I wrote about this race in the primary but wanted to revisit it in the general election. Again, the candidates running are:
Election 2018: Hennepin County Commissioner, District 4
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Tag Archives: Peter McLaughlin
Election 2018: Hennepin County Commissioner, District 4
Peter McLaughlin has been the District 4 Hennepin County Commissioner for approximately forever. (Okay, found it: since 1991. I was starting college in 1991 and didn’t move to Minneapolis until 1995.)
I have a long-running sense of not liking him very much, although in part this is because he was a close ally of Sharon Sayles Belton, who I didn’t like (I really disliked the projects the city undertook during her administration), although she got replaced by RT Rybak seventeen years ago now, so this is a somewhat outdated grudge.
My main ongoing grudge against Peter McLaughlin is that he is a big fan of spending public money on sports facilities. He helped pass a county-wide tax to build the Twins ballpark, and to circumvent the law saying they were supposed to hold a referendum on it. He was less enthusiastic about the county funding the Vikings Stadium, but had this hilarious/infuriating line about why referendums were bad:
A referendum “doesn’t make a bad idea any better,” said Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, who voted for Target Field but dislikes the Vikings stadium proposal. “I don’t believe in government by referendum. It lets elected officials off the hook for making judgments about these things.”
The point of a referendum isn’t to make “bad ideas better,” it’s to make it possible for people to shoot down the plan of spending their money on sports facilities. It’s not like Minneapolis voters shoot down every referendum that comes their way; they faithfully pass school-levy referendums. People want referendums on sports facilities because it appears to be the only possible way to keep politicians from cramming them down our throats over and over and over.
More recently, he tried to swing a deal for the soccer stadium whereby the “excess capacity” of the Target Field sales tax would go to pay for the soccer stadium, instead. What that means: currently, there is a 0.15% sales tax collected in Hennepin County. Out of that money, $5 million/year goes to libraries, youth and sports programs, and long-term ballpark maintenance. The rest goes to pay off the $350 million in bonds that were sold to fund the construction of Target Field. At the moment, that tax is collecting quite a bit more than they’d expected, allowing the county to pay off the debt early. (They’d planned on a 30-year repayment plan, and they’re going to be done in 20 years. At which point the tax is supposed to just end.)
I mean, there are a couple of ways to look at this. I tend to think, “no, you assholes, pay off the motherfucking debt and dump the tax we never agreed to.” It’s not entirely unreasonable to say, “hey, we’ve planned for that thirty-year term, so let’s just take the extra money and spend it on civic improvements,” but I don’t then say, “…like yet another sports facility!!!!”
As it happens, that plan fell through and the stadium was built in St. Paul.
On the plus side, Peter is a big fan of bike paths and transit. I am also a fan of bike paths and transit, and I particularly love the Greenway, which he was one of the movers-and-shakers for.
But this is the first time in years that Peter has had any sorts of real opponent; last time, the only person running against him was Captain Jack Sparrow. So I’m excited at the possibility of someone who likes bike paths and transit, and is not and endless booster of circumventing laws about referendums to build sports stadiums. (If you’re a sports stadiums kind of voter, Peter’s your guy, but one of the bizarre things about the whole “yeah, let’s spent a gazillion dollars building yet another sportsball palace!” thing is that public sentiment runs so strongly against these projects!)
Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Election 2014: Hennepin County Commissioner, District 4
I’m going to link again to this excellent article about why the County Board is important and why you should care about it.
In Hennepin County, they run your libraries, because Minneapolis handed over their entire system to the county. They appoint two of the members of the Three Rivers Parks District board of commissioners. The Three Rivers Parks district has some truly outstanding regional parks, though among parents it’s probably best known for Chutes and Ladders. (If you’re a parent of a child between three and twelve and you haven’t heard of Chutes & Ladders, you need to pull up that link, note down the address, and take your kids there IMMEDIATELY.)
It can sometimes be a little confusing about where the city stops and the county starts. In Minneapolis, your trash is picked up by the city. But if you have Household Hazardous Waste, which you can’t put in the trash, that’s handled by the county. There are county highways that run through the city and I’m not actually sure but it’s possible those are plowed and have their potholes filled by the county. Hennepin County maintains the office to end homelessness, which does most of its work in Minneapolis. The city has the fire department, which will come to your house if you call 911 about a fire, but I’m pretty sure that the county has the ice rescue team, who will come to try to save your life if someone calls 911 because you went through the ice. This seamlessness is mostly a good thing, I think; if things are running smoothly, you aren’t going to need to know whether a service is being provided by the city, the county, or the state. (And if there’s an emergency, you can just dial 911, and whether it’s a city, county, or state employee that responds to your emergency is not your problem.) But the net result is that a lot of county stuff is somewhat invisible to citizens. And they do a LOT.
Here’s who’s running:
PETER MCLAUGHLIN – NONPARTISAN
CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW – NONPARTISAN
Peter is one of those long-standing been-around-forever candidates whose names makes me bristle and I can’t quite remember why. I conferred with Ed, who said he was a former crony of Sharon Sayles-Belton. I remember several years of trying aggressively to vote out as many of Sharon’s buddies as possible, but clearly McLaughlin stuck around and at this point, it’s been over a decade and if I can’t find a more recent reason to hate him, I think “buddy of Sharon” is probably past its freshness date. (I mean, if you’re on the county board, you SHOULD be working well with the current mayor of Minneapolis, right?) But, he also supported Mark Andrew, so if you really hated Mark Andrew, there’s that.
