Monthly Archives: September 2025

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 3

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I’ve got one City Council seat left to do (Ward 11) but there’s a forum tomorrow I could watch so I’m skipping ahead to Park Board.

This is one of the handful of super easy races this year. In the race for District 3 Park and Recreation Commissioner, Kedar Deshpande (DFL-endorsed) is running unopposed. (Incumbent Becky Alper decided not to run again.) Love him or hate him, if you live in Park Board District 3, that’s who you’re getting for the next four years.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 2

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I’ve got one City Council seat left to do (Ward 11) but there’s a forum tomorrow I could watch so I’m skipping ahead to Park Board.

This is one of the handful of super easy races this year. In the race for District 2 Park and Recreation Commissioner, Charles Rucker (DFL-endorsed, Incumbent kinda) is running unopposed. Love him or hate him, if you live in Park Board District 2, that’s who you’re getting for the next four years. (He’s “incumbent, kinda” because he held an at-large seat by appointment when he replaced someone who moved away, and he’s running for the District 2 seat, which Becka Thompson is not running for.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 10

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Aisha Chughtai, the incumbent, was elected in 2021 and re-elected in 2023. On the ballot:

Aisha Chughtai
Lydia Millard
DeShanneon Grimes

As I did in my Ward 2 post, before I talk about the candidates I’m going to talk about all the the PACs because they have similar names and it’s frankly pretty confusing and also especially relevant here.

  • There was We Love Mpls. Presumably called that because so many of them love Minneapolis, but don’t live there. (Obligatory note: neither do I, but at least I live in St. Paul and not, say, Wayzata.) Taylor Dahlin wrote about We Love Minneapolis in June. She noted that it’s chaired by (GOP donor) Andrea Corbin, and run by Joe Radinovich and Nico Woods. (Two of the most conservative people in the Minnesota DFL.) The money overwhelmingly came from landlords with large holdings; progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many noted that 68% of their money came from landlords responsible for hundreds of property violations.
  • There is Thrive Minneapolis. In July, We Love Mpls shut down and Thrive Minneapolis seems to be the replacement. Taylor wrote about this group in July. She noted that it’s chaired by Martha Holton Dimick (the very conservative prosecutor who ran against Mary Moriarty in 2022), and again heavily funded by landlords and developers, many of whom do not live in Minneapolis.
  • There is All of Mpls, which is doing endorsements. Legally I am sure they are not actually the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat but if you click on the website you might be forgiven for thinking they basically look like the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat, especially since they have a link to “Thank Mayor Frey” (with a canned, adulatory e-mail). They have endorsed Becka Thompson in Ward 12, which is frankly inexcusable, and if I were Lydia Millard, I’d be pretty annoyed about that. I described them two years ago as “a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.” In retrospect I’m not sure that’s harsh enough. What they want is for Mayor Frey, who I consider frankly incompetent even if you like his politics, to have a rubber-stamp City Council.
  • On the other side there is the progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many. I like Minneapolis for the Many! They also do endorsements.

One final note about some of the people involved in Love/Thrive/All Of Mpls. On September 9th there was a Zoom meeting of the DFL Feminist Caucus where the people in charge and their friends engaged in some really gross treatment of trans Democrats who showed up and ran for offices. (There’s an open letter about what happened at that meeting here.) Joe Radinovich was there and voting with the hostile majority. Martha Holton Dimick nominated Latonya Reeves, who was one of the people huffing and eye-rolling over the concept of respecting someone’s pronouns. The people misgendering trans DFLers are out of step with things I consider to be core DFL values. If someone has sought and accepted these endorsements, I do not trust them. (Also, the reason the old guard of the DFL Feminist Caucus closed ranks was to defend the right of their friend to continue to hold party office despite her involvement in a fatal crash that has been charged as vehicular homicide. I’ve seen this sort of “how dare you show up in our clubhouse and make trouble” gatekeeping in other contexts and it’s toxic and awful.) More on all this in a minute.

DeShanneon Grimes

DeShanneon’s website describes her background as “entrepreneur, mother, and dog lover.” She’s currently a realtor. (From what I could find, she’s been a realtor for a year or two.) She wants red-light cameras and traffic calming; she also thinks infrastructure decisions are being made without enough input from residents and area businesses. I’m not sure she realizes that her desires here (more speed bumps / more attention paid to what businesses want) are probably in conflict.

She doesn’t list any prior civic experience (city/county committees, campaign work for other people, etc.) and she has no endorsements. You can vote for her if you really like her ideas but pick a backup candidate and maybe tell them which of her ideas you particularly like and hope they’ll enact.

Lydia Millard

Lydia Millard is one of the candidates supported by Love/Thrive/All Of Mpls. Nico Woods (formerly the person running We Love Mpls, along with Joe Rad one of the most conservative DFLers in the area) is her Campaign Manager, and she was present at the disastrous DFL Feminist Caucus meeting. I actually e-mailed her in the wake of it to ask if she was interested in sharing any comments on the rampant misgendering at the meeting and if it concerned her at all while the meeting was happening; she did not reply to my e-mail nor has she commented on the meeting at all, that I’ve seen. She appears to have close ties with the now-chair of the DFL Feminist Caucus, Alicia Gibson, who has been campaigning for her and ironically posted photos of her back in June posing with two people in trans flag t-shirts at the Pride Parade. (Alicia, unlike Lydia, did comment after that meeting: she sent out a wildly bad-faith e-mail.) “Supportive of trans people in the context of photo ops” is not a particularly useful sort of allyship, IMO. I mean, it’s better than Amy Klobuchar but the bar is in hell.

She also has some genuinely odd ideas like building a data center in Ward 10. She showed up at the vigil for the Hortmans with staffers in campaign t-shirts (the family had explicitly requested no campaigning, a request that was honored by other candidates who came.) And she referred to the old police chief Arradondo as a racist and a bigot — Carin Mrotz, the person who had this conversation with her, thought she probably was thinking of former police union boss Bob Kroll, but tried to clarify and Lydia reiterated she meant Arradondo. (She probably honestly DID mean Kroll, but it’s a weird mistake.)

