Editorial: Let charter change conversation begin

Financial pressure has a way of bringing long-simmering, politically difficult questions to a boil. Steam started rising at Minneapolis City Hall last week. In the face of a threatened $52 million loss of state aid in the next two years, three City Council members said that now is the right time to ask anew some persistent, unresolved questions about the city's governance, including:

• Is it necessary, wise or fiscally responsible for Minneapolis to continue to operate two police forces, one for general public safety and one for parks?

• Should the various heads of city departments report to a similarly varied array of City Council committees and the mayor -- in effect, giving those officials 14 often turf-conscious bosses?

• Are funds wisely allocated and managed when one elected body sets total funding for parks operations and another decides how those funds are spent?

• How can voters hold the city's most visible elected entity accountable for its fiscal decisions, when an overlapping, little-known elected body sets maximum tax levies?

Those and similar questions would come before city voters this year under a proposal called "Update Minneapolis," unveiled last week by Council Members Paul Ostrow, Don Samuels and Ralph Remington. They're talking charter change, and they're right to urge the whole city to join the conversation.

Later this week, the City Council should get the ball rolling by referring the proposal to the requisite committee. To do otherwise, as some of its opponents would prefer, would stifle an important public debate before it gets started. It would also send an ill-timed and unfortunate signal to hard-pressed city taxpayers, and to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature, about the willingness of Minneapolis elected officials to find less expensive ways to operate city services.

The structure until last year included four independently elected boards. The city library system's merger with Hennepin County left three boards remaining -- Park and Recreation, Estimate and Taxation, and Education. The Update Minneapolis proposal would leave only the separate Board of Education still standing.

Ostrow, a three-term former City Council president who has announced he will not seek reelection, is a major force behind charter change. The effort is his parting gift to a city whose anachronistic structure he has come to see as an impediment to good governance.

He says he has winced as camera-conscious City Council committees berated city department heads over matters a professional city administrator would handle professionally and privately. He has resented hours wasted coordinating dual city and Park Board roles in public works projects, wireless technology installations, fee arrangements and the like. He's convinced that there are millions of dollars to be saved with the changes he is proposing, and that city residents would enjoy better service to boot.