Minneapolis Park Board seeks 7.75% tax levy increase to combat youth violence

Minneapolis park system leaders want to offer more activities for young people in hopes of deterring crime, and they're asking for a substantial tax levy increase to do it.

The Park Board and superintendent are seeking an increase of 7.75% for an estimated total of $75,777,000 next year. They plan to better fund career exploration and create new programs for teens with low-level offenses.

The Park Board's average property tax increase over the past decade has been just 4.5%, and the request comes before the Minneapolis mayor has issued his budget, which will provide a fuller sense of the city's needs. Still, commissioners are making an early case for remediating lagging youth programs in light of high crime citywide.

"In the past three budget cycles we have been essentially unsuccessful in gathering a substantial amount of funding to fill ongoing dollars for positive adult role models," said board president Jono Cowgill in a recent meeting. "That has been a major gap in our system now going on a generation. This is our opportunity to restore that."

According to a 2019 report, the park system lost 20 full-time and 26 part-time recreation center employees from 2001 to 2019, forcing staff to "stretch thin dollars and provide programs to youth who frequent the recreation centers — some on a daily basis."

Homicide was the leading cause of death among Minneapolis residents aged 15-24 in those years, according to the city's youth violence prevention plan. Amid the pandemic and unrest following the murder of George Floyd, homicides leapt from 48 in 2019 to 84 in 2020. Fifty-five people have been killed so far this year.

"I'll be honest, I've been really skeptical of a lot of the budgets that have come out in the last 10 years," said Carol Becker, one of two elected members of the Board of Estimate and Taxation. "A lot of them have seemed to me to be very wasteful and more virtue signaling than doing the kind of services that we need to do, but I think we've got to spend money with the parks, with youth programming, because if we don't, we really don't have a lot in our arsenal that will really affect crime."

The Park Board then usually adopts the maximum allowed.

It plans to spend additional youth funding on developing new programs to engage young adults up to age 22 with criminal records, building more Creation Spaces to promote careers in art, music and technology and expanding hiring for Teen Teamworks, a paid job training program in the parks.

"The two and a half years that I've been here, I've been working toward this," said Park Superintendent Al Bangoura. "I have brought it forward to the City Council, to the [taxation board], to the mayor. I've been very clear on closing the gap, and what this board has committed to in youth funding across this organization to support our youth."

The Park Board's 47 recreation centers have been closed to general use two summers in a row due to COVID-19, leaving young people across the city with few other affordable things to do. While centers have been used for Rec Plus child care and scheduled programs like Nite Owlz teen programming on weekends, public drop-ins won't return until Sept. 8.

In February, the board allocated $350,000 for youth violence prevention programming.

"Let's stop playing games with lives, all right?" said commissioner French when others questioned the abrupt expenditure. "Let's have the money available to folks. Yeah, those folks don't usually look like the people that we usually give money, but we can change that … We've got people out here dying."

The Park Board estimates it will need $73 million to maintain services at their current level. Its Tree Preservation and Reforestation levy, which raised more than $11 million to replace trees destroyed by pests and storms from 2014-2021, is ending.