Minneapolis has two charter questions on the ballot. The fact that these rules are currently written in the charter means that in order to change them, they have to pass citywide referendum. Here are the two questions:

CITY QUESTION 1 (Minneapolis)
FILING FEE FOR CITY ELECTED OFFICES
Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to increase the filing fees for candidates seeking City elected offices from the current fee of $20 for each office to $500 for the office of Mayor, $250 for the office of Council Member, $100 for the office of Board of Estimate and Taxation Member, and $100 for the office of Park & Recreation Commissioner and, as an alternative to payment of a filing fee, allow a candidate to submit a petition of voter signatures as provided in state law?

CITY QUESTION 2 (Minneapolis)
REMOVE MANDATORY FOOD REQUIREMENTS FOR WINE LICENSES
Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to remove the requirement that businesses holding on-sale wine licenses in the City must serve food with every order of wine or beer and to remove mandatory food to wine and beer sales ratios?

CITY QUESTION 1 (Minneapolis)
FILING FEE FOR CITY ELECTED OFFICES

I will admit that on a very personal level, I am torn about this. Blogging about all thirty-five mayoral candidates in Minneapolis last time was kind of fun. If you raise the fee above the current $20, you’re going to lose the candidates like the “WAKE THE **** UP, MINNEAPOLIS!!!!” guy, the Laurist Communist, and Chris Zimmerman, who conscientiously blogged about every other candidate with the question, “would they actually be better at this job than I would be?”

I have occasionally thought about how if I were the Hat Guy from xkcd, I would approach all ballots with the question, “what would be most entertaining to me, personally?” But I’m not, and I don’t, and I think people should vote “yes” on this question.

I was curious how many signatures it took to get around this. To avoid paying the fee, you need either 500 signatures OR 5% of the number of ballots cast for that office in the previous election, whichever number is smaller.

The only thing here that seems unreasonable is the $100 to file for BET, given that it only pays $20/month. At the same time, though, the last thing you want is to make the BET the job that all the nuts run for.

But in general this seems like a really reasonable move. The $500/500 signatures requirement is not going to seriously impede anyone who’s got an actual campaign going; it will, however, deter the hobbyists. And while I find the hobbyists to be great fuel for snark and hilarity, I do not think it’s good for Minneapolis voters to have to wade through the weirdos when voting.

CITY QUESTION 2 (Minneapolis)
REMOVE MANDATORY FOOD REQUIREMENTS FOR WINE LICENSES

It used to be pretty common to require restaurants to sell a certain amount of food to demonstrate they’re not a bar. However, as craft beer has become more popular, even in restaurants that truly are restaurants, it can be really easy to screw this up and get in trouble.

In general I think Minneapolis over-regulates alcohol. This is one of my grew-up-in-Wisconsin biases. Ed and I got married in Madison; we had a picnic the night before the wedding for all our out-of-town guests, held at a picnic shelter at Hoyt Park, and provided a keg of beer. Ed wanted me to call the Madison parks department to make absolutely sure this was legal, because in Minneapolis, it totally would not be. Here’s more or less how the call went.

Me: Hi. I have the shelter at Hoyt Park reserved on [date] and I was planning to get a keg of beer.
Madison Parks Lady: {puzzled silence}
Me: …aaaand I just wanted to make sure that would be okay.
Madison Parks Lady: You’re just going to drink the beer, right? Not do anything…weird?
Me: Yeah, we’re just going to drink it.
Madison Parks Lady: We don’t allow glass containers at any of the beaches, though, if you were holding your party at a beach you’d need to drink it out of plastic cups.

Anyway. Yeah, I think restaurants should be allowed to serve expensive beer and not worry that this will bite them in the ass when people spend too much on booze. If a specific restaurant is creating actual problems then that should be dealt with — but the solution is to deal with the businesses that create actual problems, not to assume that restricting alcohol for everyone will solve things.

So my recommendation is to vote YES on both of these.