There are two people running in Ward 3:

Michael Rainville (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Marcus Mills (Green endorsed)

Michael Rainville

I do not like Michael Rainville. I didn’t like him as a candidate, and he has pretty much completely fulfilled my expectations. Rainville is a Frey lackey, always ready to defend cops whether it makes any damn sense or not (if you say “mission accomplished” regarding Cedric Alexander, I am curious what you think the mission was?) In July of 2022, he scapegoated Somali youths for recent violence, doubled down, then kinda sorta apologized only to say later the same day that he had to be careful about what he said in front of who.

In the “Progress” section of his website, something went wrong with the display and the “Homelessness” section looked like this when I pulled it up:

This struck me as humorously ironic, since what it suggests is, “I want to make a vague statement of goodwill towards homeless people, while demonstrably not really giving much of a shit.” (Which, you know … maybe that’s not irony. Maybe that’s just accurate?) To be fair, though, I use Firefox, and it might look OK in Chrome, so I pulled it up in Chrome for another look….

FYI, when I selected the text in Chrome, the rest of it came along, so that sentence is supposed to finish, “typically been responsible for addressing homelessness. If we are going to continue this progress, we need to work together toward solutions in good faith.” Even with all the text there, this is a real nothing of a statement, and when you say that homeless encampments pose “serious public and individual health risks” without acknowledging that the biggest health risk homelessness poses is to the people who are living in Minneapolis without homes, you’re being pretty goddamn shameless about the extent to which you think you serve the wealthy people who view homeless people as the central problem, rather than a lack of housing.

Also, under public safety, there’s this: “Public safety reform should be guided by the lived experience of officers and citizens, not just ideology. That’s why I make frequent visits to the First Precinct and listen to officers discuss their experiences on the job. We must reckon with the fact that we are down over 300 officers from pre-2019 levels, and that recruiting more officers cannot be fixed immediately, even with additional funding. Rebuilding the force will help restore community policing, reduce response times, and improve police-community relations. But there is so much more that we must do.” When you say, “Public safety reform should be guided by the lived experience of officers and citizens” and then talk at length and in detail about how much time you’ve spent listening to officers and have zero examples of listening to the people who are policed by those officers and all the rest of your rhetoric is about how hard things are for police officers and there’s not even any lip service about stuff like accountability: you have made your position and priorities really, really clear! This is why I do not like or trust you, Michael Rainville.

Marcus Mills

Marcus Mills is endorsed by the Green party, former City Council representatives Cam Gordon and Jeremy Schroeder, and former Mayoral candidate Sheila Nezhad. He has reasonably substantial local policy experience (an energy advisory committee, a community engagement commission, chair of the neighborhood association land use and development committee). On his issues page he talks about wanting participatory budgeting, solar panels on schools, and tenant protections (among other things — basically, his goals suggest that he’d be more aligned with the progressive wing of the City Council than Michael Rainville is.)

He also mentions playing D&D in his bio. I feel like there’s a whole set of jokes to be made here about the ways in which D&D does and doesn’t prepare you for serving on a City Council (on one hand: you’ve proved you’re capable of paying attention through long meetings. On the other hand: at a City Council meeting you don’t ever get to solve problems by casting Chain Lightning.)

His Facebook page has no new posts since June; his Events page turns up no events. So I am not sure how actively he’s campaigning. But he’ll be on the ballot, and I would absolutely vote for him.

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