In Lydia’s favor: she is Board Chair of the Partnership In Property Commercial Land Trust and she has a lot more detailed knowledge around housing than a lot of people running. I disagree with a bunch of the stances she gave on her Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire but unlike most of the Thrive/Love/All of Mpls candidates, she had detailed analytical explanations for her stances. (For example, her opposition to Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Laws: “Converting rental properties to community or resident ownership in Minneapolis is complex. The process can take over a year, and many renters don’t qualify for financing. Rising taxes and underfunded HOAs leave residents unprepared for major repairs. The Sky Without Limits co-op, supported by short-term city and LISC funding, still hasn’t secured ownership after seven years. PPL also dissolved resident-owned co-ops due to building deterioration. Before expanding efforts like TOPA, the city must address the financial and structural issues that have undermined past attempts.” That is actually a bunch of valid points and a much better response than “I believe that property owners should be able to sell their property to whom they choose to sell it to,” which is what Pearll in Ward 5 said.)

ETA: Asked about transit modes at a forum, Lydia characterized investment in infrastructure for bikers, walkers, and transit users as “penalizing people who drive.”

Most years, I would hold off on posting this, because there’s a LWV forum scheduled on October 7th. But I have travel planned in October and really want to get these done before I go. If I have time, I will watch & edit later. I am hoping that the candidates get asked some questions about biking infrastructure and bus lanes, because Lydia has a “climate resilience” section that briefly mentions transit, doesn’t mention bikes, and mostly talks about trees. (I love trees, to be clear, but I’m pretty sure so does Aisha, and I would like to hear more about Lydia’s stance on bus lanes, given the controversy over Hennepin Ave.

Anyway — overall I think she’s far more qualified and makes a much better case for her positions than the centrist who ran last time but has the same circle of friends and I distrust anyone who would hire Nico Woods.

Aisha Chughtai

I like Aisha Chughtai. I deeply appreciated the fact that she showed up at the Lake/Bloomington raid. She’s been solid on transit and affordable housing; in her accomplishments list on public safety she mentions hiring additional investigators for MPD and expanding the behavioral crisis response team.

Looking on social media for commentary about her I ran into massive amounts of pearl clutching over her saying “fuck Jacob Frey” a few months back (the full quote: “We’re gonna transform this city because fuck Jacob Frey, fuck fascism, and fuck Donald Trump!”) I really don’t fucking care about this. (I strongly doubt that most of the pearl-clutchers actually give a shit about it, either.)

Anyway: I would vote for Aisha Chughtai. FYI, the October 7th forum should be livestreamed here (and if that link doesn’t work, try the LWV Candidate Forums page.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Saint Paul, City Question 1 and School District Question 1

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Saint Paul has a lot less on the ballot this year than Minneapolis, because no one here cares if the mayoral and city council races aren’t in sync, so they just aren’t. We have a mayoral race that I’m planning to write about at some point, and two ballot questions. Even if you don’t care about the mayoral race, you should definitely go vote on the ballot questions if you live in St. Paul! tl;dr: vote yes on both.

School District Question 1

Here’s the question that appears on the ballot:

Approval of New School District Referendum Revenue Authorization

The board of Independent School District No. 625 (Saint Paul), Minnesota has proposed to increase the School District’s general education revenue by $1,073 per pupil, subject to an annual increase at the rate of inflation. The proposed new referendum revenue authorization would be first levied in 2025 for taxes payable in 2026 and applicable for ten (10) years unless otherwise revoked or reduced as provided by law.

This is a school funding referendum, and to be clear, it is on top of an existing school funding referendum (the current one expires in 2029, so I am sort of guessing there will be another school funding referendum to replace that one in 2028.) Here’s the post I wrote about that one, in 2018.

Here’s the site for the Vote Yes campaign. You can see how much it will cost you, specifically, on this site but since it looks things up by parcel number rather than address (wtf guys) you’ll have to go here to get your parcel number. (The Vote Yes site says that a house valued at $289,200 would pay about $26 per month/$309 per year; I’m not sure if they picked $289,200 because that’s the actual median home value or if they went based on vibes.)

The explanation for why they need more money basically goes back to, “Republican governor Tim Pawlenty fucked everything up back in 2003, and state funding ran way behind inflation for years, and while the DFL trifecta helped, it did not fill in the giant hole the Republicans created in school budgets.”

I always vote yes on school funding questions, because I want the schools in my city to have adequate (ideally abundant, but AT LEAST adequate!) resources, and I will vote yes on this one. Also, let’s keep electing Democrats statewide and ask them to increase state funding (done through income taxes) so we don’t have to do quite so much through property taxes.

City Question 1

This one’s more complicated to explain. (I feel like most people know what a school board funding referendum is for.) This is an amendment to the city charter (the “constitution” of the city) that would allow St. Paul to issue administrative citations for code violations, which is to say, it would let the city make people pay fines. Part of what’s confusing is that so many people assume that the city can already do this, because (a) we do get fined for parking violations (because the state gave the police department authority to do that) and (b) every other large city in the state of Minnesota already has administrative citations and it’s actually incredibly weird that we don’t. Minneapolis has them, Duluth, Bloomington, Apple Valley. In St. Paul, currently, here are the options the city has if you violate the city code: (1) They can send you a sternly worded letter. (2) They can charge you criminally, and the city page about the proposed charter amendment talks about how this has affected people. (3) There are a couple of things where they can do an end-run that feels to people like a fine even though it isn’t — if you don’t shovel your walk, they will send city workers to shovel your walk and then bill you for their time, which many people read as a fine even though technically it isn’t.

