Power debate goes before Minneapolis voters

When Minneapolitans choose Tuesday whether to revamp the city Board of Estimate and Taxation, they'll be participating in a debate that's raged in the city for a century over whether government works best with power centralized or dispersed.

The charter amendment proposal before voters would change the membership of the financial board that sets the city's annual property tax ceiling, authorizes borrowing and oversees audits of city functions.

That board now consists of the mayor, two council members, a park commissioner and two lay people elected directly by the voters. The proposal would turn the board's powers over to the City Council.

The Board of Estimate and Taxation is a creature of the 19th century that reflects the decentralized scheme of power for City Hall contained in the city charter.

That arrangement has been faulted because it disperses accountability for decisions among the mayor, the council, the board and the Park Board. But supporters say that it also provides checks and balances that ensure that no portion of City Hall grabs all the power.

It's a debate as old in America as the Hamiltonian argument that a powerful centralized government is the most efficient and the Jeffersonian response that government power needs checks to avoid abuses.

Arguments pro and con

Supporters of the charter change say that because the current board is little known or understood, its powers should shift to the City Council so there's one-stop accountability to voters for the financial decisions that determine property taxes.

But one hitch in that argument is that both the council and Park Board make budgetary decisions, but the proposal would concentrate the power to set tax caps in the hands of the council.

That leaves park supporters fearing that when money gets tight at City Hall, it will be parks that suffer, just as the council has shortchanged streets in the past decade of state aid cuts to keep police ranks full.

Besides park supporters, the amendment is also opposed by some people still smarting from the loss of the city's publicly elected library board due to a library merger with Hennepin County. They fear that eliminating the public's ability to elect two members of the board will further diminish voter control over city government.

Board members split

The board's two directly elected members, Carol Becker and Jill Schwimmer, have split on the issue.

Schwimmer, who isn't running for another term, supports the amendment. She argues that taxing and spending decisions ought to reside together at the council and that all 13 council members -- not just the two serving on the board -- ought to vote on the tax cap. She said that few citizens know enough to contact board members about property taxation levels -- though several dozen citizens did testify this year before the board set a tax cap for 2010.

Becker is seeking another term and is the biggest contributor to the campaign to preserve the current board -- an effort that has appeared better organized than the campaign of those pushing for the charter change.

Becker argues that the board serves a mediating function, as a place where three city-focused members (the mayor and two council members) have to negotiate on taxing levels with three independent members (the two public and one Park Board members), and everybody has to be satisfied or nobody gets a majority, she said.

That system worked better when the board had a seventh member to break ties, but the abolition of the Library Board took away that member. Becker and other opponents of the proposal argue that rather than abolish the current board makeup, the charter should be amended to add a second park commissioner or more public members as tiebreakers.

Council favors the change

The campaign over the issue has become a tussle of heavy hitters. Mayor R.T. Rybak and eight of 13 council members support the proposal, along with the League of Women Voters.

But Rybak's two immediate predecessors as mayor, Sharon Sayles Belton and Donald Fraser, oppose it, along with the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation.

Labor has been a key player over the past 100 years in opposing efforts to redistribute power in what critics say is an unwieldy power-sharing arrangement set forth in the city charter. The charter itself began as an agglomeration of special laws approved by the Legislature before Minneapolis was granted the power to write its own charter.

According to Iric Nathanson in his forthcoming book "Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century," that's because those who promoted reforms of city government, often aimed at consolidating power with the mayor, were also the city's business powers, with whom labor jousted over economic power.

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438