Interview with Minneapolis City Council President Elliot Payne: The Power of the Legislature in the Era of a Strong-Mayor System

The following is an interview between myself and Minneapolis City Council President (CP) Elliot Payne. My name is Will. I have been working in Minneapolis Politics and Non-profit circles since early 2019. This interview is meant to be the first in a series I want to do a break down the rise of young progressive leaders in Minneapolis in the years following the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020. While not comprehensive or free of bias given my personal connections to many of the elected officials in question, including CP Payne, my hope is to archive at least some of the thoughts, feelings, and plans these young leaders have. I will also seek out what advice they may have to academics and professionals like our fellow Humphrey Students so that we can continue to orient our collective works toward a more just and community-driven future.

First, some history:

In the Fall of 2021, three ballot initiatives took place amidst the municipal elections of Minneapolis:

Ballot 1: Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to adopt a change in its form of government to an Executive Mayor-Legislative Council structure to shift certain powers to the Mayor, consolidating administrative authority over all operating departments under the Mayor, and eliminating the Executive Committee?

Ballot 2: Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to remove the Police Department and replace it with a Department of Public Safety that employs a comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions by the Department of Public Safety, with those specific functions to be determined by the Mayor and City Council by ordinance; which will not be subject to exclusive mayoral power over its establishment, maintenance, and command; and which could include licensed peace officers (police officers), if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety, with the general nature of the amendments being briefly indicated in the explanatory note below, which is made a part of this ballot?

A note included with the ballot read:

This amendment would create a Department of Public Safety combining public safety functions through a comprehensive public health approach to be determined by the Mayor and Council. The department would be led by a Commissioner nominated by the Mayor and appointed by the Council. The Police Department, and its chief, would be removed from the City Charter. The Public Safety Department could include police officers, but the minimum funding requirement would be eliminated. 

Ballot 3: Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to authorize the City Council to regulate rents on private residential property in the City of Minneapolis, with the general nature of the amendments being indicated in the explanatory note below, which is made a part of this ballot?

A note included with the ballot read:

This amendment would:

Authorize the City Council to regulate rents on private residential property in the City of Minneapolis by ordinance.

Provide that an ordinance regulating rents on private residential property could be enacted in two different and independent ways:

The City Council may enact the ordinance.

The City Council may refer to the ordinance as a ballot question to be decided by the voters for approval at an election. If more than half of the votes cast on the ballot question are in favor of its adoption, the ordinance would take effect 30 days after the election, or at such other time as provided in the ordinance.

That same Fall, a Milwaukee native and son of a single black mother, public school teacher, and black radical activist was running in his first campaign and would be elected to Ward 1 to represent Northeast Minneapolis; a Ward burgeoning with younger families of more recently established middle-income Progressives. At the time just a junior City Council Member, Elliott Payne would take on the role of a technocratic Councilmember, partnering with younger community organizers-turned-elected officials like Robin Wonsley, Jason Chavez, Jeremiah Ellison, and Aisha Chughtai of Wards 2, 9, 5, and 10 respectively. The Fall of 2023 would ring in the election of another young progressive, Aurin Chowdhury, to Ward 12, there was suddenly a simple majority of Post-George Floyd Progressives who ran on, among other things, the promise of holding both the Minneapolis Police Department and the newly empowered Mayor, Jacob Fry, accountable.

This brings us to the time of the interview: October 28th, 2024. It has been almost exactly three years since the contentious ballots of 2021 were voted on and only one of the two that passed has been fully implemented: The Strong Mayor System. Ballot Question 2; 

It is on this crisp Autumn Day that I find myself at the Public Service Building for my interview with City Council President (CP) Payne of Ward 1. Walking across the courtyard beside the mostly vacant City Hall that remains under renovation, I pass by little stone statues of cartoonishly rotund characters caught in time pulling a sled up one of the mini grassy knolls that dot the open space. In front of this little snapshot of whimsy is a group of about half a dozen demonstrators waving a Cuban Flag and brandishing signs calling “No blockade of Cuba”. I give and receive a simple nod of recognition from the group as I pass towards the glass doors.

Upon arriving in the lobby of the makeshift City Council Chambers I am greeted by Councilmember (CM) Chavez before being brought to the Council President’s Office where his Staff and Councilmember Chowdhury are discussing details of some upcoming urban garden and edible boulevard initiatives; though from the calculating and matter-of-fact, almost grim tone one might have thought they were in Chambers discussing funding for the next big contract negotiation with the police. Once the Council President arrived from his latest meeting it was a quick goodbye to CM Chowdhury and the Staff before we sat down and got to recording. 