The City Council passed administrative citations last year (unanimously — which is required, for a charter amendment) but instead of being implemented it was put on the ballot by a couple of local perennial cranks who did a petition drive and also wrote an infuriating and inaccuracy-riddled letter to the editor to the Highland Villager newspaper. Among their claims: “the ordinance will give the city unbridled authority to impose monetary penalties” — the city’s authority is inherently bridled by the fact that things have to be passed by the City Council. “The legal end-around of the democratic process is a unanimous City Council vote” — that’s not an end-run around the democratic process, that is a democratic process, we elected the City Council. “Supporters argue that each proposed civil penalty will have three readings and a public hearing. But they fail to disclose that only four City Council votes are needed to pass any civil penalty ordinance” — no one is failing to disclose that it will require a majority of the City Council to pass city ordinances because most of us understand that this is the normal way you pass city ordinances. (Patty Hartmann is a climate-change-denying vaccine-denying Republican who ran for City Council a couple of times, and Peter Butler’s hobby is petition drives followed by lawsuits against the city when he doesn’t get enough signatures.)

I am STRONGLY IN FAVOR OF THIS AMENDMENT. I am in favor for all the reasons discussed on the Vote Yes website (created by Vote Yes for a Fairer St. Paul, which appears to be run by the SEIU labor union in the sense that they share an address.) Like SEIU, I am in favor because we need every tool available to handle wage theft. (The St. Paul city site describes a case where it took four years to get group of health aides compensated for sick time they were denied in 2020; currently, the only thing the city can demand is the back wages, so there’s no downside to the employer of dragging things out. If the city can also impose fines, they can create an incentive to the crooked employer to pay what they owe promptly.) Like HomeLine, I am in favor because we need every tool available to handle unsafe rental properties that are not being repaired by the landlords. But most of all, I want administrative citations to be an option to fine the everliving crap out of motherfucking CVS for sitting on an empty building for so long that it appears as a boarded-over building on Google Maps:

The Google Maps Street View of the boarded-up CVS at the corner of Snelling and University.

Not to mention the asshole investors who bought up half of Grand Avenue in order to let storefronts sit empty for literal years.

(This is not magic, there are blighted buildings in Minneapolis as well, but it is at least a tool that gets added to the available options.)

(I also am in favor of criminal charges for employers who commit wage theft, but realistically, that’s going to be treated as a last resort. We know that “certainty of punishment” is a much better deterrent than “severity of punishment,” and “if I short my employees their wages I’ll wind up having to pay twice as much in the end” is much more likely to discourage wage theft than “there is about a 1% chance that I will go to jail.”)

Will this be used against citizens who annoy their neighbors? I’m not saying it will never, ever happen but it’s clearly not the goal here, this is not a major problem in other Minnesota cities, and as the Fairer St. Paul website points out, we are a city that completely abolished library overdue fines a few years ago and cut fines and fees for a huge number of things during the pandemic. Back when I lived in Minneapolis I got an order to fix something minor (a short stretch of rotted fascia on the side of my garage) and I was annoyed about it but also, I just went ahead and fixed it and did not get fined. Also St. Paul will also order you to fix stuff like this (okay, maybe not a foot of rotted fascia, my friend who fixed it for me said “did you piss off one of your neighbors?” when he looked at it) and most people have assumed for years that they can fine you if you don’t do it so I don’t think it will actually change all that much for most people! (Also, this won’t affect parking violations — we can already get fined for those — and I’m pretty sure that those are far and away the thing people get fined for most often, statewide.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 9

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Look, it’s a rematch and last time Jason Chavez absolutely crushed Dan Orban so honestly I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Jason Chavez (Incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Dan Orban (Independent)

Dan Orban (Independent)

When I wrote about Dan Orban two years ago, he had no social media and seemed pretty clueless about policy. He’s since gotten social media (Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter) but I still see no indication that he’s served on any city or county advisory committees or worked in policy or done any of the other stuff that is the sort of experience I generally look for when someone is running for an entry-level political office. He says he’s qualified because he lives in the neighborhood, teaches at the U, and has a PhD in Computer Science. And, I mean. That does in fact put him one up over, for example, Becka Thompson in Ward 12.

I’m not sure what happened with the hobby farm he mentioned in 2023 (they had bought “a 20 acre off-grid Amish hobby farm” in Lanesboro). He doesn’t mention it on his website now.

I feel like this editorial that he wrote for Carol Becker’s “Minneapolis Times” website illustrates a bunch of what I dislike about him. It’s titled “Seek the Peace of the City” and it’s about the Bloomington/Lake raid. He starts out saying that he agrees we should protect immigrants and that he supports the separation ordinance. Then he goes on to take some passive-aggressive swipes at Jason Chavez, who was one of the City Council members to go to Lake and Bloomington in person: “Leaders should be accurate and deescalate dangerous situations. Based on the information that was released by the city, the federal law enforcement event on Lake St. and Bloomington was a criminal operation regarding drugs, money laundering, and human trafficking. […] Unfortunately, this message was not initially communicated. Instead the situation escalated under the false assumption that the event was an immigration raid, requiring additional law enforcement presence to help control the growing crowd. Even if this was an immigration raid, a leader’s role should be directed towards peace and deescalation. Stirring up emotional responses can lead to dangerous activity as we saw on Tuesday. Leaders should also take responsibility for the consequences of their words and actions.” He uses the passive voice when he’s talking about how “the message was not initially communicated” — it was not communicated by the FBI or by Mayor Frey’s office. In the portions of the raid conducted in the suburbs, they sent in a bunch of FBI agents in windbreakers to seize the financial records, and had they done that in Minneapolis, there would not have been a massive, furious, risky protest in response. This was a deliberate provocation, something Dan does not acknowledge, nor does he acknowledge that ICE has backed off in some areas when they’ve met a lot of pushback. This is not a normal time! Trump’s government is not a normal government that can be dealt with in a normal way! Orban’s refusal to acknowledge this is not reassuring at all.

He goes on to say, “If we have learned anything over the past 5 years, it is that we should maintain the highest moral and ethical standards for police officers. Even the appearance of excessive use of force ruins the witness of the Minneapolis Police Department’s efforts.” But in his questionnaire response for We Love Mpls, in response to the question, “With regard to public safety do you feel like the city’s more pressing issue currently is police accountability or staffing levels?” he responded with “staffing levels.”

