Warring words, ejections and lawsuits: Why can’t local governments work together?

The Brooklyn Park mayor adjourned a City Council meeting before it was over, as tempers flared out of control. A Rochester council member got kicked out of a city meeting. Oronoco fired its city administrator, then a City Council member resigned in protest.

And Minneapolis City Hall continues to be tinged with tension: shouting matches between City Council members, heated protests about an Israel-Hamas cease-fire resolution, the mayor experiencing death threats and vandalism.

Many local Minnesota governments no longer seem to be acting very Minnesota Nice.

These incidents of incivility — all during the past year, in a state that prides itself on being mild-mannered and courteous — illustrate how the devolution of American public discourse has reached Minnesota’s counties, schools and towns.

Not only do local officials notice declining discourse and increasing dysfunction on a local level, but they fear it will only get worse.

“The upheaval that’s going on, the polarization — not just partisan polarization but this polarization of people against each other — plays into what’s happening,” Rochester Mayor Kim Norton said. “It’s like feeding a flame, putting sticks on the little fire and making it into a bigger one.”

Local governments build roads and bridges, ensure safety, promote education. They exist to make the beat of daily life go on. But culture wars are creeping in so much that public officials are getting caught in the crossfire, and some fear the infamous rancor and gridlock of D.C. is now creating obstacles to local governance.

Plenty of divisive national moments preceded this, from Newt Gingrich’s Congress in the 1990s to the left’s backlash against the Iraq war, the anti-Obama Tea Party movement and Donald Trump’s gloves-off politics.

“Part of it is the model people see — that screaming is how we do things now,” said Kathy Quick, the Gross Family Chair and an associate professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. “We have a habit of it now, so it’s more acceptable. And growing incivility is really a problem.”

Leaders of statewide organizations that represent local public servants point to the COVID-19 pandemic as a tipping point for worsening civil discourse in local governments. Since then, there’s been a statewide surge in public officials resigning from supposedly nonpartisan positions.

“People are increasingly saying, ‘Why would I ever sign up for that? I’m out — I’ve had enough,’” Quick said.

It’s become a common refrain to put the blame for divisiveness on the opposite party, even at the local level. Some elected officials blame social media, where anonymity brings less accountability. Or COVID, when high-stakes decisions on a global pandemic were made locally: masking, vaccination requirements, school and business closings.

It’s difficult to imagine things improving in the short term, said Bill Doherty, co-founder of Braver Angels, a national organization that combats partisan animosity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, he said.

“We go through peaks and valleys,” Doherty said of American democracy. “This fever of divisiveness and polarization, with this national election coming up and Trump’s conviction, it would be foolish to predict something would happen soon. But we have to work towards it.”

Braver Angels holds workshops for local elected officials about improving public discourse. In those workshops, local officials tell Doherty it’s getting worse.

“A water main broke in one town, and a mayor got a death threat,” Doherty said. “There is a suspicion of authority of all kinds, distrust of social institutions of all types, less of a willingness to compromise. Compromise has become a dirty word on the right and the left.”

When Norton became Rochester’s mayor in 2019, she said she was stunned at how national incivility and polarization had filtered down to Minnesota’s third-largest city.

A handful of political opponents filled her Facebook page with vile and misogynistic posts. They doxxed her, putting her personal information online and encouraging people to show up at her house. They posted what was in her recent grocery delivery (she threw the groceries away). They tormented her at City Council meetings.

When four new members came onto the seven-person council, the incivility problem emerged inside council chambers, Norton said, with some new members magnifying those voices.

“Some people get elected because they want to be an activist,” Norton said. “Some aren’t interested in trying to run government.”

That’s the backdrop for the current maelstrom in Rochester. Council Member Molly Dennis is suing the city, along with Norton and a council member, alleging a host of claims, including violating the Americans With Disabilities Act over her attention disorder.

A March 2023 council censure limited how Dennis could communicate with city staff. City officials have said Dennis has harassed and misinformed the public, and Norton said Dennis secretly recorded their conversations. In May, Dennis was ejected from a meeting during a discussion on unpaid parking tickets.

“The ostracizing, the bullying that I’ve experienced is the worst kind of bullying,” Dennis told the Star Tribune. “At least if you’re harassed, they acknowledge you. They treat me like I don’t exist.”

In Brooklyn Park, where the City Council has censured one member and soon may censure another for interactions with city staff, Council Member Maria Tran has accused the mayor and other council members of bullying her. She told the Star Tribune she plans to sue the city and will no longer attend meetings.

Mayor Hollies Winston attributes much of the tension to two City Council members creating a hostile workplace for city employees.

“That is a culture that is untenable,” Winston said. “We have to respect the system. There are people who are trying to convolute that with free speech. You can say what you want, but free speech does not mean free of consequences.”

Tension, of course, has been around American democracy since the founding of the nation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Aitkin County, for example, commissioners were deeply divided this spring over what to do with a three-story county building needing renovation. Some wanted to move to a recently vacated set of buildings in Aitkin; others wanted a $5 million renovation project. Things got contentious but never personal.

When it became clear the renovation plan had more support, one commissioner said it was time to come together even though he’d opposed the plan.

“That was so refreshing in a day and age when people really hunker down in their positions,” County Administrator Jessica Seibert said. “Unfortunately, it has become rare to have a full board operate that way.”

The current divisiveness narrative is real, Quick said. But that narrative can also feed on itself, making things seem more rancorous than they are. In a state with 855 city councils, 87 county boards and 331 school boards, dust-ups inevitably happen.

At a Minneapolis City Council committee meeting this year about homeless encampments, Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw, who doesn’t sit on the committee, spoke about how elected officials weren’t responsive to neighbors’ complaints. She told of her own mother’s crack addiction and said the encampments only enabled addiction.

After she spoke for several minutes, committee chair Jason Chavez interjected: “Do you have a question for city staff?”

The interaction devolved from there. Chavez criticized Vetaw for “assigning motives” to council members’ positions on encampments. Vetaw claimed the fentanyl addicts in the encampments were being used as political pawns and called Chavez a fraud.

Chavez adjourned the meeting, saying Vetaw was disrespecting the council and the public. Responded Vetaw: “Wah wah wah, I got a tiny violin for you.”

“That’s the politics we’re in now. I love it. I’m scrappy,” Vetaw said in an interview this week. “I know Robert’s Rules of Order. I know decorum. But the North Side, we’re just a different kind of people.”

Civility, Vetaw said, is a good thing. But the reality is that our national divisiveness has become local, she said. She worries more activists in local politics brings an inability to compromise. So she fights back.

“This isn’t my grandparents’ politics anymore,” she said.

It all begs a question: When it comes to American public discourse, will we ever be able to turn it around?

“Deliberative democracy is still possible, and the best chances are at the local level,” said Quick, the U professor. “You know the people involved. It doesn’t feel like those folks are inaccessible to you. It sounds trite, but it really starts with listening, and with individuals resisting the divisiveness: ‘Other people may be name-calling, but I’m not going to do that.’”

Star Tribune staff writer Tim Harlow contributed to this story.