Minneapolis City Council
The Minneapolis City Council is the legislative branch of the City of Minneapolis. It consists of 13 members, elected from separate wards to four-year terms. The Council is dominated by members of the DFL, with a total of 12 members. The Green Party of Minnesota has one member, Cam Gordon.
History
The city has never had more than 13 wards, but at one time there were three representatives from each area, for a total of 39 members of the City Council. The City Council assumed its current size in the 1950s.Minneapolis has an ordinance, adopted in 2003, that directs local law enforcement officers "not to 'take any law enforcement action' for the sole purpose of finding undocumented immigrants, or ask an individual about his or her immigration status."
The Minneapolis City Council represents the city's thirteen districts called wards. The city adopted instant-runoff voting in 2006, first using it in the 2009 elections. The council has 12 DFL members and one from the Green Party. Election issues in 2013 included funding for a new Vikings stadium over which some incumbents lost their positions. That year, Minneapolis elected Abdi Warsame, Alondra Cano, and Blong Yang, the city's first Somali-American, Mexican-American, and Hmong-American city councilpeople, respectively.
The City Council passed a resolution in March 2015 making fossil fuel divestment city policy. With encouragement from city administration, Minneapolis joined seventeen cities worldwide in the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. The city's climate plan is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent in 2015 "compared to 2006 levels, 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050".
In 2018, the city council passed the Minneapolis Comprehensive 2040 Plan and submitted it for Metropolitan Council approval. Watched nationally, the plan rezones predominantly single-family residential neighborhoods for triplexes to increase affordable housing, seeks to reduce the effects of climate change, and tries to rectify some of the city's racial disparities. After the Metropolitan Council approved the plan, in November 2019 the city council voted unanimously to allow duplexes and triplexes citywide. The Brookings Institution called it "a relatively rare example of success for the YIMBY agenda" and "the most wonderful plan of the year."
Controversial incidents
In July 2001, DFL Council Member Brian Herron pleaded guilty to one count of felony extortion. Herron admitted to accepting a $10,000 bribe from business owner Selwin Ortega who faced numerous health and safety inspection violations at his Las Americas grocery stores. Herron served a one-year sentence in federal prison.On November 21, 2002, ten-year DFL Council Member Joe Biernat was convicted of five federal felony charges, one count of embezzlement, three counts of mail fraud, and one count of making a false statement. Biernat was found not guilty on extortion and conspiracy to extort charges.
In September 2005, Green Party Council Member Dean Zimmermann was served with a federal search warrant to his home by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The affidavit attached to the warrant revealed that the FBI had Zimmermann on video and audiotape accepting bribes for a zoning change. Zimmermann subsequently lost his re-election campaign, and was convicted in federal court on three counts of accepting cash from a developer and found not guilty of soliciting property from people with business with the city. Zimmermann was released from prison in July 2008.
In 2009, Council President Barbara A. Johnson was accused of misusing campaign funds for personal spending. An administrative hearing was held January 26, 2010. The administrative judges at the hearing dismissed six of the eight charges; it upheld two charges—that AAA services were paid for both her and her husband's vehicle and that not all charges for hairstyling or dry cleaning were reasonably related to the campaign. Johnson paid a $200 fine for these violations, the lowest fine possible.
In 2015, DFL Council Member Alondra Cano used her Twitter account to publish private cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses of critics who wrote about her involvement in a Black Lives Matter rally.
In 2020, after the death of George Floyd, city council leaders announced a plan to amend the city's charter and remove the requirement for the city to hire a police department, replacing this department with a broader public safety agency. The City Council was then discovered to have been utilizing private security at a cost of $4,500 per day for three of their members.
Electoral system
In 2006, Minneapolis voters approved the use of the single transferable vote for its municipal elections. The first use of ranked-choice voting was in the 2009 municipal election. However, since the City Council uses single-member districts, the single transferable vote functions the same way as instant-runoff voting. This system of voting is commonly known in the United States as ranked choice voting.Each member's term is four years, and there are no limits on the number of terms a member may serve.