Tag Archives: Katie Cashman

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.)

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 7

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OK: I’m going to level with you. I am not going to research this one anywhere near as thoroughly as I researched Ward 6, because this one, thank goodness, is frankly pretty straightforward and honestly, anyone who is willing to spend two minutes looking at the candidate websites doesn’t need my advice on this race anyway.

The candidates:

Scott Graham
Katie Cashman
Kenneth Foxworth

Kenneth Foxworth

Kenneth Foxworth is on the ballot and has a website, but it’s the kind of website where the “latest news” link takes you to a page that says “blog” and has nothing else. He is on the ballot but he’s not really in the race.

Scott Graham

Scott Graham is endorsed by an amazing selection of groups and individuals I don’t like, including retiring Council Member Lisa Goodman herself but also Martha Holton Dimick, Tom Hoch, and Mark Globus; he’s also the All of Mpls pick (All of Mpls is a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.) He also made a campaign ad all about how he’s a former Eagle Scout. This guy is in his 60s: if your campaign ad highlights an achievement from the 1970s, it suggests your more recent achievements wouldn’t play well, and given that he’s a landlord with unhappy tenants, he might be right about that. (Link goes to Twitter; @happyifydesign says, “He was my extremely incompetent and delinquent landlord and if his ability to responsibly manage properties is any indication…”)

OK, honestly, it’s probably worth highlighting some of the other stuff happifydesign has mentioned about Scott. From that tweet (posted in November 2021, well before he decided to run for office): “One triplex I lived, the downstairs neighbors moved out because their toilet froze solid. We spent multiple winters trying to get the heat fixed, but the landlord did nothing until we went to the City–then he fixed it (+ other violations) and sold the building and kicked us out.” Further down the thread: “Two of us ended up needing stitches due to injuries from his poorly kept unit (things not affixed safely). He wouldn’t remove the dead squirrel from inside the wall, nor did he care about the rapidly increasing population of carpenter ants, nor the ice dams leaking into the house.” And an even earlier thread: “Housing inspections had a long list of things for him to fix. He did so in a way that was absolutely punitive to us–like tearing down our three season porch with no notice whatsoever one day while I was working from home, with teens who hooked a jeep up to it with chains. Then rebuilt it EXTREMELY slowly with our wall a gaping hole with a tarp the whole time. I think it was open from April to October? I remember light snow blowing in at the end. He was just spectacularly unfit to be a landlord, based on his (lack of) respect for the structural integrity of buildings and his extreme defensiveness triggered by any requests from tenants. … We ran into a neighbor we’d never met at a party who was shocked to hear people lived in our building–they thought it had been condemned. We also found a note with phone number on the door from a handyman offering to help finish tearing the house down. … He mixed concrete in my roommate’s vintage catherine holm bowls–and left them dirty with concrete in the sink, which is how she figured it out. The three different units of the building were instructed to send our rent to three different entities.”

Maybe you live in Ward 7 and like Lisa Goodman because of her constituent services. I don’t think you’re going to get this level of service from Scott.

ETA: John Edwards of WedgeLive followed up on this and interviewed the tenant. You can watch that interview here, or you can listen to it as a podcast here. He also has some additional information on his website, including an article Scott wrote back in 2001 about buying “derelict properties in prime neighborhoods” and rehabbing them.

Here’s my favorite bit from that interview.

John: Tell me, how did the missing wall come about?
Julia: When we were trying to get heat in the apartment, Scott was just evasive and saying things that weren’t turning into action, and it was really unclear if we would get any heat. The other roommates who’d been there longer had suggestions, like maybe if we can’t get the heat replaced the landlord [could] cover part of the electric so that we can run space heaters. We’d done things like putting the plastic — this is the long answer — putting the plastic over all the windows. Scott was not responsive and we ended up trying to figure out what else we could do. We talked to the city and found out that one option to really put pressure on was to look into putting rent into escrow or starting an inspection process. […] So the city did an inspection which revealed additional violations. Including the three-season porch on the front which led to the wall coming off.
John: So the thing you didn’t even complain about — the city shows up to inspect the thing you were complaining about, finds more problems, and that turns into a big repair job.
Julia: I mean repair would really be an understatement. It was a demolition job. […]
John: So you had a big gaping hole in the side of the house, is that accurate?
Julia: There were tarps.

You know, the thing that really strikes me about the whole story is how much Scott’s tenants tried to work with him. How much they didn’t want to go to the city. How much they put up with. And this is so! common! among renters! And she goes on to say that she thinks Scott mistreated them because they’d been “the squeaky wheel” because they pushed him repeatedly on not having any heat and squirrels living in the walls and the roof leaking and being left with a tarp covering the front of the house for multiple months.

Katie Cashman

Katie Cashman is endorsed by Faith in Minnesota (a left-wing progressive group, if you’re unfamiliar with them), OutFront, some environmental groups, and then also a whole bunch of people I like a lot, including Jim Davnie, Tom Olsen, and Becky Alper. She’s also the Minneapolis for the Many candidate (Minneapolis for the Many is a PAC created to support candidates who support things like police accountability and tenant’s rights.)

She comes at housing questions from the perspective of a renter, rather than a landlord. While both Katie and Scott talk about building more affordable housing, Katie talks about funding free legal counsel for tenants facing evictions. She also offers up specifics for dealing with homelessness like housing-first approaches and offering co-ed and gender-neutral shelter spaces.

She commits to a bunch of very specific goals for constituent service (forums before budget meetings, office hours for constituents, neighborhood association visits, newsletters…) (Scott just says he’ll provide “the highest level of service,” he doesn’t say what that means. Someone should ask him whether he believes he provides the highest level of service to his tenants.)

Fundamentally, though, this is one of those races where the endorsements make it really easy. I would absolutely vote for Katie Cashman if i lived in Ward 7.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)