I find the mix of platitudes and handwringing incredibly offputting. Especially in the current political situation. If you want more people who will wring their hands over incivility any time Democrats do anything other than say “please Mr. President sir, would you be so kind as to respect our constitutional rights sir,” Dan Orban’s your guy.

Jason Chavez (Incumbent, DFL-endorsed)

I like that Jason Chavez showed up at Lake and Bloomington during that raid (I am strongly of the opinion that having elected officials at events like this makes them significantly less likely to become violent, and curtails unnecessary violence used by law enforcement, at least some of the time) and I appreciated that he demanded an after-action report. I like most of what he’s done on the City Council. I would vote for Jason Chavez.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 8

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Two years ago, Soren Stevenson lost to incumbent Andrea Jenkins by 38 votes. This year Andrea Jenkins did not run for re-election; it’s an open seat. On the ballot:

Soren Stevenson (DFL-endorsed)
Josh Bassais (DFL)
Philip Galberth (Independent)
Bob Sullentrop (Republican)

Bob Sullentrop (Republican)

Bob is a local Republican who has run for a bunch of stuff, including Park Board (2017), Ward 8 City Council (2021), Ward 8 City Council again (2023), and Minnesota House 62B (2024). In 2024 I e-mailed all the people running as Republicans to ask who they thought won the 2020 Presidential Election and Bob was among the large majority who simply did not respond to my e-mail. In 2023 his campaign site talked about his hatred of bike lanes; this year he mostly talks about how much he hates the DSA. (“It is Bob’s belief that Democratic Socialists are extremely radical Democrats and at least some of them are indistinguishable from communists.”) I would not rank Bob.

Philip Galberth (Independent)

Philip appears to have no information online at all (no website, no social media) other than possibly a LinkedIn. Seriously, why do people do this. It costs $250 to file! With that money, you could go buy 50 chocolate croissants from Street Wheat, eat five, and hand out the other 45 to everyone else waiting in line and it would almost certainly bring you more joy than being on a ballot for a job you don’t actually seem to want enough to even bother setting up a website.

I sent him an e-mail asking if he had a website or any information he wanted to share about himself. He said he graduated from Washburn and owns a home. “The other candidates have released visions on how they want to reshape the city in their image. I prefer to have the voters tell me how they want their city to work. The city council should work for them and not tell them how the city should function. ‘Represent not rule,’ as they say.”

He went on to say that the questionnaires asked him questions about public safety, climate, and affordable housing, which are not concerns expressed by the people he’s talked to, who ask about plowing, street lights, pot holes, plastic bollards, the cost of trash disposal if HERC is shut down, and park maintenance. He finished with “As your potential representative on the council, what could I do for you?” If anyone in Ward 8 wants to e-mail him their policy questions, his address is listed on his campaign filing. FYI, his e-mail to me arrived looking like it had been redacted by the FBI or something, I don’t know what he did with his formatting but in order to read it I had to copy & paste without formatting, basically. You may need to do the same. (I do not recommend ranking him.)

Josh Bassais (DFL)

Josh Bassais is a good illustration of why I pay so much more attention to endorsements and questionnaires than what you say on your website. His website is mostly pretty inoffensive other than being difficult to read (light-blue-text on white background), he emphasizes public safety that doesn’t center police and so on. However, he’s endorsed by All of Mpls/We Love Mpls/Thrive Mpls (centrist groups heavily funded by suburban landlords, and you can get more details in my Ward 2 post) and the more I dug the more weird nastiness and hypocrisy I found:

  • He’s endorsed by all my least favorite City Council reps, my least favorite former mayor (Sharon Sayles-Belton), an organization of realtors, and NOT the union he apparently used to work for (LiUNA, which endorsed Soren.)
  • His campaign manager is Julius Hernandez, who previously managed campaigns for Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat Victor Martinez and has worked for actual straight up Republicans.
  • He got called out at the the DFL convention for trying to talk up his support for renter protections despite saying on his We Heart Mpls questionnaire that he did not support any additional protections for renters. (Listening to that answer he’s pretty carefully dancing around the idea of additional protections — he talks about enforcing existing protections and how he would support a “tenant’s union” — while trying to use rhetoric to sound more left-wing than he is, like talking about “standing in solidarity” and “pounding the table.” Trying to use left-wing rhetoric to describe centrist positions strikes me as a bad sign, like you’re both a centrist and you’re trying to hide it from people because you know the people you’re trying to convince to vote for you won’t like your actual positions.)
  • Asked “bike lanes: love ’em or leave ’em” in the short-answers section of a forum he responded, “In July and August I love them, but otherwise … it depends.” I want to call out two things about that response. First, the idea that July and August are the best months for biking is just weird; I think of June and September as our perfect biking months, sunny and pleasant and not excessively hot. The second thing, though, is that this is a response that appears to centers his take on bike lanes on his personal experiences with biking. I don’t bike much but I want there to be safe, well-maintained, pleasant bike lanes and biking infrastructure throughout the metro because many other people bike. Some of them year round, in fact. I love bike lanes because they keep other people safe, and that’s a good enough reason to love bike lanes. Year round!
  • His website talks a lot about affordable housing, but has nothing on there about homelessness. On his We Heart Mpls questionnaire he says his solution to encampments is to “Address the root cause, drug addiction and mental health,” with zero details on how exactly he wants to address drug addiction and mental health. He did not respond to the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire (Soren did.) My expectation, if he were elected, is that he would continue the Frey policy of periodically clearing encampments in an attempt to harass unhoused people into moving them out of sight, while making noise about root causes and doing absolutely nothing to make addiction treatment and mental health treatment more available to those who need and want them.
  • His website puts accountability up front when talking about policing. His responses to the We Heart Mpls questionnaire tell a different story; that questionnaire asks directly whether you feel that the city’s more pressing issue currently is staffing levels or police accountability, and he responses that it was staffing levels. (Hey, fun fact: the police officer who shot Soren Stevenson in the face with a rubber bullet at close range while Soren was peacefully protesting was not disciplined in any way and still works for MPD.)

