Spending millions on out-of-state consultants ignores local talent—and avoids the real problem: the bloated and unwieldy size of the Minneapolis City Council.
The recent news reports that the City of Minneapolis has been quietly paying $1.4 million to a consulting firm located in Madison, Wisconsin, for guidance to stem the rancorous relationship between the City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey passed below the radar when the undertaking was entered into by a unanimous vote of the Council last September.
It may well be that the quarreling factions at City Hall can benefit from the arrangement, for the City’s elected officials—the Mayor and 13 Council members—sorely need some help in learning how to play nice. However, the “leadership development” and “executive coaching” that has been going on since last fall hasn’t seemed to help so far, as the interactions between the 14 elected officials have become increasingly hostile.
The Discretion to Lean Local
If a project like this, embodied in a one-year contract with a two-year option to extend, was to be pursued, why not hire one of the many fine consulting groups in the Twin Cities or even Greater Minnesota for the task? Why spend the money—up to more than $4 million over a three-year span—on an out-of-state provider, the Darcy Luoma Coaching & Consulting group?
There are dozens of them located in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. If the solons felt uncomfortable with a local coaching arrangement, there are some 100-plus individuals and organizations throughout the state holding themselves out as providing executive coaching.
With one slight exception for jurisdictions with reciprocity arrangements, there are no laws or other regulations in place at the state level in Minnesota or locally mandating government entities to purchase goods and services from in-state or local vendors. Nor ought there to be any rigid “buy local” mandates; they would mimic tariffs, triggering constitutional friction under the Dormant Commerce Clause and provoking “trade wars” with other jurisdictions. Such protectionist devices impede Minnesota businesses from acquiring or maintaining customers outside the state, suppress competition, and hike prices from sellers in a quasi-captive market—actions reminiscent of Donald Trump’s ego-centric machinations.
But the absence of strict “buy local” dictates does not mean that governmental units, like the state’s largest city, are precluded from using their discretion to lean in favor of purchasing from in-state or in-metro companies.
Perhaps City officials here need some “coaching” on how to “buy local” with taxpayer funds.
A Structural Imbalance: The Scale of the Council
Beyond the procurement process, a bigger problem is lurking here, both figuratively and literally: the size of the Minneapolis City Council. Its numerosity is entirely out of line with other municipalities across the country.
To put the bloating into perspective, consider how the Minneapolis model compares to other municipal governing bodies:
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New York City: Features 51 council members for a permanent population roughly 17 times larger than Minneapolis (and a transient population perhaps 20 times larger).
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Los Angeles: Makes do with just 15 Council members, despite being less than half the geographical size of the Big Apple but boasting more than a six-fold population multiple over Minneapolis.
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Tampa, Florida & Oakland, California: Both major cities possess populations roughly equivalent to Minneapolis, yet operate with nimble seven- and eight-member elected municipal governing bodies, respectively. (One wonders how Oakland handles tie votes).
Reducing the size of the City Council in Minneapolis, which was last done in the early 1950s, might make elected officials less insular by forcing them to represent broader, more diverse groups of constituents. This structural reduction could render the body less unwieldy and fractious, helping create more harmonious relationships upstairs from the historic Father of Waters statue in City Hall. Diminishing the head count would also save substantial amounts of money—millions annually—on Council member salaries and reduced support staffing.
Perhaps the City needs its own localized version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to bring about a staff size reduction, provided it does so in a more reasonable and responsible way than Elon Musk did with his chainsaw approach to governmental operations.
Historical Bloat and the Sister City Landscape
While the current composition of 13 members seems to be an unlucky number, historically it has been much worse. In its early days, the nascent, post-Civil War municipality had 20 Council members for a population of some 12,000 souls—about one representative per 600 residents. Talk about the inverse of the modern constitutional principle of “one-man, one-vote” derived from landmark redistricting cases like Reynolds v. Sims (and keeping in mind that no women could vote at the time); there nearly was one representative for every individual man.
By the turn of the 20th century, as the City’s population ballooned, so did the size of the Council, growing to 26 elected officials (two from each of the 13 wards) for a population slightly over 200,000. The Council stayed at that peak through the middle of the century, even when the City’s head count reached its historical high of slightly more than 500,000 after World War II, before eventually scaling back to its current 13. One per ward remains a figure that looks bloated in comparison to comparably sized and even larger communities.
Across the Mississippi River, we see a different dynamic. Hopefully, Mayor Kaohly Her and the seven City Council members in St. Paul—an all-women legislative body serving a municipality less than two-thirds the size of its “Twin”—will not engage in the kind of public catfights and unpleasant situations that characterize their counterparts in Minneapolis, avoiding the need for expensive outside coaching.
But if they do eventually require intervention, they should look for an organization right here in Minnesota to teach them to act like professional adults rather than whining juveniles. They certainly have plenty of local options to choose from.
