Inventing the Metropolitan Council.
How seven counties in Minnesota came together to fight sewage, sprawl and small thinking.
In Minnesota we take a pragmatic view of paradise. We flock to the lake, knowing we’ll share it with a cloud of mosquitoes. We have a truly original experiment in regional government with our Metropolitan Council. We bicker about it like an old married couple picking out a mattress.
So maybe this is just a case of Minnesotans being Minnesotans. But the tone of the Met Council debate feels harsher this year. Met Council plans for new light rail lines continue to divide our neighborhoods. Water is just beginning to emerge as a contentious issue in the region. There’s a new task force in the Minnesota House with the ominous name, “The Subcommittee on Metropolitan Council Accountability and Transparency.”
In 1967 my father, then a 42-year-old railroad lawyer, served as chairman of the Citizens League committee that helped create the Metropolitan Council. So when I listen to all the controversy I wonder what’s happened. Is this the same sensible organization I heard so much about as a kid growing up?
There’s a common theme running through the criticism, and it goes like this: “The Metropolitan Council is an unelected body with the power to tax and spend.” But is that honestly the issue? I set out to learn some history and find the answers.
The first thing to know about the Metropolitan Council is that the process that led to its creation was, like the Council itself, unlike anything else in American governance. The story played out in places few might expect. In basement rec rooms. Around pitchers of beer at the clubhouse of the old Normandale Golf Course. On the editorial pages of the daily papers.
“It was the sewer crisis of 1959 that really kicked off all of this,” Ted Kolderie tells me as we talk in his book-lined study overlooking the heart of St. Paul. Kolderie, co-founder and senior fellow at Education|Evolving and a long-time advocate of innovative public policy, wrote for the editorial page of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune at the time. “The legislature was paralyzed on the sewer problem.”
But the story goes back even further, to the beginnings of the Twin Cities. “The cities had started for different reasons,” Kolderie continues. “St. Paul began at Pig’s Eye Landing, the uppermost landing on the Mississippi, and was oriented toward transportation. Minneapolis was built around the falls and grain milling.” The cities might have gone their separate ways once the railroads came through in the 1860s, but for the geography of the Mississippi River. Kolderie hands me a slim volume, The Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis by geographers Ronald Abler, John Adams and John Borchert. It describes how the terrain of the Mississippi Valley forced the path of the new rail line coming from the east to pass through St. Paul, then continue on to Minneapolis before finally finding a good spot to bridge the river at Nicollet Island. Neither city could act on its natural inclination to monopolize rail and prosper at the expense of the other. If geography is destiny, the Twin Cities were destined to grow together.
And grow together they did, as Kolderie describes it. “In Minnesota we put most of what matters in one place, which makes us unique. We combined the land grant and state university into one, and placed it in the midst of the major metro area. The only state that’s done that.” The state capital is in the Twin Cities. So are most of our big companies. There is a bright binary star burning at the center of Minnesota’s economy.
As growth exploded following World War II the Twin Cities sprawled outward over the region’s flat farmland, eventually exceeding the capacity of the sewer system that served Minneapolis and St. Paul. The two cities had already invested in a system that worked. They had no interest in spending the money all over again to build lines to serve all the people migrating away from their borders. The far-flung suburban communities didn’t have the resources to do it alone. Partially treated waste was pouring into the region’s waterways and wells. A State Health Department study found that half of the private wells in 39 area communities had been contaminated. In a famous call to the health department a woman from New Hope complained that her tap water looked like beer, complete with a foamy head. Meanwhile at the state capital, one legislative session after another failed to find an answer.
The real problem was an inability to think big.
By the time the 1965 legislative session adjourned, it was becoming abundantly clear that the real problem wasn’t sewers. It was an inability to think like the large, interconnected region we had become. That’s the discussion I listened to as a kid, tagging along behind my dad and his friends at the shaggy old Normandale golf course. I didn’t understand half of what they were taking about. I was just a scrawny ten-year-old with a talent for finding lost golf balls. But I still remember the electricity running through the conversation.
The usual foursome on a Saturday morning consisted of Verne Johnson, Raeder Larson, John Mooty and Charles Clay. They were friends from law school at the University of Minnesota, and had been active in the Young Republican League. By the early 1950s they had a group they called “The Resolutions Assembly,” with Johnson as the executive director. I recently received a kitchen table history lesson from my mother, Audrey Clay, who was the group’s secretary in those early years. “We had all these people who cared about politics. Your dad. Verne Johnson. C. Donald Peterson, Bill Frenzel, Wayne Popham, John and Ginny Mae Mooty. Verne’s idea was to go to work for local candidates, and have discussions, and pass resolutions on the good ideas…then we sent them to the Legislature.”
