Extreme Makeover

Ask anyone who has gone through a breakup—the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Need a testimonial? Just ask the Star Tribune editorial board. Once upon a time, the Strib’s endorsement meant something. It was a player in Minnesota politics, an institution crossed at one’s peril.

Not anymore. Minnesotans have rejected the Strib’s endorsed candidates with increasing frequency—Sharon Sayles Belton, Skip Humphrey, Roger Moe, Fritz Mondale, Patty Wetterling—the list grows with each election cycle.

So what’s an editorial board to do?

One strategy: Come up with a “big, bold plan” to reshape city government—which, if adopted, would make the Star Tribune editorial board a player again. The board has decided that Minneapolis city government is “inefficient, bloated, wasteful, arrogant, and hidebound.” In other words, it needs an extreme makeover. If Minneapolis would only follow “our preferences,” as the paper patronizingly wrote last December, then it could rekindle the ardor and respect of the state Legislature. The Legislature, mind you, is full of outstate politicians like Dick Day, the House Republican Majority Leader, who thinks, among other things, that Minneapolis schools “suck.”

About those “preferences.” The Strib believes the City Council should shrink from thirteen members to six, four of whom would be elected citywide. The Strib would have the mayor appoint a city manager to run day-to-day business, and it would prohibit council members from speaking directly to city department heads and employees. Under the guise of “efficiency,” these proposals are anti-democratic and wildly out of sync with Minneapolis political culture.

More than other major U.S. cities, Minneapolis is the land of “retail” politics, where politicians woo us and answer our phone calls. When gangster wannabes heaved a ten-pound rock through my window last summer, I was very glad I could call Fifth Ward council member and nearby neighbor Natalie Johnson Lee, who could intercede on my behalf with the cops and other city agencies.

If the Strib had its way, Lee would have no choice but to direct me to the city manager’s office. This is not only inefficient and stupid, but clearly unconstitutional. How could a newspaper, presumably a First Amendment champion, advocate that our council members forfeit their free speech rights as a condition of their office?

Beyond that, would an appointed city manager be as concerned about a rock through a North Side window as someone who actually lives in that neighborhood? Mayor R.T. Rybak doesn’t think so, and neither does the guy who wants his job, Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin. Rybak says the Strib proposal has some “interesting points,” but he questions whether Minneapolis needs a city manager; within the current system, he boasts, he has produced “five balanced budgets” and instituted major “developmental reform.” McLaughlin agrees that Minneapolitans would not accept an unelected bureaucrat running the city.

Significantly, both Rybak and McLaughlin believe the Strib’s proposals would virtually wipe out African-American voting power. Rybak told me that “it is a well-known fact that the larger the district, the harder it is for minority members to get elected.”

Beyond that, the Strib editorial board “prefers” that City Council members work part-time, with their salaries pegged at a fraction of that paid to the mayor. Apparently, they believe this is the best way to “recruit high-quality council members from the private sector’s professional ranks, including Republicans whose influence desperately is needed in city government.” A once staunchly DFL newspaper now calls for Republicans in city government. The Strib itself once upon a time railed against part-time council members because, it said, part-timers created inherent conflicts of interest and created a setup tailor-made for corruption.

The Strib editorial board, with its misplaced fealty to the “private sector’s professional ranks”—the same people who brought us Enron and whose minions, such as conservative darling Tim Pawlenty, consider subsidized premiums for struggling Minnesotans “welfare” health care—must have ditched civics class in high school. Grass-roots democracy, the kind that Minneapolitans have come to expect, is by its very nature messy and, yes, sometimes inefficient, especially when compared to a business striving to produce the most widgets in a day. To the Strib’s apparent chagrin, true democracy is alive and well in the City of Lakes; it can thrive, however, only when all of its citizens have a chance to be heard.