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Minneapolis residents found out this month that seven of their City Council candidates and two people who are running for mayor can imagine a city without a police force.
While some of them later seemed to defend their "yes" answers on a voter guide as an aspirational — why can't every family have a pet unicorn kind of response — you can imagine the appalled response of the city's business leaders.
What's worse is that this news appeared just a couple of weeks before proposals were due at Amazon.com, Inc. for Amazon to consider whether our region could be just the kind of "stable and business-friendly environment" it is seeking for its second headquarters, with up to 50,000 jobs.
Somebody at Amazon headquarters who is building a file on Minneapolis might now have reason to wonder how city officials here feel about a fire department or clearing the streets of snow.
"Not helpful," said Jonathan Weinhagen, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce, of the voter guide story.
In Minnesota's biggest city, the City Council would likely remind Amazon executives a lot of the City Council in their hometown of Seattle. It's doubtful that will help our state's chances. Coming to Minneapolis would feel a little like a date with a man who seems to have a lot of the worst personality traits of an ex-husband.
Amazon.com's relationship with its hometown might fairly be described as complicated. The company has undeniably thrived in Seattle, and just in the last week, a senior Amazon executive tried to downplay talk of a conflict, pointing out in the Wall Street Journal that Amazon plans to hire about 6,000 people there in the next year if it can find them.
Political leaders in the state were clearly taken aback by Amazon's September announcement that it wanted to find a second home. But business leaders in Seattle didn't sound surprised.
The board chairwoman of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, a Seattle venture capitalist, told the technology trade publication GeekWire "It's never too late to say we're sorry."
Amazon would seem to have a pretty good case to make for being a company any city should love. The numbers are staggering: 40,000 employees at headquarters; 233,000 nights that employees and guests spent last year at downtown Seattle hotels.
But others in town want to focus on a different set of facts. Thanks in part to Amazon, the Seattle metropolitan area has been shooting up the ranking of the worst places to try to drive a car. Meanwhile, the median price of a house in Seattle has blown past $700,000, according to one report this year.
One Seattle website is demanding a consumer boycott of Amazon, and one of its co-founder's many gripes is that this big company has recruited so many single young men to Seattle that the local dating scene has been ruined.
The City Council can't be held responsible for a boring night out for software engineers, of course. Yet its formal policies look a little like what's popular now in Minneapolis, and they could not fairly be described as pro-business.
In what can only sound familiar to business owners in Minneapolis, a few years ago Seattle became one of the first local jurisdictions to embrace a $15 per hour minimum wage, to be phased in over time. Earlier this year, the City Council there voted to dump Wells Fargo & Co. as its bank, for reasons that included Wells' participation as a lender in an unpopular oil pipeline project.
This year, the Seattle City Council voted in an income tax that kicks in at $250,000 for a single filer. The ordinance quickly was challenged in court and may never get implemented, yet it's hard to imagine how anybody working inside an Amazon building saw it as anything other than being aimed right at them.
Being pro-business doesn't just mean staying away from taxes aimed at business executives, though. It also means trying to help employers expand in town. Public officials here don't seem to quite grasp that what Amazon is really after is a place where it can attract thousands of hard-to-recruit employees in a short period of time.
Do the Twin Cities have a good story to tell out-of-towners who hope to build big buildings in a hurry?
There are wonderful projects to show any visitor to Minneapolis, including the gleaming U.S. Bank Stadium football palace, site of this season's Super Bowl. But hopefully no one in the Minneapolis delegation will mention that the stadium project that opened last year had been in the works since the year Amazon.com was a tiny startup that decided to add to its staff of 11 employees.
Across the river in St. Paul, work is underway on a Major League Soccer stadium, and the city also has a purportedly popular candidate for any Amazon headquarters, the Ford manufacturing site in the Highland Park neighborhood. Yet a month after the Ford site was first championed, it remains a laugh-out-loud suggestion for Amazon.
There's no argument about the real merits of this site. With more than 120 acres overlooking the Mississippi River gorge, it could be great for office workers. It's a five-minute Lyft ride to the main terminal of an international airport. A fast light-rail line runs a little over a mile away, and there's bus rapid transit there already.
But the planning, studying, talking and protesting about what could get built there has been going on for years. As of the latest information, and with a genuine tone of optimism, the city of St. Paul said "infrastructure development could begin as soon as 2020 or 2021."
In 2021, Amazon will already have thousands of new employees working at its second headquarters — located somewhere else.
lee.schafer@startribune.com • 612-673-4302