Author’s Note: The quotes and statements you see written below are paraphrased or cut down for time, but the full recording will be made available on the Humphrey Public Affairs Review website. Council President Payne was sent an initial draft of these questions when I first asked for an interview. What is provided here is the final draft which added two questions at the end and changed some of the wording of previous questions for clarity’s sake. There are also times when parts of the answer CP Payne provides to one question are made applicable in another, so audio listeners will be able to see times when quotes from one section may be moved to another based on relevance. Cuts to the WAV file that may show up for audio listeners are just me removing moments I was either checking the recording or when there were exceptionally long pauses.

1. What can you tell us about your academic and professional background?

“I moved here from Milwaukee to study Mechanical Engineering here at the U… My first job out of college was working at a precision manufacturing facility. I was very unhappy [as] the only engineer in the facility, y’know, so there was a white collar-blue collar thing. I was the youngest person fresh out of college… and I was the only black person in the building. So, I was always getting treated very disrespectfully [but] it was hard to tell if it was a blue collar-white collar thing a young or old thing, or just a race thing.”

He leans back in his chair to reminisce.

“I, rather cynically, went to grad school to get an MBA because I felt like if my career is gonna be this unpleasant, I might as well make more money.”

I chuckle and nod, simply responding with “Fair.” I know part of my reason for coming to Humphrey is not too dissimilar; to find a way to elevate myself out of my current level in the profession. Reaching for something more because where I am just isn’t enough for one reason or another.

“And so I did the part-time program [at the Carlson School of Management] while still working in manufacturing… I intended to do a career shift after graduation, but I was so unhappy that I… got a job at a software company while in grad school.”

Since this was a time before remote work was a unique selling point of a lot of tech jobs, Elliott chuckles as he recounts his time flying across the country almost weekly to show up for work and get back to Minneapolis on time to spend whatever remaining time he had on his weekends dedicated to his schoolwork.

“Which I do not recommend by the way!” he says amidst a soft laugh. “But that job DID give me a chance to pivot my career again. This time into advertising. So, I worked at a digital ad agency in the early 2010s.”

“Clearly my professional path did not suggest politics…” he mentions his parents who were politically active  in the ’60s and ’70s, whose main influence on his political ambitions at the time was simply making him want “to get as far away from Milwaukee as possible… and Minnesota had reciprocity [for tuition].”

While working at his digital ad agency, Elliott discusses the impact of the Eric Garner video on his psyche as a black man. While not the exact moment that drove him to run for office, it would be the needle stuck in the back of his mind as he would break into his work contracting with the City of Minneapolis.

“And the fact that it was on video and the fact that there were no consequences whatsoever… the Grand Jury refusing to accept charges just… It really broke something in me. Rewired me. Made me realize ‘You can’t grad school your way out of the injustices we face.’ ”

Elliott would go on to discuss the simultaneous health complications his wife was experiencing at the time which he says forced him to “truly confront mortality”. While not necessarily political, the CP had no illusions about how much this time in his life set him up for what was to come at the end of the 2010s.

Eventually, volunteer work at a local nonprofit landed Elliott a job with the City of Minneapolis’s Department of Arts and Culture; the Innovation Team (now called the Performance Management and Innovation Team). With a call to bring human-centered design to municipal government, our soon-to-be Councilmember was contracted as a design consultant targeting racial disparities in small businesses and City permits and procedures.

One of this team’s biggest projects was the 911 Dispatcher Working Group. 

“It was a Council Action responding to the murder of Jamar Clark… to discuss alternatives of who should answer certain calls rather than the police.” However, right before going into the Research phase of designing a policy, lockdown happened and COVID-19 was in full swing.

2. What was your sparking moment to get involved in local politics?

Before I could even ask my second question, CP Payne had already gotten into breaking down the beginning of 2020 and what would be his ‘sparking moment’. At the start of the COVID Lockdowns “[t]he City did not have the technology in place to handle work from home… It took a few weeks for us to even get back into a rhythm of work… We didn’t even have Teams at the time until the City finally got the accounts activated… We had pivoted from doing in-person interviews to doing a survey which had gotten maybe 100 or 200 responses… and then George Floyd was murdered.”

