Copyright Star Tribune
In all other races, no candidate earned enough first-round votes to cinch the race, requiring additional rounds of tabulation on Wednesday. With all said and done, the three at-large commissioners, representing the whole city, were incumbents Meg Forney and Tom Olsen, as well as newcomer Amber Frederick. Forney is a former board president who has already served 12 years, and Olsen is a climate activist who joined in 2022. Newcomer Frederick, who was briefly a Ward 5 City Council candidate before switching to the Park Board. In District 4, covering downtown and the western parts of Minneapolis, Jason Garcia, whose campaign was truncated by appendicitis, triumphed in a three-way race left open after Elizabeth Shaffer ran for and eventually won the Ward 7 City Council seat. In the last municipal race to be called, the Park Board’s District 5 seat was announced for Kay Carvajal Moran. She beat 12-year incumbent Steffanie Musich and two other challengers. Carvajal Moran, 24, and newly elected at-large board member Frederick, 25, will be the two youngest elected officials in Minneapolis next year. On the outset of the election, four commissioners on the nine-seat board chose not to run for re-election, which guaranteed new people with different priorities will take the helm of the city’s semiautonomous park agency in January. Also assured seats were two candidates running unopposed: Rucker and Deshpande. Top issues for voters included restoring workforce relations after last year’s historic strike, finding new revenues, improving the experience for youth in parks and protecting the urban environment. While ideological differences have not been as prominent on the Park Board as the City Council, the makeup of the new board could mean that it will be friendlier to labor, bikes and other causes perceived as part of a progressive platform. City elections officials have announced that Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation President Steve Brandt was re-elected. Newcomer Eric Harris Bernstein, a progressive tax policy analyst, will join him on the six-member board that sets the city’s maximum property tax levy. The other four members of the BET will include Mayor Jacob Frey, two members of the City Council and a Park Board member, who have yet to be appointed.
