New carbon tax and 4 other ideas from the Minneapolis City Council’s new majority

Higher fees for big carbon emitters, stricter policies for homeless encampment clearings and more checks on mayoral power could be coming if the Minneapolis City Council’s new majority gets its way this year.

While a contentious resolution over the Israel-Hamas war has grabbed attention, the council reshaped by the November 2023 election has begun to tackle more than symbolic statements on U.S. foreign policy.

The new majority, which can be broadly described as further left of the previous council and more critical of Mayor Jacob Frey, has begun to roll out a series of policy ideas that its members hope can bring the city more in line with social, economic and environmental justice standards they believe the city’s population wants.

Many of the ideas aren’t new, but they previously stood little chance of being approved by the council and making it to Frey’s desk.

Now, the question for many of the initiatives isn’t whether the council will approve them, but how ambitious they will be — and whether they’ll garner enough support to override a Frey veto, should he attempt to block them.

Here are some of the new initiatives, many of which lack specifics, but are on track to be hashed out in the coming months:

The recent repeated evictions of several homeless camps named “Camp Nenookaasi” have underscored that the plight of the unsheltered — and those who live near them — remains front and center for the city.

For years, many in the council’s majority have criticized the city’s homeless response under Frey, and a trio of them are leading the charge to change city policy.

Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai and Council Members Jason Chavez and Aurin Chowdhury have announced plans to craft three ordinances:

The city has a regimen — the Pollution Control Annual Registration Program — that levies fees on the largest potential polluters in Minneapolis. Nearly 5,300 entities, mostly commercial and industrial facilities, are subject to the program’s fees. The program covers a range of pollutants, from sewage discharge to gasoline storage to lead air emissions.

Council Member Robin Wonsley is leading a push to change the structure so that carbon emission fees are increased to account for the cost to society, ranging from public health to the rising cost of climate change. In other words: a type of carbon tax. It’s unclear how successful this effort will be; state statutes prescribe how such fees can be calculated.

This isn’t the only place the council will be focused when it comes to climate. This year will be a formative year for an ambitious city program to lower everyone’s dependency on fossil fuels, via a set of electricity and natural gas fees that will generate an estimated $10 million annually.

The “Climate Legacy Initiative” seeks to create an entire bureaucracy around new areas of city-funded infrastructure, from weatherizing private homes to building electric-vehicle charging stations. The nuts and bolts of this work will be done by yet-to-be-hired staff within Frey’s administration, but council members want to ensure they’re watching the work closely.

Several years after Minneapolis voters chose to establish a “strong mayor” form of government, the council’s new majority wants to ensure it still has muscles to flex when it comes to the balance of power. New Council President Elliott Payne sees this happening in a hardly headline-grabbing way: oversight through transparency, and transparency through increased reporting requirements of city agencies.

The most visible of these will likely occur via changes to policing dictated by state and federal court settlements. Databases will likely have to be created to, for example, see and track use of force by officers. Payne, a self-described “nerd,” would like to see this type of data transparency duplicated across a host of city operations.

Workplace regulations in the city are likely to be in the spotlight this year as Frey and the council look to establish a “Labor Standards Board” that, at its core, would seek to raise wages and benefits for people in traditionally lower-wage jobs in the city.

The effort has already spawned a pushback campaign from the hospitality industry, which has backed a group called “Save Local Restaurants” that has taken out TV and billboard ads.

Another priority related to worker protections: potential rideshare regulations mandating minimum pay and more rights for drivers of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft. Previous efforts on this have failed to win Frey’s approval.

Expect council supporters of rent control to mount another campaign this year, after being stymied in a contentious battle last year.

No one has floated a specific plan yet, but those on the council supportive of the idea — a slim majority — are keen to see if they can fashion a new plan factoring in lessons learned from St. Paul, where voters approved one of the strictest policies in the nation and Mayor Melvin Carter swiftly scaled it back.