The Resolutions Assembly experience would prove to be an asset in 1957 when, fresh from a stint in Washington working for Republican Congressman Walter Judd, Johnson took a job as executive director of the Citizens League. The group had started with a local focus, originally working on charter reform in the city of Minneapolis. By the late 1950s its sphere of influence was expanding. “Verne came back to town and went to the Citizens League, and all these guys followed,” my mother observed at our kitchen table session. “They were smart and they understood government. They made it their entertainment.”
Paul Gilje joined the Citizens League as Research Director in 1964. He offers a similar description of public policy research driven by civic-minded private individuals. “It wasn’t so much about finding a good balance of opinions, it was about dealing with the issues and ideas on their merits.” He told me he’d first discovered the Citizens League during his years as a reporter for the Minneapolis Star. He learned that following the League’s study committees was a smart way to get a scoop on the next big topic at the state capital.
By the mid 1960s, Gilje says, “we had been peppering the Legislature with reports on metropolitan issues.” A 1965 Citizens League study took a hard look at the area’s existing regional agency, the Metropolitan Planning Commission. Why wasn’t it doing more to address problems like the sewer issue? According to Gilje, the committee concluded that an entirely different sort of governmental structure would be needed to solve the region’s growing problems. They asked the League’s board of directors to either broaden their assignment, or form a new committee.
The 1965 report is an intriguing artifact. There are no flashy graphics, just mechanical typewriter characters on faded mimeo paper. The spine is anchored by an array of bent staples. It cut to the heart of the problem.
“The decision-makers in the Twin Cities area now are the town boards, village councils, city councils, county boards and boards of special-purpose agencies. Each is operating individually and independently of the other. Each cooperates with others only to the extent that it is in the best interests of its own residents. This is, of course, what the various units of government are required to do.”
“None of them is assigned to look after the best interests of the entire area.”
In the fall of 1965 Ted Kolderie wrote a major series for the newspaper under the banner “Our Metropolitan Future.” In its own way it, too, is an artifact from a time when the media were far less fragmented than they are today. An example of the press providing an energetic and persistent voice to lead reform. Over the coming years Kolderie’s editorials and the policy work of the Citizens League would perform like two pistons in an engine to move the discussion of regional policy forward.
The lead article in the series describes the challenge in stark terms. “The metropolitan problem is the failure in law and governmental organization which denies this community any real political identity, and leaves it less power to act on its problems than is possessed by the smallest village in the state.”
The second piece in the series ran under the headline “Our Area Can Prosper Only if United.” It began by pointing out that the two formerly minor league cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had recently attracted the major league Twins and Vikings franchises, but only because they had decided to act as a single region. It was an early recognition of the emerging importance of the region as our fundamental unit of economic competitiveness.
The series also brought up the idea of building a new regional agency out of the area’s senatorial districts. The districts were roughly equal in population, giving voters equal representation. Also helpful, the districts tended to cross both county and city lines. This would create an agency better able to speak for the region’s people, not just its many individual units of government.
A political mechanism for making area-wide decisions.
Kolderie was in Washington D.C. on a fellowship during the time he wrote the editorial series. His thinking distilled further on the trip back to the Twin Cities. He remembers carrying his typewriter out into the backyard on a stop at his wife’s family home in Indiana. When he finished typing he had a 20-page document he called the SCAN memo, for Special Council for Area-wide Needs. That was his working name for a new structure to coordinate area-wide decisions.
The SCAN memo reads like a blueprint for the principles and strategies that would become important in the coming debate on regional governance. Two ideas in particular should be noted. One, that a new regional agency be decentralized. “We are not talking about a massive, consolidated ‘metropolitan government’ which would take over and administer services and functions currently — and properly — handled at the municipal or county level.” The goal was to create a central authority, and give it the ability to coordinate these many individual functions to better serve the development of the area as a whole.
And second, that it be “utterly the creature of the state.” As the SCAN memo described it, “The state recognizes the existence of the metropolitan community, and provides a political mechanism for the formulation of area-wide policy. The metropolitan area, for its part, recognizes the interest of the state in its sound economic and political development.”
This is a fundamental distinction, and one that continues to be misunderstood by many of the Met Council’s critics. We have a strong tradition of home rule and town hall government in our country. We also have a strong tradition of the state and states’ rights as the building blocks of our constitutional system.
