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Lori Sturdevant: Might there be a better way? Just asking.

That's what Paul Ostrow was doing, too, with proposals to simplify city government.

By LORI STURDEVANT, Star Tribune

Last update: October 11, 2009 - 8:11 AM

Minneapolis City Council Member Paul Ostrow is discovering that one of the hazards of being a political lame duck is that you're also a convenient goat.

In conversations with city election candidates about this year's dustup involving three Minneapolis elected bodies -- the City Council, the Park and Recreation Board, and the Board of Estimate and Taxation -- one theme recurs: It's Ostrow's fault.

The indictment: Ostrow moved too quickly in January in proposing charter changes that would collapse the three elected panels into one and hire a professional city administrator to oversee city services. The First Ward solon didn't round up enough early support. He didn't fully flesh out his proposals, leaving key details to be decided later. He didn't get enough other leading Minneapolitans to go along -- though council colleagues Ralph Remington (another imminent retiree) and Don Samuels were at his side.

Ostrow responds to those comments philosophically. At age 50 and weeks away from wrapping up 12 years in City Hall, the former prosecutor is in reflection mode. He views his service with some dispassion -- and his city's and state's circumstances with considerable concern.

"There are things I could have done differently," Ostrow said last week. "I thought this was the kind of issue that called for leadership."

The money woes state and local governments are confronting ought to stir more questions akin to the ones Ostrow raised about the way public work is structured. Instead, he frets, the slapdown his ideas received could keep future proposals like his under wraps.

"If we are going to live within the usual set of assumptions of what we can and cannot discuss politically, we're doomed. The politically acceptable solutions are not going to be good enough," he said. "It will take elected officials willing to make the case for change to their constituents, realizing that on day one, their constituents are not going to be with them."

Only one of Ostrow's ideas made it to the ballot. On Nov. 3, Minneapolis voters will be asked whether the Board of Estimate and Taxation should be dissolved as a separate panel, with its functions -- setting each year's maximum levy, internal auditing and authorizing debt -- folded into the City Council.

To Minnesotans unfamiliar with the intricacies of civic affairs in the state's largest city, the elimination of an obscure body that does things city councils elsewhere do quite nicely all by themselves might seem like an obvious move.

In some Minneapolis quarters, the suggestion was received as if it were an attack by a foreign power. Park Board defenders mounted an impressive counteroffensive. They packed hearings. They collected 17,000 petition signatures. They hinted at sinister possibilities: If the City Council takes over the Park Board, would developers taking over golf courses be next?

The Park Board went so far as to seek voter approval to become a freestanding government, accountable to voters alone. The City Council and a Hennepin County judge blocked that ploy, for now. It may resume next year, at the Legislature.

If it does, it will only get in the way of the search for answers to what will be the overriding question in every government hall in this state for the next several years: How can the people's work be done as well or better than it is now, at lower cost?

The search for answers to that question was at the core of Ostrow's proposal. Fear of what an earnest search might produce in Minneapolis is at the core of the backlash it produced.

And not just in Minneapolis, but around the state, leadership is going to be defined as the ability to help people overcome their fear of change. Despite his experience this year, Ostrow leaves office with a word of encouragement for his successors: "We have more ability to lead than we realize."

• • •

Last week's column about two mayors doing the two-step -- run for mayor, then run for governor-- left a false impression. I cited a comment that Chris Coleman's spokesman John Stiles made about the St. Paul mayor's campaign travel, but I clumsily made it appear to be a direct response to a question from GOP state chair Tony Sutton. It wasn't.

Stiles wants it known that if he'd been directly asked Sutton's question about why a St. Paul mayoral candidate would fly to Alexandria, he would have said that Coleman didn't fly to the central Minnesota city. He drove.

Meanwhile, Coleman stopped doing the two-step on Thursday, announcing that he will not run for governor next year.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.

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