The Failed Promise of the Met Council

The choice is not between the Met Council we have and no regional governance at all; it is between an agency that drifts as a patronage outpost and one rebuilt, staffed, and empowered to do its job.

Nearly sixty years ago Minnesota did something visionary. In 1967 the Legislature created the Metropolitan Council, a regional body for the seven-county Twin Cities area, in response to failing septic systems, a collapsing bus system, and uncoordinated growth across a region fragmented into 181 cities and townships and dozens of school districts. Nearly six decades later the Met Council has failed to deliver on its basic promises. I write as a former city planning director who worked in housing and economic planning, and the lesson I draw is not that regionalism failed; it is that Minnesota never gave regionalism a fair test.

The promise was substantial. The Council was to coordinate land use and growth, run regional transit, manage wastewater, and reduce the fiscal inequalities that produced unequal services and unequal schools. The Fiscal Disparities Act of 1971 required metro communities to share commercial and industrial tax base growth, and the Metropolitan Land Planning Act gave the Council authority to require local plans to conform to regional system plans. Few American regions have ever assembled this much regional power in one place.

Honesty requires a concession. The Council runs one of the country’s best regional wastewater systems at famously low rates, the regional parks system is the envy of its peers, and Fiscal Disparities remains the largest tax-base sharing program in America. But these successes are technical service delivery, the work of engineers. The Council succeeds where competence suffices and fails wherever political courage is required, exactly what one would predict of a patronage body. Pipes do not require courage; telling a wealthy suburb to accept apartments does.

Start with governance. All seventeen members, including the cabinet-level chair, are appointed by the governor and serve terms coterminous with the governor’s, so the entire body turns over with each administration. Appointment was supposed to insulate planning and finance experts from parochial politics. The practice has been the opposite: a patronage outpost stocked with loyalists, campaign allies, and contributors, described by legislative critics as friends and allies of the governor who appointed them, whipsawing in direction each time the governor’s office changes hands.

The chairmanship tells the story best. In 2015 Governor Mark Dayton named Adam Duininck as the Council’s first full-time chair, a man the Associated Press described as a political ally deeply involved in efforts to elect Dayton and other Democrats. Duininck had run WIN Minnesota, a DFL fundraising operation, served as a union political director, and was married to Dayton’s chief of staff, with no formal training in planning. He was the system working as designed, and the temptation is bipartisan. Meanwhile, virtually all of the roughly 400 other major regional planning organizations in the country have a majority of elected members. The Twin Cities chose insulation from voters and got insulation from competence.

Nothing illustrates the accountability deficit better than the Southwest light rail line, budgeted at $1.25 billion in 2011 and now $2.86 billion, the most expensive public works project in state history and nearly a decade behind schedule. The Legislative Auditor found the Council was not fully transparent with the public and legislators and kept spending without the money to finish, and a later audit documented noncompliance and weak internal controls. No one was fired and no one was voted out, because no one could be.

The Council has also failed to use the powers it has. The Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed in City of Lake Elmo v. Metropolitan Council (2004) that the Council may require a city to conform its plan to regional system plans. Yet in the two decades since, the Council has rarely wielded that authority, development jumped its boundaries into exurban counties, and the Legislature declined to extend the fiscal disparities pool to follow it. An agency that wins its biggest case and then declines to act has chosen irrelevance.

It was not always so; the proof is the Council’s own history. In the 1970s the Council tied sewer extensions and infrastructure grants to each suburb accepting its fair share of affordable housing, and it worked: by 1979, 70 percent of HUD-subsidized housing was being built in the region’s developing, overwhelmingly white suburbs, making the Twin Cities a national model of integration. Then, under pressure from affluent suburbs and central-city housing developers alike, the Council simply stopped enforcing the system, and today the fair share requirement remains the law but is mostly ignored. This history demolishes the kindest defense of the Council, that it never really had usable power. It had it, used it, succeeded, and chose to stop.

Now we can measure the consequences. The new Who Sprawls the Most? study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health scored 233 metro areas on compactness across density, land use mix, centering, and street connectivity, with a national average of 100. The Twin Cities ranked 156th with a score of 87.97, behind Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, and Omaha, which have no comparable planning agency, while Portland, governed by a directly elected regional council, ranked 60th, and geography is no excuse, since Madison, on similar Midwestern terrain, is the most compact medium-sized metro in the nation. The county data sharpen the indictment: Minneapolis’s Hennepin County and St. Paul’s Ramsey County score as compact while every surrounding county sprawls, a core doing its part for a planner that never disciplined the edge. A ranking cannot prove causation, but when the region with the strongest planning powers in the country trails a hundred and fifty regions without them, the burden of explanation is the Council’s.