A familiar heaviness punctuated the silence as we both took a breath. A collective sigh familiar among those who were living and working here in Minneapolis during those few fateful days in late May and early June of 2020. 

“It is not possible to describe the psychic weight of being a black person who works for the City of Minneapolis when you witness what the City has the capability of doing. It is even harder to describe what that feeling is like when you are working… on creating programs that were meant to avoid these types of circumstances.”

The heaviness is still there but Elliott pushes on, almost without skipping a beat.

“That body of work led to the [current] Behavioral Crisis Response, which [today] feels like a well-established program… but as we were working on that in 2020… it wasn’t supported and was actually categorized as ‘defunding the police’…” Despite it being a modest allocation in the 2021 Budget that soon-to-be CM Payne would work on his first term in office, the fight to get this along with other programs would come up against “objectively racist things that were blocking us from being able to do this work” would drive his project manager to resign due to health concerns.

“That sequence of events made me feel compelled to run…”

3. What observations do you have about the changes Minneapolis has experienced in the last 5 years (from your time as an ordinary citizen to organizer to now as an elected official)? This can be about policies and politics, culture, or anything else you feel passionate about talking about.

“My perspective, probably appropriately so for your audience, will probably be pretty wonky… My role as a contractor was pretty unique…” Elliott would break down how work at City Hall would be going through “fits and starts” while he was constantly out in the field during the downtime between all the procedural blockages that kept the work from progressing any faster. “I have this sort of ‘frontline staff’ perspective of what’s been happening in Minneapolis. Talking about in the last 5 years, I mean…  We were on the cover of the New York Times as the face of the Defund Movement… and [Ballot Question 2] was very much misconstrued in a bad faith way to be a ‘Defund’ measure… The only substantive change it called for was getting rid of the staffing minimum… [to] create the flexibility in the budget that is realistic to the need… And the thing that didn’t get as much attention was the Strong Mayor amendment (Ballot Question 1). And I feel like that is the biggest change in the last 5 years because it is such an extraordinarily impactful structural change to the way the City government works. I am coming from this perspective of somebody who was working on staff directions that came out of the Council… and what I experience now, as an elected person, is almost like a dismissal of [each member of the legislature]… Even now, when we vote on something, the administration does not necessarily need to act on it. This is evidenced by our Public Safety Aid [Proposal which was going to be given to the State Legislature] that we passed last year. The Mayor attempted to leverage it to pass one-time hiring bonuses for MPD…. [whereas] we [the Majority of City Council] saw this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build out a model for safety, because the entire conversation about police funding was ‘Maybe there are other investments or programs we could design that would keep our communities safe that would not necessarily need police’… It ended up being a pretty simple policy challenge: do we want to raise taxes or cut costs to fund a new program? This was our one-time opportunity to say ‘We don’t need to put this burden on the tax levy to imagine some new programs…’ We passed it, we all celebrated it… and the Mayor just didn’t implement it. And then, you know, maybe back in June of this year, he brings forward a budget proposal to gut that [Public Safety Aid] to pay for the historic pay increase to the MPD Budget during contract negotiations…”

I had known previously that there was a lot of backroom brawling during the contract negotiations, but this detail was brand new to me. The heaviness from before was replaced with the exhale of an unfortunate realization. All that work that went into getting these young and talented professionals elected. The months of campaigning and years of backroom lobbying to try and tip the scales of power even just a little bit in favor of trying something different for a change… all undone by the inaction of one indifferent Mayor who has given the impression that his primary constituency is a police department made up of more than 80% staff that are not even from the City he represents.

Council President Payne remarks that after expending so much political will to block the Mayor’s gutting of these investments was the moment that pushed him to run for Council President

“It was a reflection of the way that things used to work. Where Council had the power and therefore, when [they] took an action, that was the end of the matter... Now we get to witness the Mayor [regularly] disregard the will of the body… AFTER signing the budget. He could have vetoed it, but instead, he just signed it and used his discretion to not implement what the will of the body was.”

What was the biggest change? In a system where the odds were already stacked against any substantive change to the Status Quo, we voted for a system that encourages inaction rather than negotiation.

