Candidates' identities playing critical role in Minneapolis' Sixth, Eighth ward council races

Perhaps the most closely watched race of this fall's Minneapolis City Council election is playing out in the Eighth Ward, where Council President Andrea Jenkins is defending the seat she has held for two terms against youthful newcomer Soren Stevenson, who is running to her left.

In the nearby Sixth Ward, incumbent Jamal Osman is facing challenges from Kayseh Magan and Tiger Worku, who have a large East African voting base abuzz with talk about getting out the vote — as well as the candidates' ethnic backgrounds.

Identity is inextricable from the question of who should represent the interests of the two centrally located wards, where diverse working-class residents grapple with complex problems of public safety and homelessness.

Jenkins was a longtime City Council staffer when she made history in 2017 as the first Black transgender woman elected to public office in the United States. She has repeatedly emphasized the importance of her life experience to Minneapolis' quest for equity, and the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign has called her reelection "an urgent moment" amid a nationwide wave of anti-transgender laws.

"Racism is the foundational problem that is challenging America and the city of Minneapolis in its ability to grow, and I am not sure how a white guy is going to solve that problem," Jenkins said during her unsuccessful bid in May for the DFL Party endorsement.

Stevenson ultimately snatched the DFL's vote of confidence from Jenkins in an early upset and also won the backing of Twin Cities Democratic Socialists. On the key policy debate over rent control, Stevenson — who worked over a year for Northcountry Cooperative Foundation to develop housing co-ops — wants no exceptions to a 3% annual cap on rents.

Jenkins, a small landlord, says she would support a policy targeted to benefit "the people who are suffering the most," who she identified as mothers of color with corporate landlords in north Minneapolis and the southside's Phillips community.

The council president claims credit for many of the city's initiatives during her time in office. During a League of Women Voters forum, Jenkins said the city had brought 700 units of affordable housing to the Eighth Ward, 287 of them "deeply affordable." However, city staffers say that 153 affordable housing units have closed on financing in the ward since Jenkins took office, including 69 considered deeply affordable.

On her personal resume, Jenkins includes creating cultural corridors, a city arts department and poet laureate program (she's a poet herself), as well as declaring racism a public health emergency in 2020.

Stevenson, then a University of Minnesota graduate student, rose to local prominence in 2020 after law enforcement officers blinded him in one eye amid protests over the murder of George Floyd. With the Eighth Ward still divided over the fate of the torched Third Precinct police station, Stevenson said city officials should do more community engagement before choosing a station location, and that data hasn't shown that the temporary downtown station has resulted in response times slower than other precincts.

Sweeping homeless encampments, Stevenson said, is "cruel, ineffective at dealing with the issue, and expensive." He believes rent control, overdose prevention sites, and a housing-first policy with culturally appropriate services would be more effective in removing camps.

Other candidates in the Eighth Ward race are DFL-affiliated Terry White, who's proposing to spend $30 million on emergency homeless shelters, and Republican Bob Sullentrop, who wants all juveniles accused of armed carjacking to be "tried as adults and put in prison."

Heated race in the Sixth Ward

More homeless encampments have appeared in the Sixth Ward than anywhere else in Minneapolis, giving Osman a front-row seat to the cycle of disbandment, dispersion and finger-pointing among local government agencies that has undermined solutions.

A resident advocate for CommonBond Communities when he was elected in 2020, Osman has positioned himself as a swing vote who acts independently of the City Council's more ideologically entrenched blocks. He has been vocal about the limits on his power to influence issues under the city's new strong-mayor system, criticizing Mayor Jacob Frey for his response to encampments, opposition to rent control — Osman strongly supports a 3% cap — and veto of a minimum wage for rideshare drivers.

Nevertheless, Osman's challengers are hammering him to say how he has improved life for Sixth Ward residents. Magan, a former Medicaid fraud investigator in the Minnesota Attorney General's office, and Worku, once the youngest president of the Seward Neighborhood Group, both accuse Osman of being ineffective.

The challengers are sensitive to the framing of their identities in a district where ethnic and religious affiliations hold sway over voters, despite the candidates' insistence that such things shouldn't matter.

Magan told the Star Tribune that he's been frustrated to hear Osman refer to Worku as Ethiopian (Worku is Oromo) without mentioning that voters have another Somali option in him. At the same time, Worku accused Osman of falsely calling him a Christian.

"I am a practicing Muslim. I'm proud of it. But that's not the point," Worku said during a recent League of Women Voters forum. "So what if I'm Christian, so what if I'm Jewish, so what if I'm white or Black? When you represent Ward Six, you've got to represent everybody."

Republican Guy Gaskin is also running in the Sixth Ward, where the race has been rocked by allegations of fraud.

During the DFL endorsement process, Magan questioned the legitimacy of 180 Worku delegates with unlikely Proton Mail email addresses. Worku said his campaign set up the emails for elderly immigrants who didn't have other means of communication, but some delegates on his list — including some who turned out to be self-identified Republicans — denied ever supporting him. The DFL ultimately canceled its Sixth Ward convention without endorsing anyone.

Magan also hit Worku over his campaign finance reports, saying it was unlikely Worku had raised more than $47,000 entirely from small donations of less than $100, the threshold at which donors must be identified. An administrative law judge found probable cause of a violation, but before the matter could proceed to an evidentiary hearing Magan withdrew his complaint, leading to its dismissal. He declined to say why.

Both challengers have jumped on Osman's connection to the Feeding Our Future scandal, a federal investigation of nonprofits alleged to have stolen more than $250 million of COVID-19 relief funds meant to feed children. The Minnesota Reformer revealed last year that Urban Advantage Services, a nonprofit incorporated by Osman's wife, Ila Ambo, claimed to have fed 2,500 children a day under the sponsorship of another nonprofit that was shut down by the state following FBI raids.

Neither Osman nor Ambo have been charged with wrongdoing, and Osman won Attorney General Keith Ellison's endorsement last month. Ellison's backing helped distance Osman from the shadow of fraud while raising the question why the attorney general isn't supporting his former employee, Magan. Ellison isn't saying.

Worku, who did not respond to an interview request and declined to fill out the Star Tribune's candidate questionnaire, is the internet-famous "Soup for my family" guy from the 2021 Daunte Wright protests.

At the time his CNN clip was going viral, Worku was presiding over the Seward Neighborhood Group as it devolved into mass resignations and financial problems. A letter by former supporters of Worku accused him of creating "an atmosphere where staff was treated abysmally, differing opinions were suppressed, basic democratic norms were violated, and where some even feared retaliation."

Worku addressed the controversy in his memoir "Mosaic Republic," published last year. He said he resigned from the Seward association "not out of fear, but out of responsibility," because he believed it wouldn't survive if he fought back.

"I had my moment in the sun," Worku wrote, "and it was time to go inside."