Roper: Uptown-area council race is a microcosm of fractured Minneapolis politics

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Of all the Minneapolis City Council races on the ballot this year, the battle to represent Uptown in particular stands out as a microcosm of the city’s fractured political scene.

A democratic socialist who is one of the mayor’s chief antagonists on the council, Aisha Chughtai, is fighting to keep her seat in an especially liberal pocket of the city. Her opponent, Lydia Millard, wants the city to beef up public safety efforts to help revive Uptown’s small-business corridors.

A crowd packed into Queermunity on Tuesday night to see the candidates face off at a League of Women Voters forum, which also included candidate DeShanneon Grimes. (Queermunity is a gathering space on Hennepin Avenue in the heart of Uptown.)

A lot of Uptown-area business interests support Millard, as evidenced by the ovation she received at a spring event I attended about a new improvement district. But businesses don’t vote. Lawns across Uptown are also peppered with Millard signs — another indicator of support. But most of the ward’s residents live in apartment buildings.

So there’s no sense trying to predict the outcome. Chughtai handily won re-election in 2023 with only 3,800 votes. More people likely strolled down Hennepin Avenue during the Open Streets event in late September, where both candidates were campaigning on a recent Saturday.

“I’ve seen the way that our neighborhood has … become a ghost town,” Millard told me amid the lively bustle of the festival. “And I’m looking to change that by prioritizing public safety, supporting and bringing in businesses … and then just getting back to the basics of constituent services.”

“There’s been a lot of disagreement between myself and the mayor over issues that you, the people of Ward 10 ... sent me to City Hall to fight for,” Chughtai said of Frey’s busy veto pen. Two specific vetoes she cited, over “taxing polluters and preserving affordable housing,” refer to a carbon tax and an ordinance giving renters first claim to buy their apartment buildings.

Chughtai later added that she’s looking forward to passing rent control legislation in her next term.

The candidates had opposing perspectives about the current status of Uptown.

Millard, who is executive director of the Stevens Square Community Organization, argued that public safety in the Uptown area has been “completely abandoned.”

“[Businesses] just want to be given an environment to thrive in, and we have not done that,” Millard said. “Businesses are not leaving because they can’t afford the rent. The businesses are leaving because they don’t feel safe in this neighborhood and they‘d rather go to the suburbs.”

“One of the things the mayor and I agree on is that Uptown … has faced immense hardship in the last five years, and that we are beginning to see this area come back after dedicated public and private revitalization efforts,” Chughtai said.

It was a pointed forum, as League of Women Voters’ events go. Millard accused Chughtai of being unresponsive to her constituents. Chughtai slammed Millard for accepting donations from Republicans. You can watch the entire discussion on YouTube.

The backdrop of the race is an ongoing effort to organize a business improvement district and draw more businesses to the Uptown area — something I’ve written about previously. I think it’s notable that a primary leader of that effort, Uptown Association President Andrea Corbin, is also heavily mixed up in the council races.

Corbin, who owns a flower shop on Lyndale Avenue, started a political action committee (We Love Minneapolis) that tried to sway DFL endorsements this spring. It spent more than $16,000 boosting Millard’s campaign. The Ward 10 convention adjourned without an endorsement in May.

The last race I covered in Ward 10 was Lisa Bender’s successful challenge to Meg Tuthill in 2013, an election that paved the way for many progressive housing and transportation policies. Back then, Tuthill argued that there had been too much turnover representing the ward (three council members in 12 years).