City of Edina doesn't want to run school board elections anymore

City elections staff members are looking for ways to cut back on their work in Edina, one of just a handful of Minnesota cities that hold an election every year.

City Council and mayoral elections in the west-metro suburb are held in even years; in odd years, the Edina school board contracts with the city to run school board elections. As election work has piled up, particularly since the pandemic popularized absentee voting, Edina Assistant City Manager Lisa Schaefer said the three people in the city clerk's office have less time for everything else they have to do.

"Over time, elections have been more difficult to absorb," Schaefer said.

Administering a primary and general election can take up to six months of near-complete focus from city staff members, Schaefer said, from preparing to mail ballots to calibrating voting machines and processing ballots when they return. Heightened security around voting equipment has made everything more time-consuming.

The Edina school district has contracted with the city to run its elections since the 1980s, Schaefer said. It made sense decades ago, she said, but the arrangement has chafed as elections take more time and resources to manage.

The school district gets billed for city staff time and other easily measured costs. But Schaefer said it's hard to account for the costs of office space, staff burnout and tasks that don't get done during election season, such as council business, responding to data requests and managing city records.

The contract caps the bill at $150,000, which Schaefer said was easily exceeded during the 2021 election.

Most Minnesota cities and school districts align their elections, so election workers run one primary and one general election every other year. According to the Secretary of State's office, only about one in every 10 cities and school districts have misaligned election years.

Out of about 300 school districts in Minnesota, Edina is one of 20 with odd-year elections while the city has elections in even years. Eleven other cities, including Minneapolis and Golden Valley, do the reverse: odd-year city elections and even-year school elections.

When city and school board elections don't happen in the same year, the work can add up. A few years ago, Edina's city election workers had to run five elections in two years: the 2019 school primary and general, the presidential primary and the 2020 state primary and general elections.

Eden Prairie recently switched its school board elections to even years to align with city elections and ease the burden on staff.

Another challenge in Edina is that city and school district boundaries don't neatly align. Only about 70% of the city of Edina is part of the Edina school district, while other portions of the city are part of the Hopkins and Richfield school districts. Hopkins has odd-year elections for both city and school board seats. Richfield, like Edina, has even-year city elections and odd-year school board races.

If it happens to coincide with another election, the Edina residents who live in the Edina school district just get school board races added to their ballot.

This fall's school board elections will be run as usual, but there could be changes in 2025. Unless the two sides come to a new agreement, either the school district will take responsibility for running school board elections, or the board elections will be shifted to an even year.