BY CAM GORDON
Part 1 – The Rise
Last year, the city of Minneapolis saw an exodus of staff in two of its smaller and newer departments: Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, and Performance Management and Innovation. Both lost all their staff in 2023.
One of those who left was Brian K. Smith.
Hired by then-mayor Betsy Hodges in 2016, Smith led the Department of Performance Management and Innovation that, according to the city’s website, “helps the city address complex and pressing challenges that lead to racial disparities,” and develops “new solutions that move the dial toward equity in Minneapolis.”
During Smith’s time there, among other things, the department managed the minimum wage study which ultimately led to the city setting its own minimum wage, evaluated 911 calls, and established the behavioral crisis response teams that now provide a fourth response to emergency calls.
What follows is the first in a series of columns dedicated to telling Smith’s story (mostly) in his own words.
“I’m proud of everything we did,” said Smith. “I think there are some things that stick out more than others because of the impact that they may have had for residents that people can see, touch and feel. That was the small business team that was created out of our work, that was the behavioral crisis response teams, and the conduct on premises rental license ordinance amendments.
“Internally I think we did a lot to help people understand how to use data, how to make strategic plans, how to constantly look at your program and evaluate whether you’re living up to your mission and vision of your department or your division.
“We were able to set a culture in the city, to a degree, where people would constantly look at their performance in their department and we built a performance management process which the city never had.
“The good thing about the way I think it worked in the beginning was, we didn’t get stressed out with staff directions. We didn’t get overwhelmed with Betsy. When she talked to me she just said, ‘Hey, we trust that you are able to do the job, we trust that your staff are really smart and hard-working and so we just want you to just look at the policies and practices around the city, listen to community members, mostly residents of the city, and if there’s things that you find are things that people are interested in, take a deeper dive into it and see if it grows into something and just keep me informed.’”
Betsy Hodges was the mayor of Mineapolis from 2014-2018.
“She wasn’t heavy-handed,” said Smith. “We knew what her policy objectives were and what her platform was, but she trusted us to look at those things that the council had, that she had as a mayor and listen to residents to see what will be the most pressing thing that we needed to address. Not what was more politically expedient.
“Sometimes some council members would ask for some stuff, and it would ruffle some feathers of other council members, or ruffle feathers of the department heads, because we did our very best to be objective,” Smith said. “Our job, we thought, was to find information, inform people so they can make informed decisions and then it lands where it lands because we’re human too and we have a lot of ideas about how things might turn out or how things should turn out, but what we had to do was follow the prescriptive method that we adopted and some of the stuff that we developed to make sure that we didn’t let our attitude, our opinions and our own experiences get in the way of what actually needed to happen to serve residents better.
“The only time it would get extremely challenging is when there were people on the inside who had way more authority than us, who wanted to dictate to people how things should be, as opposed to listening to and working with them. We had some elected officials who were like that, and we have a mayor who’s like that now, so it made it extremely difficult for us because people were trying to guide our work or ask the question and guide us towards the answer that they wanted us to have. That’s why we wouldn’t use certain researchers because there are some researchers in town who you can tell them what you want the outcome to be, and they will gladly take your money and give you that outcome. So that also presented a challenge sometimes because some elected officials were used to holding things as a genuine question like they had genuine interests, but they already had their mind made up and if we didn’t go along with it, it was hell for me to pay. I protected my staff, but it was hell for me to pay from time to time.
“Everybody felt a little bit of relief in knowing that there was this new body of folks in the city that weren’t completely caught up in the everyday politics of everything and actually took pride in just being as objective as they possibly could in giving the information.
“We could be that liaison, we could be that technical assistance provider, we could be that support not only for residents but also for departments and elected leadership in the city. And I didn’t know what would come of it, but I knew that’s what I was going to go there and try my best to do. Maybe it was timing, but it seemed like that’s what a majority of elected officials wanted. Residents definitely wanted it. Department heads were more leery than people think, partly because it would have been the first time somebody would be telling a story about them, other than them. But I would say over the years we got to a place where the majority, not a heavy majority, but a majority of the departments in the city knew that our work would do nothing but help them, even though some of them still feared a process that sometimes pulled the cover off of things in order to shed light on it, not to embarrass anybody, but to shed light on it and so that we can see where we need to make improvement and for some people that was extremely scary. Scary because they knew it would mean change, some scary because they were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing, and they thought it would create a level of accountability that just didn’t exist in the city for departments.”
After Hodges left office in 2018, things changed and, said Smith, “for the most part the appreciation of the work was gone. I met with Betsy every two weeks, but the only times I ever met with Jacob [Frey] was one budget meeting and whenever I was bringing a national conference into town where he would be speaking. I’ve never had one meeting with Jacob about our work in five years, not one. He wasn’t interested.”
Part 2 coming next month in the February edition of Southside Pride.