Anyway — I think Josh Bassais is an empty suit who’s pals with a bunch of people I deeply dislike, and I think he would be a rubber stamp for Frey. I would not rank him.

Soren Stevenson (DFL-endorsed)

I liked Soren Stevenson two years ago and was planning to doorknock for him; I wound up not going out that day because my husband came down with COVID and I didn’t want to risk exposing other people. Anyway, I’m sorry, clearly if I had gone out I’d have found you 38 more votes.

Soren Stevenson had an eye shot out by the Minneapolis Police during a protest after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd; on police accountability specifically, I trust him a lot. He’s worked as a lobbyist for the Minnesota Justice Coalition and doing street outreach for Agate Housing and Services. One thing that struck me was that his ideas on homelessness include dedicated shelter beds for trans and gender-nonconforming people; I wonder if his awareness around this specific issue is partly from working with people for whom shelters are just not safe.

Soren is someone who has walked the walk in a whole lot of extremely tangible ways and honestly, working in street outreach is a hell of a background for someone who wants to do useful policy work on homelessness. (I have a friend who did street outreach and then lobbying — he’s now retired — and he was, for decades, someone with a long list of useful and practical ideas for addressing unsheltered homelessness.)

I would absolutely vote for Soren, and I am really excited to see him on the Minneapolis City Council.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 7

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The tl;dr is to vote for Katie Cashman, who is the hardworking moderate with a commitment to constituent service that all the conservative Minneapolis Democrats say they want.

On the ballot:

Katie Cashman (incumbent)
Elizabeth Shaffer (DFL-endorsed)
Cory Ryan Vest

Cory Ryan Vest

Cory Vest is a DFL party official and doesn’t have a campaign website I could find. The only information I could find about his campaign was a brief mention in this article. He’s not showing up for forums or responding to questionnaires. He has a personal Facebook and a personal Twitter but on neither page does he have anything about his campaign that I saw. I don’t think he’s actually running.

Katie Cashman

I like Katie Cashman, and honestly I think if the conservative wing of Minneapolis were not still in a snit over her beating their favorite terrible landlord last year, they would also like Katie Cashman, who is moderate, hardworking, and good at constituent services. She showed up in person to deal with a derelict building people had broken into and were squatting in. She tracked down a replacement playground structure (a genuine bargain) to replace the torn-down Loring Greenway playground. (The Star Tribune fills in a detail that had been baffling me: the Loring Greenway is not an official Minneapolis Park and thus it was Minneapolis Public Works, and not the Park Board, that made decisions about that playground.) She worked with Rainville on office-to-residential conversions in downtown, with Palmisano on boulevard gardens, and with Vetaw on a tobacco ordinance.

The We Love Mpls/All of Mpls/Thrive Mpls right-wing we-love-Jacob-Frey-and-Landlords groups (I provided more detail on them in the Ward 2 writeup) likes to pretend that Katie is part of the DSA. There is no way the DSA would endorse Katie; she’s opposed to rent control. Seriously, if the Thrive/All of/We Love Mpls crowd actually wanted a moderate as opposed to a rubber stamp for Jacob Frey with a side of “the biggest developers on the Downtown Council should get whatever they want, regardless of whether it’s good for people who actually live here,” they would have just endorsed Katie and called it a day.

Elizabeth Shaffer

Elizabeth Shaffer has served on the Park Board for the last four years and I have a whole lot of reasons I don’t like her.

  • I don’t think she’s a Democrat. This is not the political donations list of a Democrat. Republican John Pederson, who ran in (and dropped out of) the CD 6 Republican Primary, is her brother; she donated over $5,000 to his campaign. The Democrats she donated to were Antone Melton-Meaux (who ran against Ilhan Omar a few cycles ago) and Amy Klobuchar. Mind you, Open Secrets gives you a weirdly incomplete list, I say based on looking up my own list there, but if she had donated substantially to Angie Craig or Kelly Morrison I have to figure she would have mentioned this while defending herself with “he’s my brother!” when people brought up the donations to Pederson. (Also. I think you can say no even to family members if they are straight up running in the other party! Especially if they voted to ban same-sex marriages. If you absolutely feel that you must show your love with a monetary donation, you can send them $50 as a goodwill gesture instead of maxing out your donation in back-to-back years.)

    She also featured the MN GOP chairman of CD 5 in her campaign kickoff video.

    In addition, her husband donated to Julie Blaha’s Republican opponent in 2022. Elizabeth described herself as a “nonpartisan pragmatist” when she ran in 2021 and had never gone to a caucus. I didn’t like former Ward 7 rep Lisa Goodman but I never doubted she was a Democrat. I did not like Katie Cashman’s opponent in 2023 but he was clearly a long-standing Democrat. I do not think Elizabeth Shaffer is a Democrat!
  • She’s weirdly unqualified for the job. I watched the Ward 7 LWV forum and there’s a question 14 minutes in about 311: “What steps can be taken to improve accountability, timeliness, and transparency in response to calls made to 311 non-emergency service?” Elizabeth’s response: “Accountability for responding to 311 calls is something I know we all deal with. Investigators are in short supply right now in the Minneapolis Police Department, and we all have had situations where we cannot have response time like we would like. So as far as accountability — I would need to learn more about that? figure out what — how the call structure happens for 311? and continue to follow up with residents on how to improve those processes.”

    This answer struck me as so bizarre I double-checked on Bluesky that it was not that I had missed some massive change in what 311 does. There are in fact a ton of things you call 311 for but you do not generally call them to get a police investigator and I think she straight up thought this was a question about some non-emergency version of 911 that she just hadn’t heard about before, which is wild. Here’s a thing I once did with 311: one winter years ago I walked along 42nd Ave from 42nd Street up to Lake and reported every single pothole. (Via the website. I don’t think they had an app at that point.) I was very gratified to see a truck out doing patches later that week.

