Open races, new faces promise a fresh start for two Minneapolis City Council seats

Two sections of Minneapolis that became epicenters of protests after high-profile police killings will soon elect new City Council members.

Incumbents Alondra Cano and Lisa Bender are not seeking re-election, leaving wide open possibilities for 14 candidates to persuade voters that they can deliver safety, housing stability and economic revival.

The diverse Ninth Ward, which abuts the site where police murdered George Floyd, endured the destruction of Lake Street and the occupation of a city intersection for more than a year. It was also where a mega tent city sprang up in Powderhorn Park before homeless encampments spread to parks throughout Minneapolis. The 10th Ward — wealthier and majority white — faced weeks­long unrest in Uptown this summer after federal authorities shot Winston Smith, who was wanted on a warrant for being a felon in possession of a gun. Authorities are still investigating why the encounter turned deadly. With both a strong homeowner community and an 80% renter population, it has become a battleground over city planning and housing policy.

Cano was an immigrant rights activist elected to the council in 2013. The Ninth Ward's first priority is rebuilding Lake Street, she said, but constituents tell her they cannot run solvent businesses unless constant gunshots are addressed.

Eight candidates are on the ballot for the Ninth Ward.

DFL-endorsed Jason Chavez is an aide on the Workforce and Business Development Committee of the Minnesota House.

"When we talk about Lake Street, obviously people sometimes don't feel safe and I get it," Chavez said. "We need to just see people as humans and truly invest in support, create programming that is going to not criminalize people and put them back in a cycle of prison, just for them to come back out two weeks later."

He said the area's chronic ailments of gun violence, sex trafficking, homelessness and addiction are reasons he supports rent control and a new model of public safety in which police play a limited role.

Mickey Moore is a retired small-business owner who has raised more campaign funds than anyone else in the race. He is a longtime homeowner in the Eighth Ward who moved to an apartment in the Ninth Ward seven months ago to run in a district dear to his heart, he said.

"Those streets, those businesses and the immigrant community have just always been a home to me," Moore said. "When I saw that it was in distress and nobody was picking up the mantle … it was really a match that made sense for me."

Moore rejects calls to abolish the Police Department, saying that disrespects the experiences of crime victims. He supports Chief Medaria Arradondo and wants to focus on changing the culture of the department and state law so that officers fired for wrongful use of force don't get their jobs back through arbitration.

Yussuf Haji owns Orange Oak, an advertising and translation service, and co-founded Unite Cloud, a nonprofit trying to fight xenophobia in central Minnesota. Three years ago, the Minnesota Department of Revenue hired him to do outreach with African immigrants, and he moved to the Twin Cities.

Haji wants to mend the fear that prevents outsiders from investing in the Ninth Ward, he said, and agrees with Moore that words like "defund" and "abolish" have hurt the community's potential.

As a father, Floyd's murder filled him with anxiety for his children's safety, he said. But after talking to neighbors about crime and being held up at gunpoint in his campaign van, Haji resolved that police are needed.

"We can work on all the reforms that we want," he said. "But there shouldn't be a vacuum. We should have some sense of at least law and order, especially among the Black, brown and Indigenous community."

Also running in the Ninth Ward are Jon Randall Denison; community activist Alfred Flowers Jr.; Carmen Means, executive director of the Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization; Brenda Short, a financial clearance representative with Allina Healthcare, and Ross Tenneson.

Bender is a former city planner elected council president in 2017. She spearheaded major urban design policies through the 2040 Comprehensive Plan, making Minneapolis the first city in the nation to prohibit single-family zoning.

The 10th Ward has strong, disparate opinions on many issues, Bender said. "The trick is to try to find enough common ground that people can feel good about moving forward. Otherwise, it'll just get stuck."

There are six contenders for the 10th Ward seat.

Aisha Chughtai leads in DFL delegates as well as fundraising. She works in the political department of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Minnesota State Council. As a renter, she vows to go to bat for their interests.

SEIU is working on a pilot project employing union security guards to de-escalate conflicts in north Minneapolis. Chughtai, who advocates redirecting police funding to "community-based public safety," wants to see such programs in every neighborhood.

"I would really push and want to organize my fellow council members elected to reassess our priorities of continuing to fund and throw money at a police department that fails to keep people safe," Chughtai said.

Katie Jones is a landlord who lives in a triplex and runs a duplex four blocks away. She is employed by the Center for Energy and Environment, working with cities to develop energy disclosure policies.

Jones rejects the notion that boosting police staffing will reduce crime. The 10th Ward produced the most petition signatures in the city to put a question on the ballot to replace the Police Department with a public safety department. She believes it will pass, she said, and that a "heavy amount of stakeholder engagement" must follow to bring form to that new department.

Then, she said, she wants to start engaging the community around ward-specific projects such as redeveloping the Kmart site at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue.

Chris Parsons is a career firefighter with the St. Paul Fire Department.

He proposes a "nuts and bolts" approach to constituent services, he said, instead of what he views as policy "dictated from downtown."

"Our City Council would be doing such a better job, and our people would be so better served, if they spent more time on constituent service instead of trying to be transformative figures," Parsons said. "The job of the City Council is to provide your constituents access to government, and that is not happening right now."

Parsons said he hears neighbors concerned primarily with rising crime and wants the City Council to focus on legislative tasks such as writing ordinances rather than trying to run a department of public safety. He said he prefers that Minneapolis improve policing through new hiring.

Alicia Gibson is a former member of the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association. The stay-at-home mom said running for office was how she hoped to hold her neighborhood together amid a sense of chaos.

Public safety is the wedge issue of the election, but Gibson said she believes there's more consensus around a path forward than it would seem. Constituents want compassionate police who think of themselves as members of the community, working in concert with social workers, she said, proposing investing in the Police Department rather than defunding it.

People find the police funding issue polarizing, just as the 2040 comprehensive plan divided neighborhoods, she said. She hopes to change that.

"There are some people, and I understand it, who have lost faith in the system and so they don't trust that the system can be repaired," Gibson said. "Maybe I'm more hopeful than others."

Other candidates for the 10th Ward include community health worker Ubah Nur and David Wheeler, president of the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation.

Read more about candidates' views in their own words in the Star Tribune voters' guide at StarTribune.com.