Copyright Star Tribune
I love Minneapolis. My wife and I are raising our two young daughters here, and I recently moved my parents here. This city is my home — and at this dark hour in our national politics, it can be a beacon of hope. Every American city is having an overdue conversation about who they are and who they aspire to be. Cities are examining their values and how their actions align with those values. We must resist the lurch toward authoritarianism at every opportunity, from the courts to the ballot box. Minneapolis is doing its part, with multiple active lawsuits against the Trump administration. But our city’s future is about more than resistance alone. It is about looking in the mirror and defining how our actions at the local level will deliver outcomes consistent with our values. My opponent state Sen. Omar Fateh would argue the way to beat Trumpism is to mimic it: to govern through theater, swap ideology for evidence and steer public power toward favored interests. But the opposite of MAGA extremism is not the opposite extreme. It is effective, thoughtful governance driven by results, data and loving your city more than your ideology. Our local government has a responsibility to make life better for our neighbors. Under my leadership, we’re doing exactly that — and we’re poised to take the work further. While rents rose 31% nationally between 2017 and 2023, they rose just 1% in Minneapolis. We achieved that by legalizing more homes in more places and by building 8.5 times more deeply affordable housing than before I took office. And while unsheltered homelessness has risen in most large cities since 2020, in Minneapolis, it is down nearly 33% because we focused on housing and rehabilitation. We’ve also worked with community leaders to build a comprehensive safety system. Our mental health response team is up and running, 24/7. We’re turning the corner on police recruitment, with applications up 135% and more than 600 sworn officers for the first time in years. The results speak for themselves: Violent crime is down citywide, and gun violence on the North Side is at its lowest level since at least 2007. And while crime is trending down, police reform is also moving forward. The Minneapolis Police Department is now the most diverse it has ever been in history, and the independent, court-appointed monitor for our consent decree recently credited Minneapolis with making “more progress toward building a foundation for sustainable reform in the first year of monitoring than nearly any other jurisdiction” in the nation. We’ve achieved these results despite real division at City Hall. For years, I’ve worked productively with council members who disagreed with me but sought common ground. The current council majority, however, has too often embodied and emboldened the style of zero-sum politics we see at the national level. I’m eager to work in good faith with anyone who is willing, but I won’t abdicate my responsibility as mayor to act as a check on bad policymaking. This election is not about whether we share progressive values. It is about what policies will actually deliver progressive outcomes. Here’s where Minneapolis needs to go next: To improve public safety, we’ll hire more than 150 new MPD officers who are committed to reform and to building a better department. We will continue pushing for common sense gun reforms or — if the Legislature can’t act — demand the authority to act ourselves. And we will enact every reform in our consent decree. We can make housing more affordable by investing record amounts in public housing and building more housing. We will expand programs that work, like Stable Homes Stable Schools, which has helped more than 6,700 students and their families find and keep housing. We will pass responsible budgets that prioritize excellent city services over unproven programs to keep property taxes as low as possible for working families and small businesses. And we will continue to stand up to the Trump administration and protect our neighbors. This election presents a defining choice for our city. Voters must decide between two divergent paths for Minneapolis. I hope to earn your support. Together, we can show the world what it looks like to build a city that stands as a counterweight — not a counterpart — to the chaos and dysfunction in D.C. Glen Stubbe/The Minnesota Star Tribune This election is not about whether we share progressive values. It is about what policies will actually deliver progressive outcomes.