4. What are your hopes for the remainder of your time in office? (Policy wise or otherwise)

“I was very laser-focused on public safety when I was getting ready to run… When we worked on the Behavioral Crisis Response it was met with skepticism, hostility, and even obstructionism. So I am laser-focused on trying to overcome those barriers… We are very early in the life cycle of transforming public safety. There are any number of program areas I can imagine myself, let alone through community-oriented design approaches like unarmed safety ambassadors, safe use sites where people can opt into treatment, and housing that doesn’t leave people behind or outside… these are all components of what public safety is to me. I really want to, in my time in office, if not plant the seeds of that future, at least have some early successes…

5. Earlier this month you along with the majority of the Council overrode the Mayor’s Veto on Carbon Emission Fees; what was the discussion like between you, your fellow council members, policy writers, and regulators leading up to that?

“This goes back to the Legislative Intent of the Body and how the Administration acts on that… This started with Councilmember Wonsley’s first term in office, and I observed a ton of obstructionism to her agenda… We [Progressives] were in the minority… So, she was trying to find a path forward for a carbon fee for years. There are some real legal barriers according to the State Statute. Every fee that you charge has to recover the cost of enforcing something… So, we have a chicken and egg problem because if you don’t have a program in place you cannot charge the fee, but if you do not have the fee, then how do you fund the program in the first place? So, Councilmember Wonsley was, in my opinion, pretty crystal clear in her legislative intent to devise a carbon emissions tax for 2025. She had two bullet points: A carbon emissions fee for 2025 and other pollutants identified by a process to begin in 2026… A generous interpretation of the Administration is that they misread her intent and thought 2025 [as a start date for the process, rather than an implementation date]. A less generous interpretation is that they were dismissing her legislative intent.”

Anyone who has a passing presence within Minneapolis political spaces, especially on social media, knows of the heated policy battles that are often played out between CM Wonsley and the Frey Administration. It is pretty hard for this author to believe that it was an honest misunderstanding.

Because of all this, “the Administration has not put in the program design work to be able to capture a fee starting in January [2025]. So, we brought together all the Stakeholders; the City Attorney’s Office, the Health Department, [etc.] to say ‘Look, this was the legislative intent going back to 2022. What’s the path to doing that?’ and it ended up being that we simply could not charge the fee until after the program has been designed to the level that you can implement it [namely the study component from CM Wonsley’s second bullet point of her original intent]… The administration characterized this move as something they… were not comfortable moving forward with and vetoed.”

In response, Elliott and the rest of the Progressive Wing took two actions:

“Action 1 was overriding the veto and Action 2 was passing the ordinance but having the fee start date pushed out to the middle of the year next year… so that the fee would not hit until after the programming was designed.”

“A carbon fee at the municipal level is not going to end climate change…” he says, “but we need to create the conditions so that higher forms of government can be responsive to that need [to take further action to reduce carbon emissions.”

CP Payne likened this to the most recent rideshare minimum wage that was first passed in Minneapolis and later implemented at the State level back in 2023.

“We can be responsible for our community and pass things other bodies do not have the political will to pass… we can at least be a catalyst.”

6. Many young professionals at the Humphrey School have strong academic and employment backgrounds in politics and/or public policy. However, many may not have much experience working in and around the communities they study and wish to support. As an elected official who started out working at the ground level of community organizing in the very places you would eventually come to represent in government: what would you recommend to those students looking to get involved/employed once they attain their Master's? How do we become professionals who seek to work within the system while still keeping in mind that it is our duty to transform it into something better?

“This might sound a little bit superficial, but [I recommend] honestly volunteering on a campaign and specifically door knocking… Not necessarily because you want someone to win but specifically as a means to experience what real people actually feel”

“I think it is really easy to be tribal and lump people into stereotypes…” and yet “I had some of my most racist interactions dealing with people who had Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards… I have had Trump supporters come to my events and hand me a Five Dollar Bill in support… it’s really grounding to be face to face with the complexity of humanity.”

“In this social media era, it is really easy to feel like everyone agrees with you or fall into a space where you feel alone and everybody hates you. Even just in my day-to-day life here [at Council]; many of the people who email you, who feel empowered to speak with you, are not the same people who are most representative of your Ward. So it is always good to have community office hours…” etc.

CP Payne would highlight this point by discussing how oftentimes the Frey Administration and their supporters on the Council dismiss the work of him and the rest of the Progressive Wing, calling them “activists” with the snide implication that they themselves do not represent their communities nor have the skills needed to govern.

He goes on to discuss it as a balancing act. “I have a mandate from my constituency to argue my point, but also many of these are things they are telling me, these are things that are important to people in my community.”

