Minneapolis' neighborhood associations are worried about dwindling financial support — to the point that several may merge to survive.
Greatly diminished since their glory days of having hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on improving their own slices of the city, Minneapolis' 70 neighborhood associations are slated to receive just $10,000 each in base funding next year.
The first neighborhood associations to consider pooling their resources at a loss of some neighborhood identity include Shingle Creek and Cleveland; Seward and Longfellow; Kingfield and Lyndale; Logan Park, Northeast Park, Beltrami and St. Anthony East, according to the city of Minneapolis. Stevens Square and Phillips West initiated the process but ultimately opted against it.
"It is clear that the City's strategy is to slowly starve organizations like [the Nokomis East Neighborhood Association's] until they merge and dramatically decrease the number of these neighborhood organizations," the Nokomis East association said in a statement. "[The city] will sorely miss the programming and resources these neighborhood organizations provide, but they won't know it yet until they are gone."
As the city invests in a new government structure that concentrates power under a "strong mayor" at the top of City Hall, advocates of neighborhood associations want to make sure money is being spent on reaches of government closest to Minneapolis residents.
"This [Neighborhood and Community Relations] department is woefully underfunded … we're nickel-and-diming it," warned Council Member Lisa Goodman of the "abandonment of neighborhood groups" during an October budget meeting. "It would be to our council members' disadvantage to allow that to happen in this new government structure."
For more than 30 years, neighborhood associations provided an avenue for Minneapolis residents to organize with their neighbors, participate in local development and forward constituent concerns to City Hall. They were powerful in the 1990s and 2000s, buoyed by a commitment from the state Legislature to fund neighborhood improvement projects at a rate of $20 million a year for 20 years via a multijurisdictional Tax Increment Funding (TIF) effort. Joining the city were Hennepin County and the school, park and library boards, according to Karen Moe, interim director of Minneapolis' Neighborhood and Community Relations Department.
In the so-called Neighborhood Revitalization Program's heyday, each neighborhood group determined how best to spend its money so long as most of it went to housing, per state law. Some built shopping centers and grocery stores. Others splurged on neighborhood parks and crime prevention. The underpinning philosophy was that residents were best equipped to decide the future of their own communities.