Meanwhile the disparities the Council was meant to cure persist. The gap in referendum property wealth per pupil between rich and poor school districts has grown sharply. The Twin Cities has the largest Black-white homeownership gap of any comparable metro, a 46.9 point chasm, and 45 of the region’s 50 most segregated schools are charters. There is also a constitutional cloud. Avery v. Midland County extended one person, one vote to local bodies exercising general governmental powers; the Council’s defense rests on Sailors v. Board of Education, which permits appointed boards performing essentially administrative functions. A body that taxes, legislates land use, and overrides elected city councils for 3.2 million people stopped being administrative long ago.

Worse, the Council’s abdication has left Minneapolis doing the region’s work alone, producing a new segregation by housing type. In 2018 the city adopted its 2040 plan ending single-family zoning citywide, absorbing the density, the litigation, and the political pain by itself; households that still want single-family homes are pushed outward, sharpening the contrast in housing types across the metro. The plan triggered years of litigation, with the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously holding in 2021 that it required environmental review, until the Legislature changed the law in 2024 to exempt metro comprehensive plans retroactively. One city densifying alone, while no suburb was asked to share the load, produced sorting on one side and conflict on the other, precisely what a regional planner exists to prevent.

The deeper principle is that good cities and regions contain a diversity of housing options rather than a single type per jurisdiction. Many suburbs are bedroom communities built around one housing product, and Minneapolis now restricts in the opposite direction. People move through life stages, from single to coupled to raising children to empty nesting to retirement, and a community offering one option forces them out at each transition. The region should encourage something closer to a random distribution of housing options in every city; Minneapolis cannot build the region’s balance alone, and only a regional body can.

What follows from this indictment is emphatically not abolition, which would capitulate to the parochialism the Council was created to overcome. The answer is competent leadership, better structure, and more authority, or at least the will to use what it has. The Legislature’s Metropolitan Governance Task Force sent six reform options to lawmakers in 2024, and direct election deserves the most serious consideration; the objections to it describe every other elected body in the state. Short of election, members should serve staggered fixed terms, removable only for cause, and be vetted against statutory professional criteria in planning, public finance, development, or administration, akin to those Minnesota sets for the Public Utilities Commission.

Structure should be matched with accountability and teeth. Splitting the planning council from a professionally governed transit operating authority, one of the task force’s own options, would keep construction debacles from consuming the planning mission, and a standing inspector general with mandatory audits when megaprojects exceed budget would institutionalize oversight that arrived years too late on Southwest. Minnesota should adopt a housing appeals law modeled on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, letting developers appeal exclusionary zoning denials to the Council in cities falling short of affordable housing thresholds. Infrastructure money, sewer extensions, transportation dollars, and Livable Communities funds should again be conditioned on housing-mix performance, the very mechanism that worked in the 1970s. The Legislature should extend the Council’s jurisdiction and the fiscal disparities pool to the real commuting region, including Wright, Sherburne, Chisago, and Isanti Counties, and require annual public reporting against measurable outcomes: compactness, affordability, the homeownership gap, and school segregation.

A reinvigorated Council matters now because housing is the coming test of Minnesota governance. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the DFL-endorsed candidate for governor, has pledged to put the state on a path to build at least 100,000 houses, condos, and apartments. She cannot come close without the Met Council, because most of those units must land in the metro, and hitting the target requires understanding the diversity of unit types needed, their location relative to jobs, and the transit to move the people who live in them. The Council should balance density goals against the legitimate desire of many families for single-family homes, assemble community land trusts for permanently affordable housing, encourage micro housing and accessory units, and tie development to sustainable energy practices. This is the work I once did as a housing and economic planner, and a Council staffed by planners rather than operatives could deliver it.

Finally, Minnesota should ask whether regionalism’s next frontier is education. The metro’s school segregation and funding disparities are regional problems produced by dozens of district boundaries, and they will not be solved district by district. One can imagine metro-wide integration and enrollment frameworks, tax-base sharing extended to school revenue, or regional siting standards for charter schools. The politics would be ferocious, but the insight of 1967 applies to nothing more obvious than schools.

The Met Council was a great idea, and the problems it was created to solve are more pressing now than in 1967. Regional inequality, housing shortages, school segregation, sprawl, and transit dysfunction do not respect municipal borders. The choice is not between the Met Council we have and no regional governance at all; it is between an agency that drifts as a patronage outpost and one rebuilt, staffed, and empowered to do its job. Minnesota does not need less regionalism. It needs, for the first time in decades, to take regionalism seriously.