Roper: After riding a boom into office, Frey and Carter fight for third terms in a challenging era

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Minneapolis and St. Paul were booming eight years ago when each sent a young, energetic mayor to City Hall.

Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter’s enthusiasm seemed just the ticket in 2017 to close out an ascendant decade for the central cities. Stadiums were rising, people were packing new downtown apartments and politicos kept talking about reviving streetcars. There was so much Cool Mayor levity in the air that the duo held an intercity snowball fight.

After a bruising start to the 2020s, Frey and Carter are now facing the toughest challenges yet as they each try to remain at the helm for rare third terms. This more sober political environment is marked by competing visions for the two cities: whether they should focus on the “basics” or intervene in new ways to fix society’s problems.

Frey and Carter’s records diverge there, in many ways, a point that may grow sharper as the campaigns against them heat up.

In St. Paul, Rep. Kaohly Vang Her emphasized the need to improve the nuts and bolts of city services when she announced her run this week against Carter, her former boss and mentor.

Carter’s signature accomplishments, by comparison, have been more expansionist initiatives such as a guaranteed income pilot, college savings accounts for newborns and erasing residents’ medical debt. (Her was once his political director and worked on the savings accounts.) Carter also expressed last-minute support in 2021 for St. Paul’s disastrous rent control policy, which he later tried to weaken.

The jobs Frey and Carter are interviewing for have changed a lot since 2017. So it’s healthy that neither of them can merely float into re-election on the inertia of incumbency.

Growth and prosperity of the central cities are no longer a given. The downtowns are struggling in different ways, and won’t bounce back by accident. Powerful synthetic drugs have exacerbated street homelessness in both cities, meanwhile, causing a multitude of downstream problems.

Pandemic relief funds have dried up and federal cuts will trickle down to municipal budgets. Residents are already starting to feel the pinch of rising property taxes to pay for government services, partly due to the declining downtown office values.

There are likely some tough decisions in each city’s future. They will require collaboration between the mayors and city councils.

So it is striking that both Frey and Carter vetoed — or partly vetoed, in Carter’s case — budgets passed by their respective City Councils last year.

Frey’s unprecedented budget veto was a sign of the widening gap between the mayor and a council that has veered farther to the left. There’s a lot of “they started it” finger pointing going on between the council’s liberal bloc and the mayor. But we elect these council members and mayors to work it out for the betterment of the city. So voters should hold them all accountable for better governance.

The toxicity is being exacerbated in Minneapolis by massive political action committees. The biggest-dollar PACs are trying to align the City Council with Frey’s values, though I suspect Fateh’s DFL endorsement may give fuel to more left-leaning groups. They’re going to flood the scene with divisive mailers and advertising, which will leave a lot of bad blood after Election Day.