A regional body has to exist somewhere in-between. Politically, our traditions don’t offer much guidance for this. The concept of a region didn’t even exist until the period of rapid urban growth following World War II. Yet in cultural and economic terms, the region has become the dominant reality for most of us. Anchoring a regional strategy to the State Legislature begins to create a mechanism for it to work within our democratic traditions.
Kolderie circulated the SCAN memo among a small group, including individuals at the Legislature and Citizens League. “Verne didn’t want to touch it,” Kolderie says of the Citizens League at the time. “It was too comprehensive and far ahead of the discussion.”
Instead, Verne Johnson went to work on his own efforts to move the discussion forward. In 1966 he began to hold regular meetings in his basement, gathering business and civic leaders to discuss ideas for metropolitan reorganization and build a consensus for action. I remember the Johnson basement as a classic 1960s rec room, with Linoleum on the floor and plywood paneling on the walls. It was as far as you can get from the ornate hearing rooms of the state capital, and a different universe entirely from the high-dollar power politics of today. The press attended the basement sessions, with Ted Kolderie representing the Minneapolis papers and Peter Vanderpool there for the St. Paul paper.
By the fall of that year the discussion was ready to move out of the basement. Johnson organized a daylong meeting on metropolitan government at St. Thomas College. Kolderie attended this as well. He remembers that Johnson set up a large board with a grid outlining the issues. Every time the group was able to reach consensus, he filled in the square with red. By the end of the day, “there was a lot of red.”
1966 would prove to be a pivotal year for those hoping to find a regional answer to the area’s growing problems. A new Citizens League committee was established with Charles Clay as Chairman. This one was given the broader scope requested by the 1965 committee.
The State Legislature also went to work, with subcommittees on regional governance in both the House and Senate formed during the interim leading up to the 1967 session. The House subcommittee was led by Rep. Howard Albertson. In the Senate it was Sen. Gordon Rosenmeier, who would become a central figure in the coming debate.
“Gordon Rosenmeier was from Little Falls and ran things in the state,” was the assessment Paul Gilje gave me of the power dynamic at the capital in 1967. Ted Kolderie described the first time he met Rosenmeier, while a young writer for the paper. The powerful Senator had invited him to the Minneapolis Club for a drink. “Rosenmeier had almost complete control of the Senate. An amazing character. He drank scotch and soda endlessly. He explained how things worked: ‘Minnesota is a great state. At its heart is government. At the heart of government is the Legislature. At the heart of the Legislature is the Committee of Civil Administration.’” Rosenmeier was the Chairman of the Committee of Civil Administration.
Washington was also becoming a larger player in metropolitan affairs. In 1966 Congress passed the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, popularly called Model Cities. This provided federal funds to address the twin problems of decay at the core of urban areas and sprawl at the edges. But as a condition of getting that aid an area would need to have a regional plan, and a regional planning body set up to review requests against that plan.
The answer in most metropolitan areas was what came to be known as a COG, or Council of Governments. The 1978 book Governing the Twin Cities Region by John Harrigan and William Johnson, describes them this way: “In the COGs, each county, central city, and large municipality is directly represented, and the financial contributions of these member governments are voluntary.” The authors count more than 300 COGs by 1970, yet describe them as “fragile tools for making hard decisions” due to their voluntary, non-statutory set-up.
“The so-called COG system was considered quite brilliant,” Ted Kolderie told me. But he also described the enthusiasm as short-lived. “A few would go on to become advisory bodies, but they were never very effective. Most of them just became paper mills and struggled along until the Reagan Administration finally shut them down.”
The old Metropolitan Planning Commission was in essence a COG, and the new Citizens League committee was well aware of the failures outlined in the 1965 report. In November of 1966 the committee took the unusual step of releasing a summary of the commentary and proposals they had heard up to that point. The hope was to encourage early area-wide discussion of the issues. As the committee put it, “to hear the positions and feelings of as broad a spectrum of the metropolitan area as possible.” The information was organized into areas of agreement and disagreement. One finding stands out. “There was no dissent on the need for the 1967 Legislature to establish a metropolitan-wide governmental organization.”
Hire the bus drivers, or concentrate on the overall plan?
“The big question,” according to Paul Gilje, “was whether a Metro Council would be an operating body or a coordinating body. Would they hire the bus drivers, or work on coming up with the plan for the system.” Closely tied to this throughout the debate would be the question of whether members would be appointed or elected.
1967 began with another major editorial series from Ted Kolderie, this one under the banner headline “Metropolitan Unity.” The second in the series carried the title, “Which Metropolitan Approach: Consolidate or Co-ordinate?” Kolderie wrote that much of the early sentiment, from groups like the Chambers of Commerce, the Hennepin County League of Municipalities, and the new Governor Harold LeVander, leaned in favor of a consolidated operating district. Creating a central board to directly administer services like sewer, transit and mosquito control.