“You need enough connection to your community to know when you are in one space [your space] versus another [their space] on a policy at any given point.”          

By now we have realized that there are maybe 10 minutes left and I had saved my more policy-heavy questions for last. We agreed to a lightning round of questions for me to get these out before the Council President and I both had to return to the real world instead of our bubble of reminiscence and validation.

7.      Finally: I have listed here a few policy points that have been floating around here in Minneapolis that we would love to hear your thoughts about, including any recommendations you might have on how our readers can get involved before and after graduation. 

   1. First up is Police Reform: Members from the Community Commission on Police Oversight have reported City employees and the Mayor’s Office dragging their feet with regard to training civilian members and generally disregarding their input on maintaining transparency with the general public on decisions being made. Older members have likened it to the previously failed Civilian Police Review Authority from the early 2000s in terms of its toothlessness and lack of effective institutional guidance or community authority. Is there any discussion of this in Council Chambers and/or any work that might be done to improve the situation in the near future?

The Council President and I share a brief chuckle. To start a lightning round with the biggest elephant in the room that is Minneapolis Politics.

“I have opened up the books to amend the CCPO based on feedback from the Commissioners” on a variety of things.

His list would go on to include 

1: Addressing the logistical issues these volunteers face in having virtually no time to review dozens of hours of police body cam footage when going into a conduct review

2: Potentially addressing the question “Is this too much to ask of volunteers? [To do] real investigative work?” Author’s Note: Volunteers for the CCPO get $50 and Validated City Parking for reviewing dozens of hours of Police Body Cam Footage for the purposes of deciding on matters of police brutality.

3: “Do we need more people to get trained and sit on these panels?”

2. Next up is Housing, arguably the second biggest elephant in the room given the clashes between Council President Payne’s Progressive Wing and the Mayor’s office. What is the current state of the Rent Stabilization policy that was passed by the city’s Community Working Group back in early 2022-2023 and the fallout of the Eid procedural vote back in September of last year?

Author’s Note: During Eid in September 2023 the Muslim Members of the City Council were absent during a procedural vote that would have advanced the Rent Control Policy that had been passed by Ballot Question 3. Opposition to the measure used the opportunity to vote down the procedure to “Return” the proposal to its author (one of the Muslim Council members who was not present). While it is argued behind closed doors amongst detractors that there was a way for Progressives to avoid this by moving the vote to a different day, among other things, the lion’s share of the controversy centered on the majority of white moderates using a Muslim holiday to shut down a policy they had opposed despite its popular support.

The Council President would go on to explain that negotiations over the policy with the City Attorney got halted by this procedural vote. Now, with Progressives in the Majority, “It feels like we are negotiating amongst people who support the policy rather than between people who do support the policy and absolutely hate the policy.”

CP Payne also made it a point that Rent Stabilization is not the only policy point he wanted to touch on, citing recent changes to the Advisory Committee on Housing to have Unhouse Community Members have voting power.

“It is both a policy and political balance. There are some housing policies that we feel are more widely supported that we can just move through the body, while we know there is going to be more political sensitivity around Rent Stabilization that we want to consider the implications of as well.”

With it being October at the time of writing, I followed up with him:  What else is on the Council’s agenda regarding homelessness reduction as we get closer and closer to the winter months?

“Right now, CM Chavez is trying to put forward a Navigation Center model of support where people can be brought indoors right away and then help get them into housing. The key was getting them indoors.” However, the Mayor claims “there isn’t a service provider willing to do that because the ones who did it before are not willing…”

CP Payne would acknowledge that people pointed out the shortcomings of the program, but added that plenty of additional orgs have come to him and the rest of the Council claiming they were willing… “[a]s long as the funding, the commitment, and resources were there,” he says, chuckling and nodding as I broke character as an interviewer to rant about how “I would’ve been down” to do it at my previous job as a Housing Stability Coordinator had anybody asked.

     After sharing one last chuckle, that was the end of it. We shook hands and parted ways; Council President Payne returned to his duties as a legislative heavyweight, and I got back to ruffling my dog’s ears and baby-talking to him while I contemplated how the hell I was gonna structure this weaving and winding conversation into a coherent printed interview. It is now January during my final edits and I am still not quite sure how clear this actually is. On the bright side, other council members have already voiced their desires to be involved in the project, so I guess I will have time to practice.