Metropolitan Initiative
Twin Cities Metropolitan Area
Meeting Notes
August 22, 1997

What do we have going for us? What works?

• the business community
• regional parks and open space
• solid waste system - reducing landfills
• cleaning up brownfields
• inter-regional library system
• non-profit partnerships; across service lines & intra service
• use of technology in transportation management
• fiscal disparities (tax-base sharing law)
• state-wide community-based planning act
• cooperation across school districts
• neighborhood revitalization project is improving neighborhood-based planning
• public transit systems
• used ISTEA well; paying more attention to alternative transportation modes
• critical mass of people willing to work on things
• strong cultural community and cooperation
• do a good job of defining problems
• cooperative government bodies
• willingness to create new institutions
• voluntary consensus to attack challenge of affordable housing
• strong philanthropic community
• Metropolitan Council
• educational institutions
• evangelical/faith community
• Barriers (or the gap between capacity and performance)
• Twin Cities is an organization-rich environment; tendency is to create new organizations which freezes the capacity of existing institutions
• integrating systems is hard work and is made harder by special interests trying to keep what they have

Issues Surrounding the Metropolitan Council:

• its needs to be elected
• public doesn't know much about it and doesn't understand its role
• problems with staff implementing policies
• Council operates like a state agency
• we expect the Council to do things it wasn't designed to do
• gubernatorial neglect of metropolitan issues
• no legislative direction on metro issues
• local units of government have to work with a dysfunctional tax system
• no shared vision of the region and no elected leaders who have articulated a vision
• no base of support for elected leaders who articulate a vision
• a culture that requires complete consensus to get change
• a policy culture that confuses people until they're no longer involved and then diffuses the accountability
• no implementation capacity
• calls for a stronger role for Met Council run against trend of empowering local gov't
• call for smaller and more local government is used as a tool to stop things
• community discovers regional issues from the bottom up - much energy but getting something done is difficult
• aging leadership, not enough interest among young people
• reduced the meaning of civic life to volunteerism
• no ethic for the land
• short-term attention span on policy matters
• behavior and incentives don't line up
• alignment problem - resources with vision; tax policy vs. what we want
• risk adverse; very conservative in implementation
• not enough engagement with people of color and not enough cross-sectoral conversation
• more focus on the education system
• philosophical support for brownfields but no action at the ground level
• workforce development system is supplier driven and insensitive to the needs of employers or employees
• too much rhetoric and simplification of issues e.g. linking affordable housing and concentration of poverty as a single issue
• race relations (dispersing poverty is looked at like toxic waste)
• urban/suburban mistrust
• suburban classcism
• passion for mobility as highest priority
• solving regional problems is dome too much by pitting interest groups against each other

What system changes are needed to move ahead? What needs to change?

• allow the Council to operate and function as a regional governing body
• get over the Council discussion - it distracts from the actual stuff that needs doing
• create neighborhoods as implementation units and the region as the planning unit
• disassemble the current local government structure
• need a larger forum where people can learn about how all the 'narrow' issues fit together - cut through the enormous self-interest
• think about how your action affects the whole region
• metro-area legislators must do a better job of thinking about the region as a region
• better linking of people who need jobs with education and training
• look at the flow of capital and subsidies
• spend more time figuring out what we want and less on fixing the 'structure'

What would we do different? Some ideas

• develop a key goal - measurable and focused on outcomes
• don't change existing organizations, instead propose something and see how all the players respond to RFP-type process
• probably not possible to enunciate only one goal, here are three things: education and skills training; economic disparity; and affordable housing
• employer, job-seeker driven system in job training programs
• farmland protection project to clean-up the Minnesota river
• focus on economic disparities instead of schools/education; develop a parameter range for acceptable economic disparity in a community
• metro replacement policy for affordable housing
• invest in urban village planning
• put together a team of federal officials to sit down in an integrated way to talk about: 1) commerce clause in interstate competition and the destructive 'bidding wars' that states engage in and 2) ensuring competitive markets, especially in the airline industry
• determine what would make the business community make a significant investment in the region - what gives the region a competitive edge for business
• skilled workforce - make connections between jobs and necessary skills
• more help for small local entrepreneurs in creating livable wage jobs
• performance-based tax-base sharing
• measurable regional goals
• investment in infrastructure that elicits private sector investment
• connect divisive issues - connect successful job development to successful skills training to geographic patterns
• send a symbolic message - don't build the Stillwater bridge and use the money to enhance current infrastructure
• build awareness and connect the disinvestment with growth
• federal program that marries capital to social ends

Curt Johnson's summation

The Twin Cities region is undergoing a quiet transitional crisis that is manifested in a variety of ways.

1. Minnesota nice is giving way to candor and specific confrontation, but we haven't figured out how that works yet
2. We used to have a quiet implicit vision. We don't share it any longer, but we're still stuck in that last vision.
3. Our organizational frameworks are cracking at the seems. People want things done that the organizations can't do.
4. Our attitudes and local politics feed mistrust, which has become a convenient tool
5. In our capacity for change we are great at networking, but with people whom we already know and with whom we already agree.
6. Tendency is to push issues down or shove them up and then condemn everything government does.
7. Recurring tendency to think process and fixing the structure is the solution.

How can we create a sense of regional community, how can we see the region as we do from the air? Let's identify one or two things to do; get on the field; cut through the rhetoric and get something done. It doesn't have to heroic or solve the biggest problems. Let's just do it.