In 2021, the local chamber of commerce types who spent millions on Mayor Jacob Frey’s reelection and to boost a ballot question giving Frey strong mayor powers, argued that Minneapolis needed clear lines of authority and accountability. If everyone was in charge, then nobody was in charge. In order to ensure there could be no doubt who to hold responsible in cases of failure, they said voters deserved a strong mayor. Now we have one.
Four years later, and even the best journalism our city can produce about a dysfunctional, mismanaged, possibly corrupt city department — responsible for millions in public safety spending — frequently does not mention Mayor Jacob Frey’s name.
We should know by now, the mayor is in charge.
If you got your news from local TV last week, you’d have seen the recently resigned director of the Neighborhood Safety Department, Luana Nelson-Brown giving two interviews where she was treated as a whistleblower, standing up to a “broken system” she was trying to fix. She was allowed to shift blame to the city council, even though the city council is not her supervisor.
As we all know, the mayor is in charge.
Also on local TV, there were cryptic accusations against the city council from the Commissioner of Community Safety Todd Barnette. He reports to Mayor Frey directly and was Nelson-Brown’s immediate supervisor. If you wondered what he does to warrant annual compensation of nearly $400,000 — shielding the mayor from election year accountability might be it.
I bet you saw news about the city council’s “controversial” idea to temporarily move violence intervention funding from the city to the county — due to mismanagement, they said. This idea became controversial because Luana Nelson-Brown was campaigning against it on TV — and because a prominent North Minneapolis pastor, Jerry McAfee, showed up to yell at the city council about it. The council backed off the idea.
If you’re extremely online, you may have heard a more detailed account of the pastor’s remarks which many interpreted as homophobic; or the pastor’s counter-charge of “heterophobia.” If you’re a sicko like me, you watched the Facebook live video where the pastor, a recipient of violence prevention contracts from both the city and state, reacts to the furor by declaring “I don’t preach non-violence” and “I ain’t shot nobody, however I will if I have to.”
Long story short, there’s a swirl of controversy around the city council as the mayor remains nameless and blameless above the fray. You’d never know he was in charge.
In 2021, before coming to work for the City of Minneapolis, Luana Nelson Brown was executive director of the Iowa Coalition for Collective Change. The organization failed to file the correct paperwork and lost its tax-exempt status. The Iowa Attorney General’s Office (run by a Democrat at the time) identified “compliance challenges” and called funding the organization “increasingly difficult and risky.”
As reported by Susan Du in the Star Tribune: under Nelson-Brown’s leadership in 2023, the Neighborhood Safety Department created a no-bid contract for the “Human Dignity model” of violence prevention that nobody can confirm is a real thing. The contract was given to an organization created less than a month before issuing the request for proposals. The guy who runs this organization can’t name anyone else who uses the “human dignity model.” And oh yeah, he’s Nelson-Brown’s ex-boyfriend.
In another case reported by Du last November, an organization belonging to Nancy Korsah, the sister of NSD staffer Georgia Korsah, was recommended for a $1 million contract. Georgia, the city staffer, is also the former COO of the organization. Council members identified red flags and denied the contract.
When I read this story, I did five minutes of investigating on Nancy Korsah’s website and found a fake testimonial from a CEO named “Jason M.” The headshot actually belongs to a University of Michigan professor named Brian Flanagan.
This all reflects poorly on Mayor Jacob Frey, who is currently seeking a third term, and his Neighborhood Safety Department. But I’m not sure anyone has a memory long enough to understand the mayor is in charge.