But, Kolderie wrote, the idea of keeping metropolitan government a coordinating body that wouldn’t get bogged down in operating details was also gaining traction. He compared it to the role of a general contractor in the construction industry, supervising the work of sub-contractors such as plumbers and carpenters to make sure the overall plan is executed properly.
In February, the Citizens League released its report, “A Metropolitan Council for the Twin Cities Area.” It began with the statement that metropolitan government was already in fact a reality. “The basic question facing the 1967 Legislature is not whether the Twin Cities area should have a metropolitan government. The area has had metropolitan government for several years — in the form of independent single-purpose districts. The basic question is whether the Legislature will continue to build on this form, with the inevitable result that citizens lose more and more control over their government, or whether the Legislature will establish a framework which will enable the citizens to recapture control.”
The Citizens League recommended an operating body that would take over functions such as wastewater treatment, transit and planning. The independent districts would go out of existence as “separate governments.”
To form this body the Citizens League called for direct election, using state senatorial districts as the boundaries. Committee members saw this as appropriate for a body that would be a policy making body rather than an administrative board. “Direct election of policy makers in government is a fundamental principle.”
In February State Senator Harmon Ogdahl and Representative Bill Frenzel introduced a bill calling for a multi-purpose service district with elected members, largely mirroring the proposals in the Citizens League report. But both the proposed operating duties and the idea of directly electing council members would become problems.
“Rosenmeier didn’t like it.” Paul Gilje says of the influential State Senator from Little Falls. “He thought an elected body would supersede the Senate.” The City of Bloomington, which was doing quite well economically under the existing set-up, was also a strong voice testifying against the bill as hearings began at the Legislature.
But the long years spent building consensus had created a powerful momentum. Ted Kolderie describes one Saturday morning legislative hearing in which several prominent area CEOs filed into the first row to quietly watch the proceedings. “Rosenmeyer got the message that there was powerful support for the idea and it was going to happen. He submitted an alternate bill with Howard Albertson from the House. So there were two competing bills. He intended to get in front of the issue with his own plans.”
The Rosenmeier-Albertson bill was considered more conservative, with members appointed at large by the governor. It would be a coordinating body with no operating powers. The two bills would remain deadlocked throughout the session.
“Bill Frenzel came up with a good compromise, combining the best of both bills,” Kolderie says. “The idea was to design the Council as a coordinating body, get it created, and charge the Council with solving the problems of sewers.”
That still left the question of representation. A proposal was offered to combine the 28 metro senate districts into pairs and appoint 14 members. But a major part of the consensus at the St. Thomas meeting and in the 1967 Citizens League report was that a metropolitan government should be elected. The Citizens League went so far as to caution that it viewed its proposal as unified, and if the method of electing council members changed, “we would not necessarily recommend all the powers and responsibilities we have included here.”
Amendments to elect members were offered by Wendell Anderson in the Senate, and Martin Sabo in the House. Ted Kolderie told me that he watched the voting board light up in the House as legislators switched their votes back and forth until, finally, the amendment failed by just a few votes. The Senate amendment received a tie vote on May 19, and so also failed to proceed. The next day was the final day to consider bills, and no further amendments were offered. According to the Legislative Reference Library file for 1967, the Legislature adjourned sine die on May 22nd. The Metropolitan Council had been created as a coordinating body, with members to be appointed by the governor.
So what does all of this teach us today, almost 50 years after the Legislature created the Metropolitan Council?
Begin with this. We Minnesotans have been lucky in our past. Whether it’s the big geologic rumblings of prehistory that gave us such abundant natural resources, or the more recent events that caused the Twin Cities to grow together and, yes, create a Metropolitan Council. We’ve been left a legacy that continues to drive our prosperity.
Like the natural process that formed our lakes and rivers, the political process that gave birth to the Met Council was glacial. It took years to build the consensus that made the 1967 legislation possible. It took the slow, grinding machinery of compromise. If the Legislature had made the perfect the enemy of the good and rejected compromise in 1967, we might still all be drinking sewage.
So we have a Met Council that was built on compromise, and has been fine-tuned by the legislative process ever since. The question of how its members should be selected remains unsettled. The Citizens League continued to recommend direct elections, most recently in a 1997 study. The closest the idea ever came to reality was a bill that passed both houses of the Legislature in 1994, only to be vetoed by Republican Governor Arnie Carlson.