    It is possibly unfair that I think that if you’re the sort of person who ought to run for office, you should have done this at some point. The city can only fix stuff that public works knows about; it’s a big, complex city and if you notice something that ought to be fixed you should report it, there’s an app and it’s honestly pretty easy! But the fact that she straight up did not know what sorts of things people use the app for and what sorts of problems people have with 311 and she tried to fake it was concerning. Taylor Dahlin also pointed out that 311 is a tool used by renters to get code enforcement, and Elizabeth’s ignorance of that was a red flag.

    And it’s not just this, there are lots of things where she hedges or answers with platitudes or clearly is just out of her depth (and I also saw this in the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire, which is an open-book exam.)
  • As a Park Board member she prioritized parking over building a new park. While pretending the concern was fire safety only to turn around and also prioritize parking over fire safety! I find her comments about this particularly abhorrent because she talks so much about how much she values “listening”: strong “I will listen until someone says the thing I want to hear and I can say ‘the people have spoken!'” vibes. There were literally years of engagement, extensive planning, and $300,000 left on the table. This decision was environmentally bad and also fiscally ridiculous.
  • As a Park Board member she cut youth-focused staff positions. Do I like nicely paved bike paths: yes. Do I think this was a good way to find money to pave the bike paths: absolutely not.
  • She claims to be pro-renter but opposes any and all tenant protections. (In the questionnaire she filled out for We Love Mpls, she checked “no” in response to “Do you think we need additional renter protections?” and also says she opposes Tenant Opportunity to Purchase laws.) She also addresses various types of renter protection in her responses to the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire and is against anything that would require anything from landlords.
  • She did a crap job during the Park Board worker strike. As it dragged on, the Park Board was asked to lean on the negotiators to work honestly towards a settlement and refused to get involved at all. LIUNA, the union that represents the Park Board workers who went on strike last summer, said that Elizabeth (and several others on the board) engaged in union busting.

And this is all not even getting into her redirecting affordable housing money to rebuild a fountain in one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, or the fact that she’s endorsed by a bunch of people I loathe, or her dismissive comments about the Trump administration decisions not affecting Minneapolis, because I want to wrap this up and go for a walk before I need to make dinner.

Vote for Katie Cashman! Donate to her! Volunteer for her! Elizabeth Shaffer is an out-of-touch rich lady who donated over $5,000 to an anti-abortion Republican and believes in landlord protection, not tenant protection.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 6

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As I noted in 2023, this is always the ward I feel the most unqualified to write about. Once again, a lot of the discussion in the ward is happening in Somali; when I went looking for information on Mahamoud Hassan I found a video of a 15-minute campaign event, about 13 minutes of which are in Somali. These people might be making a really powerful case for Hassan and I would not know!

There are two people on the ballot this year:

Mohamoud Hassan (DFL)
Jamal Osman (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)

Mohamoud Hassan filed for the 2020 Ward 6 special election and then didn’t answer questionnaires or attend the candidate forums, and then he filed for Park Board District 3 in 2021 and didn’t campaign at all. This time he actually has a website and attended the LWV forum.

I am not actually a fan of Jamal Osman. (I went into a whole lot of detail two years ago and my suspicion about his connections to the Feeding Our Future scams has not been assuaged by any of the more recent revelations.)

However, I watched about half of the LWV forum and Hassan was just so deeply unimpressive. The first question was about gun violence and what the City Council might be able to do about it and Hassan’s answer was to add more police, period. Jamal Osman talked about prevention, and youth programming, and how much the violence interruptor programs were helping. I watched a bit more of the Q&A and while Osman’s answers were generally pretty nuanced, Hassan’s didn’t improve much. (To be fair, I was struggling to understand him due to both a pretty heavy accent and a mic that added a little bit of an echo. But what I caught just was not great.) I think if I lived in Ward 6 I would vote for Osman.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 5

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Right! Ward 5. City Council Rep Jeremiah Ellison is not running for re-election. On the ballot:

Jovan Northington
Maurice L. Ward
Ethrophic Burnett
Pearll Warren
Miles G. Wilson
Anndrea Young

The tl;dr: I would rank Ethrophic Burnett first, Anndrea Young second.

As I did in my Ward 2 post, I’m going to talk briefly about all the PACs because they have similar names and it’s frankly pretty confusing.

  • There was We Love Mpls. Presumably called that because so many of them love Minneapolis, but don’t live there. (Obligatory note: neither do I, but at least I live in St. Paul and not, say, Wayzata.) Taylor Dahlin wrote about We Love Minneapolis in June. She noted that it’s chaired by (GOP donor) Andrea Corbin, and run by Joe Radinovich and Nico Woods. (Two of the most conservative people in the Minnesota DFL.) The money overwhelmingly came from landlords with large holdings; progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many noted that 68% of their money came from landlords responsible for hundreds of property violations.
  • There is Thrive Minneapolis. In July, We Love Mpls shut down and Thrive Minneapolis seems to be the replacement. Taylor wrote about this group in July. She noted that it’s chaired by Martha Holton Dimick (the very conservative prosecutor who ran against Mary Moriarty in 2022), and again heavily funded by landlords and developers, many of whom do not live in Minneapolis.
  • There is All of Mpls, which is doing endorsements. Legally I am sure they are not actually the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat but if you click on the website you might be forgiven for thinking they basically look like the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat, especially since they have a link to “Thank Mayor Frey” (with a canned, adulatory e-mail). They have endorsed Becka Thompson in Ward 12, which is frankly inexcusable, and if I were Pearll Warren, I’d be pretty annoyed about that. I described them two years ago as “a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.” In retrospect I’m not sure that’s harsh enough. What they want is for Mayor Frey, who is frankly incompetent even if you like his politics, to have a rubber-stamp City Council.
  • On the other side there is the progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many. I like Minneapolis for the Many! They also do endorsements.

