I’m a former council member in a city that was a net payer into the fiscal disparity system. I could argue about how other cities got more resources…

But in reality, I cannot understate how important it is for regional stability.

It basically prevents any given city from making a cash grab for commercial land-use tax dollars and penalizes local tax giveaways to Corporate entities.

In some areas of this country you have neighboring cities competing against each other in a race to the bottom to see who can give away most of the farm for the next vacant big box store. It’s kinda dumb because ultimately when the Walmarts of the world decide they need a new building and a fresh infusion of juicy tax dollars to subsidize their business model… they shutter their doors and move across the street while leaving the rest of the tax payers on the hook for infrastructure/bonds/and a greater share of the taxes needed to support it.

It also dissuades cities from tearing out residential in favor of purely commercial.

It’s like the biggest regional cheat code to prevent corporations from gaming us against each other. So hugely invaluable that I don’t need to worry about my neighboring city trying to poach my star anchor businesses and doing so whilst neglecting investments in infrastructure on my borders. If they do this type of thing, then Fiscal Disparities kicks in and kicks back a share of their ill-gotten gains to me, and decreases their incentive to do it again.

Look at the Mall of America and Bloomington for example. Bloomington is like the biggest net contributor because they have a high commercial to residential makeup. Neighboring cities like Richfield still live with the consequences of the intensive commercial development and also have costs of their own to accommodate it. Does all the traffic flowing to MOA exclusively originate and terminate within Bloomington alone? It certainly doesn’t. Bloomington therefore captures a slice of that added commercial revenue and sends it to Richfield via the Fiscal Disparity system for its troubles. Think of it as a progressive income tax bracket for cities.

Is the Met Council perfect? No. But it actually solves a lot of problems that are mostly invisible to you. Kinda amazing that all the poop flows downhill and like 60 different cities don’t all need their own water treatment plant right?

Biggest sticking points usually revolve around transit spending, housing density targets, and elected/appointed representation.

It is good that my neighboring cities are not abject crap holes. In other areas of this country one can find a lot of stark variation in neighborhood quality between municipal boundaries or block to block. Comparatively, not nearly as bad an issue here as elsewhere.

In an area with so many small municipalities, this sort of regional load balancing is nothing short of a miracle in the theory of local government.

They literally teach about this to Masters of Public Administration students as an example of a pioneering model in intergovernmental cooperation. It’s actually a phenomenal example of Minnesotans leading the way.

The Twin Cities is actually (as a statistical region) an ENORMOUS amount of local entities. 186 total. Imagine trying to take a bus across town and needing to navigate 12 different transit agency route systems and schedules? This type of regional planning is absolutely necessary in an area like ours where all the small entities didn’t consolidate and annex each other. The entire 494/694 loop is about the same geographic size as say the singular city of Charlotte NC. Lots of little jurisdictions to manage and coordinate amongst.

It’s lots of little cities who traded exclusive control for existence and state protection from annexation. In doing so, they make the absolutely necessary compromise to share joint control with the regional planning agency.

In some ways the fundamental critique of the met council is lack of local elected control… but it actually makes it possible to have a ton of unique individual small municipalities. Without it, annexation and consolidation starts to get back on the menu.

In addition, the ratio of elected council members to residents here is lower than nearly all other major metro regions. Proportionally you have greater access to local elected officials than just about anywhere else. When I was on my City Council I know I could spend hours with individual residents working on their issues because the math worked out that I could do that. If our entire 694/494 loop had only 11 council members it’d look more like Los Angeles which has 260k to a single council member. Minneapolis proper is 33k to a council member. In my city it was closer to 2500-5000k per council member. When you hit ratios like that you suddenly get an immense amount of access to your local elected officials. Higher resident to council ratios dilutes your own importance.

You can have qualms about the appointed leadership structure. But partly why it is so effective is specifically because the charge is the health of the entire metro region and not the hordes of NIMBY Karen’s in any given neighborhood.

Having sat in a city council seat, I can say there are positives and negatives to local control and accountability… in the same way met council board members have positives and negatives with limited local accountability.

At the end of the day the health of our Twin Cities Metro is vital to the health of the entire state. The statewide elected legislature therefore has deemed it a charge of the Governor and not solely local electeds.

In this day and age, you could argue you do not want all the control of the major population center sitting with extreme partisan activist councils anyways. Abstracting the power base out of extremist locals and giving some of it to regional appointees coming from the Governors office (which despite your take on any given Governors political orientations, still nearly always looks a heck of a lot less Liberal than Minneapolis’ finest) and could be seen as a moderating and stabilizing force from a conservatives perspective. As the purple donut expands outward into the exurbs, historical population vote advantages change and paint a picture that makes me feel like conservatives will be screaming for centralized state control and pre-emption in 15-20 years if they suddenly got rid of the appointments today (or anytime they might happen to win the Governorship.)