When we were building the BCR, she refused to let us meet with her staff. She refused to give us any data. She refused to cooperate at meetings,” said Smith. “She would make racist statements directly to us, she would make them directly to other white people about us and the city about us, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.”

The lawsuit argued that “Beginning in late 2019 and for well over a year, Hughes, a White woman, discriminated against Plaintiffs because of their race, treating Plaintiffs with hostility and denigration, falsely accusing Plaintiffs of lying, criticizing and undermining them in front of City staff and residents, refusing to meet with them, and refusing to provide them access to information necessary to perform their jobs….Hughes treated White employees in a dramatically different, respectful fashion.

In one example, the lawsuit states that Hughes “demonstrated anti-Black bias, including openly questioning whether the majority-Black staff on the OPI team would be able to pass a criminal background check.”

Despite raising the issue to her supervisors and the city’s human resources department through what Smith calls “constant emails,” he said, “nobody did anything for almost a year.”

Smith concluded that many people in City Hall think that “Black people are expendable.”  “Everybody thinks we are built for long suffering, and they are so used to seeing people suffering they just think that that’s the way it is.”

“My size ended up in my 360 [work performance] review,” he said, quoting from memory one of the comments, “Brian has to realize that he is physically intimidating to some people, he’s a larger black man so he should learn how to….”

“Oh, it’s real,” Smith said of a racist, toxic work environment in City Hall. “If the pressure that came after George Floyd being murdered and other murders after that, the DOJ [Department of Justice], State Human Rights, 100 million dollars in lawsuits, and the pressure that has built up in this community, if that is not enough to make change, I’m not sure what will.” 

About the BCR service he helped create, Smith said, “what they need to do is to continue to let the innovation team manage it until they straighten out the things they need to straighten out in the office of community safety and the police department. To put it in precincts would be a huge mistake.”

“Alternatives should be built, the same way we built the last one.  They should be piloted, and they should be set up in a way that shows that people are serious about transforming public safety.”

Looking ahead, Smith said, “My concern inside the city is that people who truly want to be public servants will continue to leave, which means the level of service that the residents deserve and pay for, will go down.”

“My concern is for residents.  It can take a long time to undo some of the prejudice that is at play.  The stuff that is embedded in our culture about race, about class, about who deserves service and who doesn’t, that’s so embedded it takes years to try to get at it.”  

“The people in this city have dealt with enough pain and deserve better.”  

Note: - a version of this was also published in the Southside Pride newspaper.