One final note about some of the people involved in Love/Thrive/All Of Mpls. On September 9th there was a Zoom meeting of the DFL Feminist Caucus where the people in charge and their friends engaged in some really gross treatment of trans Democrats who showed up and ran for offices. (There’s an open letter about what happened at that meeting here.) Joe Radinovich was there and voting with the hostile majority. Martha Holton Dimick nominated Latonya Reeves, who was one of the people huffing and eye-rolling over the concept of respecting someone’s pronouns. The people misgendering trans DFLers are out of step with things I consider to be core DFL values. If someone has sought and accepted these endorsements, I do not trust them. (Also, the reason the old guard of the DFL Feminist Caucus closed ranks was to defend the right of their friend to continue to hold party office despite her involvement in a fatal crash that has been charged as vehicular homicide. I’ve seen this sort of “how dare you show up in our clubhouse and make trouble” gatekeeping in other contexts and it’s toxic and awful.)

All this is important context because there’s a Minneapolis for the Many candidate in this race (Ethrophic), an All of Mpls candidate (Pearll), a backup All of Mpls candidate (Miles), and then three others, two of whom are too disorganized to take seriously (Jovan and Maurice) and then one who I would say is a reasonable second-choice for progressive voters (Anndrea).

Jovan Northington

Jovan Northington lists websites at both jovan4ward5.org and westrongertogether.org, neither of which works. I e-mailed him and he got back to me with the jovan4ward5.com address, where I found a graphics that show the nonfunctional .org address. He is involved with what may be a nonprofit called “Strength Group” (or maybe it’s just a Facebook page? the westrongertogether.org address is supposed to be their website but again, it’s not working.) He filled out the We Love Mpls candidate screening questionnaire. An important piece of context here is that this questionnaire was done with a web questionnaire that used a lot of radio-button-style click-to-choose options. From the free-response sections, he wants to build “small business resilience incubator hubs” in downtown buildings; provide grants and loans to small businesses; and he would deal with encampments by hiring private security and posting no-trespassing signs.

Maurice L. Ward

Maurice Ward’s website calls him “the People’s Choice,” but the only person who seems to have endorsed him is Jarmel Perry (and the bit about the endorsement quotes Maurice talking about Jarmel, rather than Jarmel talking about Maurice). This article in the Spokesman-Recorder made a much better case for him than his website does: he’s a formerly incarcerated person who started a nonprofit, JIIVE (Justice-Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively) that has created community gardens for formerly incarcerated people and is advocating for the creation of gardens at prisons to give prisoners the opportunity to grow food and eat more fresh produce.

I was curious what exactly he did to wind up incarcerated and turned up this Star Tribune article (it’s sure striking how the way we talk about this stuff has changed in fifteen years. Pretty sure the Star Trib wouldn’t have a headline talking about a “juvenile hooker ring” these days.) Maurice served 12.5 years, according to the information in a Star Tribune editorial he co-wrote last year. (Can I just note: that’s a lot more time than was served by any of the white sex offenders I’ve known.) (“How many sex offenders have you known, Naomi?” Three men I’ve known personally, all of them white, have been convicted of sex offenses against children. Two got probation or suspended sentences with no time behind bars and one served less than six months.)

Anndrea Young

Anndrea answered both the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire and the We Love Mpls questionnaire. Her answers on both are worth browsing (again, just be aware that the WLM questionnaire was heavily based around multiple-choice questions — I appreciate that Anndrea resolutely clicked mostly the ones that WLM clearly didn’t want you picking.) One of her central concerns is the problem of displacement (particularly around the coming Blue Line extension). I appreciate this because sometime back a candidate in Ward 6 talked about the problem of “gentrification” and said that we should frame the problem as displacement. It’s not that nice stuff is bad, it’s that the nice stuff should be available to the people in the area where it’s being built, rather than those people being shoved out of the way. She gives mostly very short answers on the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire, but generally aligns with Ethrophic rather than Pearll. One note regarding the We Love Mpls questionnaire — they ask people to rate themselves on a liberal-to-conservative scale where the left side is 1 and the conservative side is 10. Anndrea rated herself an 8. I confirmed by e-mail that this was because she’d misread the question, she should have rated herself a 2.

Anndrea is endorsed by Brooklyn Park City Council rep Shelle Page, the group Run for Something, and she’s the second-choice ranking from SEIU.

Miles G. Wilson

Miles has a nice website (one of the two really nice websites), was funded by We Love Mpls but is not endorsed by All Of Mpls, and is rumored to have had his mom fill out questionnaires for him. In his We Love Mpls questionnaire he said (or his mom said) that he’s opposed to the separation ordinance that forbids Minneapolis city staff from asking people about their immigration status. I e-mailed him to ask if this reflects his actual views or if he misread something (this was before I ran across the gossip that his mom filled out the forms anyway, but tbh this is still a reasonable question, is this what he actually believes or a mistake in filling out the form? I have not heard back from him yet.) I would describe his overall set of responses in the We Love Mpls form to be sympathetic towards police, less sympathetic towards landlords (he thinks we need more cops more than we need more accountability for cops — that’s one of the “pick one” radio button answers — but he’s also pro-rent-control.)

His website emphasizes constituent services, transit, and public safety. There are no endorsements listed, which honestly I find pretty surprising. He’s apparently the backup All of Mpls candidate. Not sure if he’s got support from anywhere else.

Pearll Warren

Pearll Warren is the candidate endorsed by All of Mpls (and my read on this race is that it’s between her and Ethrophic, they’re the two people with money, endorsements, and volunteers.) She filled out both the We Love Mpls questionnaire and the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire.

Pearll has a compelling background: she’s currently a Homeownership Development Manager for Habitat for Humanity, and has previously worked as a HUD housing counselor. One of her policy proposals that really startled me (which she mentions in both questionnaires) is that we should be addressing homelessness/encampments in part by using civil commitments to forcibly confine mentally ill people for treatment whether they agree to this or not. (“We also need to responsibly utilize civil commitment orders when necessary, to ensure those experiencing severe mental or emotional instability receive the care and stabilization they need. Compassionate intervention—not criminalization—is how we begin to address this crisis with the urgency and dignity it deserves.” — That’s in the NfMN questionnaire.) I kind of suspect that her attitude here has been shaped in part by the work she’s done.

