Agenda - Council - 05/12/1981 - Laserfiche WebLink

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agency composed of local elected officials to carry out certain functions. It has been a difficult matter to assure thal the Metropolitan Council, though representative of the region, can still carry out these areawide planning func- tions. We have felt that the federal government should ac- cept the decision by our directly-elected state Legislature on how regional government should be structured. flow the members of the Metropolitan Council should be selected. We think they should be elected, except for the Chairman who should be appointed by the Governor. We have urged that the Council be directly elected from districls of approximately equal population, be salaried and serve less than full-lime. This was our position on our re- port on the Council's creation in 1967 and it remains a cen- Iral part of our thinking regarding the Council today. In 1967 efforts to elect the Council failed by one vote in the Senate and four votes in the House. In the years since then the elective issue has been introduced in almost every session. It has passed the House several sessions but not the Senate. We have felt that the Council as a policy body ap- propriately should be elected. It makes decisions affecting the region as a whole and its members need to be account- able to the public directly for those decisions. One of the more fascinating dimensions of the question of election concerns whether "better" people are selected through appointment rather than election. Some persons claim that it is easier for someone to take a more areawide approach being appointed than ff a person were elected. Others state that the members are likely to reflect the area from which they were named no matter what. The election O approach, however, gives the Council the necessary visibil- ity and enables members to be cred~le. Elected officials normally can have the respect of other elected officials, but Council members sometimes do not have the degree of respect that they should from local officials because they · are not elected. Part of the Legislature's reluctance to permit election has been the fact that a district for the Council election would probably be larger than a state Senate district, thereby pos- sibly giving greater prominence to a member of the Metro- politan Council than to the Legislature. Some persons have .pointed'out that this is not a valid argument because all of the powers that the Council has are derived from the Legislature. Legislators have been, by statute, involved informally in the selection of members. The Governor is required to consult with Legislators from each Council district before an ap- pointment is made. At least one Governor turned over the decision entirely to the members of the Legislalure from Ihe affected districts. Most Governors, however, have made the appointments themselves. One suggestion for selection of members other than by the Governor or by direct elec- tion has been to have the persons officially selected by the legislators rom the affected districts. One possible modification o'f the elective process might have to do with dividing the question of who is nominated and who is elected. The nomination process has been as- sumed to be one in which persons would self-select them- selves and be then subject to a primary and general election. Some persons have wondered whether candidates might be nominated in some other way while still preserving the election. We believe the Chairman, who serves at4arge, should con- tinue to be appointed by the Governor. This will continue a meaningful tie with slate government and will afford maxi- mum opportunity for coordination of metropolitan pro- grams with state programs. Moreover, we believe that an election campaign for chairman of the Metropolitan Coun- cil-involving one-half the voters of the state-could be very expensive. An elected chairman might be seen as competi- tion for the Governor. Also, there would be no comparable office representing the rest of the state. Whether-in the event the Council is made elective-the same type of political campaign should be contemplated as now exists for other elective offices. We think a new ap- proach should be tried. Whether members of the Council are appointed or elected, there is very little opportunity for their knowledge and viewpoint of metropolitan issues to be discussed in ad- vance of theh' selection. We have advocated that should the Council be made elective that there be a portion of public funds set aside to assure that the positions of candidates for the CounCil on metropolitan issues are broadly distributed. This could take place through special publicly financed publications circulated to every household and through special television programs, perhaps on public television stations. -- The question of conduct of a campaign and its expense has emerged in recent years as a major factor in the discussion of whether the Council should be elected. As the costs of political campaigns has risen, people have wondered whet- her it would be in the public interest to add another group of people to this list. This statement was prepared by the Structure Task Force of the Citizens League. The slatement is csmsislcnt wills positions the League has taken in several studies of metro-