Once more with feeling: Thanks to many voices, in particular CMs who have laid
down some public markers in this matter, we are now in a much improved position
to review the proposed city budget in detail several weeks before the next
public event, namely the city council's own public hearing on the content and
efficacy of this document.
It would have been helpful to have had an earlier start for this review and
certainly the Board of Estimate and Taxation has two competent elected members
- David Wheeler and Carol Becker - who are, shall we say, "friends of the court
of public opinion". The other members of this Board are other elected
officials. They are Mayor Hodges, President of the City Council Barbara
Johnson, Park Board Commissioner Anita Tabb, and City Council Member John
Quincy - who is the Chair of the City Council's Ways and Means Committee and
the Majority Leader of the City Council's many members who identify as DFLers.
The Board of Estimate and Taxation is required by charter to hold a public
hearing for citizen input on the proposed city budget and here in 2014, that
hearing was held on August 27th, two days before the actual text of the
proposed budget was made available to the general public on August 29th.
What does that tell you about good faith behavior of the Mayor of Minneapolis,
the President of the City Council, and the Chair of the City Council's Ways and
Means Committee who also happens to be the Majority Leader for 12 of the 13
Members of the City Council?
The Charter of the City of Minneapolis sets August 15 as the due date for
publication of the Mayor's budget proposals. We all know this. How is it that
that seminal document wasn't released until two days after the city
charter-required Board of Estimate and Taxation public hearing intended - again
by charter - for input from Minneapolis citizens?
I hardly think this was inadvertent. The delay in access meant that there would
have been no realistic way for the general public or even the membership of the
Board of Estimate and Taxation themselves to have had any oppportunity to get
real about what the Mayor has now belatedly reported to the citizens of our
fair city in relatively significant detail.
Where was the adherence of the Mayor to the charter's requirements about
information flow? Where were the voices of the President of the City Council
and the Chair of the City Council Ways and Means Committee? Where, for that
matter, was the voice of the representative of the Minneapolis Park Board in
this critical matter? What explains the silence of the majority of the City
Council who surely were aware of this discontinuity?
The two independently elected members of the Board of Estimate and Taxation
have publicly expressed their frustration about insufficient access to the
planning document in question and the belated timing of the release of said
document by the Mayor of Minneapolis speaks clearly to the questions that must
be asked. Was this a matter of nonfeasance or was this a matter of conscious
malfeasance?
We can recall the studied indifference of the immediately former Mayor in these
matters of shared responsibility. We can also recall the refusal of the
electorate to abolish this vehicle of presumably informed oversight meant to
give informed voice IMHO to citizens affected by these draft expressions of
public intent. We can also recall with what solid support the electorate of
Minneapolis chose to give to the continued presence of Board Members Carol
Becker and Peter Wheeler, the latter of whom succeeds the former as President
of the Board of Estimate and Taxation to the present day.
"Carrying coal to Newcastle", we can also recall the refusal of the City's
leadership to permit any outside audit of the City's finances, establishing
instead an internal audit process dependent on access to pertinent documents to
the very cadre who are allegedly far more benign to developers than good
governance would surely prefer.
There are numerous analysts unquestionably able to play "pick-up sticks" with
the fine print now available. That can now happen - an epiphany surely not lost
on the several newly elected City Council Members who will be a part of the
City Council's public hearing on the draft budget required by charter and
scheduled to happen in late October.
Should City Council Majority Caucus leader CM John Quincy chair that hearing in
his role as Chair of the City Council Ways and Means Committee, we will have
opportunity to observe his leadership behavior firsthand. No doubt all sorts of
testimony will have been prepared beforehand by interested parties. That's the
nature of this game of musical chairs.
I assume the other City Council members will prepare for this event with due
diligence, acting de facto and de jure in lieu of meaningful input from the
Charter-required results of the Board of Estimate and Taxation event so
conveniently scheduled to have occurred before the guts of the draft City
budget were available for public scrutiny.
For all of us, "the game's afoot". Considering how blatant manipulation of
process landed the huge Viking Stadium liability in our collective laps, might
it not be well to look closely at the intended benefits arranged for Ryan
Companies? Do note the relative ease with which the stadium crowd has
effectively emasculated the Minneapolis Park Board's titular responsibility for
the "People's Park" adjunct to the new stadium. There are more sweet-heart
municipal arrangements to be examined and I venture to hypothesize that roseate
projections from our Planning Department may well be overtaken by awkward
realities in the national economy.
Fred Markus
Phillips West