Regionalism and the future of the Twin Cities Met Council

UPDATED: The full report, with narration and the related PDF, is now available here.

Here in Minnesota, the perennially controversial Twin Cities Met Council is once again in the news. Over the last six months a task force took a look at how we might update the Met Council so as to address some of the concerns expressed about it.

I attended almost every one of the task force's public meetings, and I thought quite a bit of information was missing from the conversation. So I set out to gain a much clearer understanding of how the Met Council compares to its peers across the country.

As part of that I looked in detail at the Met Council's peer organizations in over 20 of the largest metro regions in the country. I compared and contrasted how the Council stacks up on measures of legitimacy, scope and outcomes, and reviewed alternative structures to our 100% unelected regional authority.

The full report will be out next week, with the usual narrated presentation and PDF available. The bar chart to the left gives you a small hint of what I found.

Stay tuned.