Looking up Mark Andrew took me to this article, in which (totally independent and not Republican at all) mayoral candidate Cam Winton objected to the fact that Peter McLaughlin arranged to release a YouTube video (made with county funds) on the official Hennepin County channel about the program that built the Greenway that just so happened to be very flattering to Mark Andrew and which came out right before the election. The link in the article no longer works but I tracked down what appears to be the video on YouTube. Oddly, the video that’s now on YouTube was released November 12th (a week after the election) so the fact that it does not contain egregious quantities of Mark Andrew may not actually represent what Cam was complaining about earlier. The main thing I’d say is worth objecting to about the video is that it clearly represents significant time and energy on the part of some county employee and yet has a whopping 95 views. And that’s pretty representative of their overall viewership. GUYS. YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. The silly video of a bad fashion tips demonstration made by my daughters and their friends has 107 views. SRSLY GUYS.
I felt like one of my lingering grudges against him was stadium-related, and yeah, McLaughlin was one of the Hennepin County people who not only passed a county-specific sales tax to build the Twins’ ballpark, but also arranged to circumvent the requirement to hold a referendum. He then did not support the Vikings stadium deal, but that didn’t matter since it was passed by the state and funded by the state. That article has sort of a hilarious bit about the suggestions for a referendum:
A referendum “doesn’t make a bad idea any better,” said Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, who voted for Target Field but dislikes the Vikings stadium proposal. “I don’t believe in government by referendum. It lets elected officials off the hook for making judgments about these things.”
Yeah, you know what? A referendum doesn’t make a bad idea any better. But it at least empowers people to say no to a bad idea, like a $1.024 billion sports palace, $498 million of which is coming from the public purse, and I was going to make a joke here about how bad the Vikings are, but frankly it doesn’t even matter. Even if they were the best team in the country, I think they should buy their own goddamn stadium (or continue playing in the one they already had).
Anyway, I guess we can’t blame that one on Peter, although there was a point where he was being awfully cagey about his feelings on the subject.
Overall, I’m not 100% sold on Peter. My general impression of him is someone who will do generally good work but will tuck in favors to friends here and there, and his friends may be people I don’t like very much. In his favor, he supports green energy and transit, he helped build the Midtown Greenway (which is awesome), and the county mostly runs smoothly.
Or, if you prefer, you could vote for a guy who cosplays a drunken, lunatic swashbuckler?
I am pretty sure that Jack wants you to take him seriously. He has an article on his blog about his past accomplishments; he’s spent about 40 years as an activist, focused largely on housing. In recent years he’s worked with Occupy Minnesota to make life hard for banks foreclosing on homeowners. Back in the late 1980s he founded an advocacy group called People United for Economic Justice, which used similar tactics (occasionally in collaboration with anarchist bowling-ball-throwers — I’m not making this up, Jack links to the wikipedia article about the other group because it mentions their collaboration with his group.)
Taking him as seriously as I can for a minute, I will note a couple of things.
* As an activist, he is extremely fond of the sit-in. Back in the 1980s it was HUD homes and the Gold Medal Flour building; now it’s foreclosed houses and banks. There’s a lot to be said about that tactic but when I’m looking at a person whose sole qualification is “activist” and considering them for elected office, I want to see a bit more range.
* Things he’s involved in seem to go awry pretty regularly. (“In the case of the St. Paul lawyer’s office, the order to move in to open the door never arrived. As a result, one of our members was charged with assault when a false claim was made that he had caused a woman who had been inside the office to fall after the door was forcibly opened, causing her an injury. The door was forcibly opened by pulling on it while it was being held from the inside, but the person accused was not involved and was found not guilty by a jury.” — Um, if your group forced open a door and injured someone, SOMEONE should probably have been found guilty by that jury. I mean, maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it sounds like he’s saying, because of a communication lapse on the part of the Occupy people, a false claim was made that someone had injured someone by forcing open a door. And in fact we DID forcibly open a door, it just wasn’t the person who got accused who did it! …if I AM reading it wrong, it’s because his explanation is awfully confusing. Poor communication skills: also not a plus in an elected official.)
* A lot of what he accomplishes seems to boil down to attention, rather than substantive results. Which shouldn’t be entirely surprising with someone who went to court and changed his legal name to Captain Jack Sparrow.
Anyway. Even setting aside the fact that he changed his name to Captain Jack Sparrow … he strikes me as someone who’d be profoundly ineffective in this job. But in any case I see no reason to set that aside. THE GUY CHANGED HIS NAME TO CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW.
I liked the Pirates of the Caribbean movies! They were a blast! Captain Jack Sparrow is a great character and terrific fun to watch! I DO NOT WANT HIM REPRESENTING ME IN ANY POLITICAL OFFICE, UP TO AND INCLUDING DOGCATCHER.
Will Tell Stories For Food 