Millions more flowed into Minneapolis Police Department fight in final weeks of city election

Political committees jockeying to sway Minneapolis voters on the future of their police department spent millions in the final weeks leading up to the November election, a surge that nearly equaled what they had previously expended.

New campaign finance disclosure forms released this week provide new insight into the spending and supporters of two political committees — Yes 4 Minneapolis and All of Mpls — which were on opposite sides of the ballot question.

Introduced in response to the murder of George Floyd by police, the proposal, which voters ultimately rejected, would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a new agency focused on taking a public health approach to safety.

The new campaign disclosure forms show that the Minneapolis Regional Chamber donated $1.3 million last year — including just over $640,000 in the the final two weeks — to a new organization called Plan for Progress. That group donated just over $1.2 million last year to All of Mpls, one of the main groups fighting the police proposal, known as Question 2. The chamber also donated to a separate group that advocated for a successful ballot measure that gave the mayor more power in City Hall.

Jonathan Weinhagen, the chamber's president and CEO, said he heard frequently from business owners who felt the election represented a "tipping point."

"What we were hearing [are] very credible signals that had Question 2 prevailed, companies would let their leases lapse, would reconsider locating outside the of the city," Weinhagen said. "And we're a regional entity that competes against regions all across the country, so my worry is less that they're going to move to St. Louis Park and more that they're going to move to Denver or Boston or Austin."

The chamber, a nonprofit, doesn't file its own disclosure forms, though it did about a decade ago when it had its own political committee. Weinhagen said they chose to donate to entities that had already been formed rather than creating their own political committee for this election. The money from the donations, he said, came primarily from membership dues.

"Voters were faced with a very complex ballot on a set of complex issues that impact the future direction of our city," Fatehi said. "And I think both sides raised the money that was necessary to get our respective messages out to the voters, who ultimately and resoundingly made their preferences clear at the ballot box."

The new disclosure forms also showed that Yes 4 Minneapolis, the group that wrote the proposal, reported bringing in nearly $1.4 million in the final weeks leading to the election, bringing the group's fundraising total for 2021 to roughly $3.2 million in cash. The group also reported receiving about $1.1 million in "in-kind" donations last year, a broad term used when groups provide labor or services, such as access to e-mail lists.

Their largest newly disclosed donation — for $750,000 — came on Election Day from the Art for Justice Fund, which is sponsored by the New York-based Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The fund supports a variety of organizations that seek to end mass incarceration across the country, according to Amy Holmes, a director at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

"This campaign, the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign, we really saw as a new way of thinking about holistic public safety and almost taking a public health approach to safety," Holmes said. "Even though the ballot measure didn't pass, we're really encouraged by [the number of] voters who shared our interest in a new model for public safety that rejects the idea that law enforcement is the only way."

A spokesperson for Yes 4 Minneapolis said no one from the group was available for an interview on Thursday.