Do not skip this one! You need to vote, and you need to tell your friends to vote, and you need to tell them how to vote. The tl;dr is that you should vote 1. Eric Harris Bernstein; 2. Steve Brandt. Read on for more information.

This is a two-seat race with three people running. MPR has a helpful video explaining how instant-runoff voting works in a multi-seat race. (If I tried to explain it, it would be very confusing; the video actually makes it genuinely more clear.)

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Steve Brandt (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Eric Harris Bernstein
Bob Fine (DFL-endorsed)

The BET sets the property tax levy for Minneapolis — this means that they determine the amount of money that the city can raise through property taxes, which is then split up based on the value of property people own. (You can play around with the property tax estimator if you’re curious what other people’s bills look like.) How that money then gets spent is determined by the city budget, made by the City Council and the Mayor. The BET can also decide to sell city bonds.

There are six people on the BET: in addition to the two people elected directly, there’s the mayor; the Council President; the Council Member who chairs the Council committee whose charge includes the budget; and one Park Board Commissioner. You can see the current makeup of the board here.

This is a low-profile elected job where you very much need people who are nerdy about budgets and finance, detail-oriented, and ethical. It’s paid, but not very much — $400/month (or $0 if you’re also on City Council or the Mayor.) If you’ve ever tried to recruit someone to be treasurer for a small volunteer-run organization, you have probably noticed that detail-oriented ethical budget and finance nerds are in short supply.

Good news, though, we’ve got two running!

Steve Brandt

Steve Brandt was elected four years ago and has done a fine job. Among other things, he supported colleague Samantha Pree-Stinson’s proposal to livestream their monthly meetings and make the video available. (Samantha is not running for re-election.) It appears that 132 people have watched the August meeting.

Steve is a retired journalist, and has brought his interest in follow-up questions to working on the board; he recently supported a property tax increase but on the condition that the mayor and City Council do a study on other ways to raise revenue. (From Steve’s website: “One proposal I support is to extend downtown’s liquor and restaurant taxing zone to include all of the North Loop’s bars and restaurants. That means that the owners of these businesses will have a level playing field instead of some having to bill for the tax and others not.”)

His list of supporters includes lots of people I don’t like, but in this case I think that’s fine. What I think we’re all in agreement on is that we appreciate Steve’s solid competence.

Eric Harris Bernstein

Eric Harris Bernstein joined the race too late to ask for DFL endorsement, which is unfortunate. (Samantha Pree-Stinson was originally planning to run for re-election, and withdrew from the race in early August due to health issues.) It’s unfortunate he didn’t have the opportunity to get endorsed, because he’s a terrific candidate. Eric is a progressive policy analyst who started out in policy and discovered “a passion for taxes.” He has worked since 2020 for We Make Minnesota, a coalition of labor and progressive groups organizing specifically around taxes and a more equitable tax code.

He is bringing both progressive values and a ton of actual expertise on taxation to the table. That’s actually genuinely rare in a new candidate for BET and I am really excited by the prospect of adding him to the board! I also listened to the WedgeLive interview with him and highly recommend it if you’d like to know more about his approach, or for that matter, more about what the BET does. (I linked to the WedgeLive YouTube channel but you can also listen to it as a podcast.)

Bob Fine

The Minneapolis DFL Convention got a lot of news coverage but one thing that got kind of skipped over in the coverage is that the convention skipped over debate and Q&A and everything else and endorsed Steve Brandt and Bob Fine for BET, I think basically because they were the two people showing up to ask for endorsement (Samantha Pree-Stinson was not seeking DFL endorsement) and because people wanted to get to the mayoral endorsement vote before they ran out of time. Which was valid, but unfortunate because in my opinion, Bob Fine really should not have been endorsed.

First of all, I think it’s worth noting, he sent out zero communications ahead of the convention (unlike Steve, who sent out a set of e-mail messages to the delegates talking about his values and accomplishments) and (ETA: as of September 9th, when I posted this) he has no website, no campaign Facebook, nothing on any social media that I could find, no information about why he wants this office or what he plans to do if he’s elected. He ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 2013, and his LinkedIn still references that race, and there’s nothing else that I could find! (ETA: here’s the website he put up in mid-September.)

Back in 2013, he gave an interview to MPR where he pledged to cut the city levy by 5% while refusing to specify what cuts he’d make to achieve that goal. (“All you have to do is audit city departments.”) This article also mentions that he’s a Faribault slumlord: “Among his holdings is a 20-unit apartment building in downtown Faribault. City records show building inspectors complained to its manager ‘numerous times’ about a malfunctioning elevator in the 143-year-old building. In 2011, they threatened to close part of the building if the problems weren’t addressed. Other records show recent problems with cockroaches, illegally installed air conditioners and a broken dumpster.” (Fine’s defense was that he was just the owner, not the manager. I don’t know if he still owns the building.)

All of that is actually problematic enough. But there’s more. Fine spent a number of years on the Park Board; in 2003, he forced through the hiring of an old buddy as superintendent of the Parks system. This was covered in a 2010 City Pages article that vanished with the City Pages archive but which you can still access through Archive.org. He ran for Park Board again in 2017 (I wrote about it here) and again in 2021 (I wrote about it here).

In his 2021 race for the Park Board, he was endorsed by the crowd that wanted to keep an 18-hole golf course at Hiawatha. Also from that race, he said at a LWV forum that homelessness was “far and away something that is not the mission of the Minneapolis Park Board. Neither is it a mission of the School Board, or the library system.” My comment at the time was that both the Minneapolis Public Schools and the library system deal with homelessness every day and do, in fact, treat it as part of their mission; his ignorance here should have embarrassed him.

Anyway. The fact that he showed up, got endorsed, and then completely dropped out of sight and has no website (ETA: did not get a website up until mid-September) or anything is frankly not a great sign! But his history with Gurban is all by itself a legitimate reason to not elect him again.

Vote (1) Eric Harris Bernstein, (2) Steve Brandt. And tell your friends! Because again, this is a race a lot of people don’t pay much attention to, and there are absolutely people who will show up on November 4th and vote for the DFL-endorsed candidates.

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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.)