Having the benefit of history to temper our expectations, it’s hard to envision a scenario where the governor, and or the modern-day successors of a legislative powerbroker like Gordon Rosenmeier, wouldn’t feel threatened by the perceived authority of an elected regional government. Former Met Council member Jim Brimeyer put it succinctly. “An elected Met Council would just turn into a mini Legislature, and nobody wants that.”
Perhaps the best we can do is make an uneasy peace with the idea that those who dislike a particular Met Council decision will always begin their argument with the point that it is an unelected body, even though they’d never expect it to be anything else. There’s a smug confidence to the argument when you hear it made. There’s also a hollowness, if you understand the history.
One could make the opposing argument that there’s an inherent wisdom in the democratic process itself, particularly a lengthy one like the formation the Metropolitan Council. This also is a way of thinking that’s dear to our traditions. It would suggest that the Met Council we ended up with is the one we need. The body best able to navigate the gray area between state and municipality.
The more useful question would be to ask how effectively has the Met Council, as an appointed body, been able to function. The subject has not been well studied. I recently had the opportunity to exchange emails with Peter Bell, who served as Met Council Chair during the administration of Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty. His simple answer? He didn’t think being appointed made all that much difference. A 2011 report on the Office of the Legislative Auditor blamed the inability of the region to agree on a transit strategy on the fact that the Met Council is appointed. But it came back to the same circular political argument against the idea of appointment, rather than to the question of whether the appointed officials themselves have been able do an effective job.
The recent disaster in Flint Michigan, where an emergency manager appointed by the Governor decided to switch to a cheaper water source that ended up poisoning city residents, offers a useful contrast as well as a cautionary tale. In Flint there was no regional strategy to insert itself between the city and an appointed official with a mandate from the governor to cut costs. In Minnesota the presence of a regional strategy reverses the Flint equation. Members may be appointed by the governor, but their mandate is to represent the citizens of the region.
There does seem to be a growing consensus that Council members should return to serving staggered terms, as they did before 1994. There has also been talk of giving local officials a larger voice in recommending candidates. These reforms would add a check on the power of a governor to implement a very single-minded agenda over the opposition of local citizens, as happened in Flint.
The bigger question is how one reconciles all these divergent political and practical realities. Essentially, that is the job of the Met Council itself. The Council has tended to find its best success when it does the patient work of building consensus for good ideas. A statement issued by the Citizens League in 1972, a period of intense turf wars between the Met Council and the service agencies it was supposed to be coordinating, put it well.
“The friction evident reflects very largely the success of the Metropolitan Council… it would be a mistake to conclude that what the area has been watching, this past year, is simply controversy. It has been, really, the most intense and searching debate over basic policy about the future development of the Twin Cities area… precisely the kind of debate — leading toward well-informed decisions — the Legislature had in mind when it set up the Council to replace the Metropolitan Planning Commission in 1967.”
This whole thing began with sewers. That still may be the best place to find clarity. The 1967 legislation established the Metropolitan Council with a mandate to find an answer to the sewer problem. “Its first effort worked perfectly,” Ted Kolderie told me. The Council spent two years holding hearings and building consensus. Then it presented the 1969 legislative session with a plan to collect waste and send it to a rebuilt central system. When the City of Minneapolis complained that the plan was a burden on its taxpayers, the Legislature asked whether their views had been given a chance to be heard. The city could only answer that, in truth, they had. That was enough for the Legislature, and they finally decided to act. The region at long last had an answer to its sewer problem.
Today, the Metropolitan Council website tells us that the Twin Cities area is able to “collect and treat wastewater at rates 40% lower than peer agencies, while winning national awards for excellence.” Peter Bell, the former Met Council Chair, put it this way. “We do clean wastewater better and cheaper than anybody else.” The once intractable problem is now an advantage that we promote in our efforts to market the region’s strengths.
Critics would say that the Met Council has accomplished this by creating an artificial boundary within which it will build sewers. They argue that allowing the free market to determine where people live would keep land costs lower. Except that it wouldn’t. All of us in the region end up paying for those sewers and thus subsidize the developers building houses outside the boundary, as well as the families buying them. So the question becomes, do we really want decisions that affect the pocketbooks and quality of life of everyone being made solely by developers over which we have no control. Or municipal officials for whom we have no opportunity to vote?
The Metropolitan Council is a political arrangement that gives all of us who call the region home a voice in such decisions. Jim Brimeyer, the former member, told me that during his time on the Council, “We had people from all over coming here to see how we did this. It’s the only one like it in the country.” The Met Council may not be perfect, but the job it does is important and we’re unlikely to find an alternative that does it better. That’s the lesson history teaches.