I want to quickly make a couple of points about civil commitment:

  • Our standard for civil commitment is that you can be placed under involuntary hold if you’re a danger to yourself or others, and you have to genuinely be a danger. I think this is a good standard.
  • We do not have enough beds to provide mental health treatment to the people who are actively seeking mental health treatment, so the idea that we can solve homelessness with more involuntary holds strikes me as really questionable unless we’re going to put some sort of massive investment into high-security mental health treatment facilities.
  • This seems like a singularly bad time to be ramping up involuntary confinement of people we’ve decided are mentally ill.

Moving on. She’s opposed to a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act on the grounds that “property owners should be able to sell their property to whom they choose to sell it to.” (I am not as anti-landlord as a lot of my friends but in general I’m more sympathetic to the people who will potentially lose their home than to the people who will potentially make less money on their investment, so I disagree with her on this.) On eviction protection, she says we should focus on root causes: “wages that don’t keep up with rent, rising living costs, and a lack of affordable options.” I mean, yes, this is all true, but part of why I’ve gone from “rent control is a terrible idea” to “actually maybe we should try some rent control” is stuff like price-fixing on the part of landlords, which makes it just about impossible for wages to keep up with rent. (She does in fact support rent control, with a bunch of caveats that I tend to agree with, like exemptions for new construction.)

One final thing I noticed that she brings up on the NfMN questionnaire is a concern about the location of the Blue Line extension (in her response to Question 3): “First and foremost, we have a train currently scheduled to run through North Minneapolis, up 21st Avenue—a route that would severely divide our community, particularly within the 5th Ward. I want to work closely with the Metropolitan Council to reroute the light rail up Olson Memorial Highway, connecting to Highway 100 and linking with suburban communities. This was the original plan, and our business corridor along Olson was dismantled with that purpose in mind. It’s time for that investment to serve its intended function.” You can see the proposed route here (and also leave comments). I don’t know enough about the geography of the area to say whether I think she’s right about this or not. (I do think that one of the fundamental things about building light rail is that people will object to literally anywhere you put it and if you try to find some sort of perfect location you’ll just never build it, and I really think North Minneapolis deserves a light rail extension, though.)

Ethrophic Burnett

Ethrophic Burnett is a project manager for the City of Minneapolis and has worked for the city since 2018. Prior to that she worked for Urban Homeworks and the Northside Achievement Zone. She makes some specific commitments around responsiveness and constituent services (regular community office hours, and quarterly meetings with community leaders) (just about everyone mentions responsiveness and constituent services; it’s one of those things that’s easy to promise, hard to provide, and hard to evaluate from the outside.)

She did not respond to the We Love Mpls questionnaire but provided detailed responses to the Neighbors for More Neighbors questionnaire. She and Pearll diverge about where you’d expect: Ethrophic supports Tenant Opportunity to Purchase laws, she’s more positive toward rent control, and she’s opposed to encampment clearing (“Clearing encampments doesn’t solve homelessness, it just moves it around”).

Where Pearll is pretty direct about supporting civil commitment to deal with drug addiction, Ethrophic is pretty direct about harm reduction when she talks about how she’d handle homelessness: “That includes creating safe, sanctioned spaces with access to restrooms, sanitation, mental health and addiction services, and consistent engagement by trained city staff, not law enforcement.” (I am sort of assuming she’s talking here about creating a legal encampment site. I have mixed feelings about this solution, but it’s better than the thing where we fence off sidewalks to keep people from putting tents under bridges and periodically throw everyone’s stuff away.)

(Absolutely everyone agrees that the Avivo Village model is great and effective and gets a lot of people into housing who are not open to living in a traditional shelter. My question on this is, if everyone agrees that Avivo Village is fantastic, why are there not now a dozen similar places all over the metro? What’s the obstacle? I have written to Avivo’s press person and will report back at some point.)

Ethrophic is endorsed by Minneapolis for the Many, Take Action MN, Hennepin County Commissioners Irene Fernando and Angela Conley, and all the Ellisons. (Jeremiah, Keith, Kim.)

I would rank Ethrophic Burnett first and Anndrea Young second.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Mayoral Race (the four contenders)

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There are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor. You only have to worry about four of them, and this post will talk about those four. If you want to know more about all the others, that is in a separate post.

The four candidates who might actually win in November:

Jacob Frey (incumbent)
Omar Fateh
Jazz Hampton
DeWayne Davis

The tl;dr is that my current ranking is (1) DeWayne Davis; (2) Omar Fateh; (3) Jazz Hampton. What I would really strongly encourage people to do if they don’t want Jacob but aren’t sure how they feel about the precise order of the challengers is to pick a favorite as soon as possible and donate and doorknock. Four years ago, I got my post up really late, and I was indecisive, and I think I was probably not the only person who got caught up in analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis that keeps you from donating and volunteering will get you four more years of Jacob Frey! I am here RIGHT NOW, TODAY with information to help you make a decision (which can totally be different from the one I’m making! Get out there and doorknock for Omar Fateh or Jazz Hampton if one of them is your first choice!) Frey is extremely unpopular; the biggest hill to climb for his opponents is name recognition.

I made an effort this month to meet DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh, and Jazz Hampton in person. I went to a DeWayne Davis meet-and-greet at a park, an Omar Fateh fundraiser, and a Jazz Hampton meet-and-greet at a playground. I asked each of them if they could identify a problem that they thought they could solve as mayor — Minneapolis is facing plenty of problems, some very complicated and some more straightforward, was there any particular problem that they looked at and thought, “make me mayor, and I could fix this one.” I didn’t try to find Jacob to ask this question because he’s been mayor for eight years; he’s had his chance.

Something I found worthwhile was the Mayoral Candidate Q&A from the city DFL convention. There are some challenging and interesting questions. (You can skip 5 seconds at a time with arrow keys if there are candidates you don’t want to hear from.) One caveat is that the video was taken from over to the side and you can’t always tell who’s talking; you have to be able to recognize the candidate’s voices (which mostly I can, but mileage may vary here.)

Cut because the analysis is going to get long!

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