This article looks at select 2022 votes of councilmembers with a focus on those representing Southwest neighborhoods.  Visit my vote tracker and the City of Minneapolis voting record tool to see additional voting information.

In 2022, the vast majority of council business was adopted unanimously, but, looking at the divided votes can highlight some of the policy differences between councilmembers.

The divided vote tracker lists all votes in which at least one councilmember voted “no.” This method is used to limit the council votes to a smaller sample, and to do so in an objective manner.

There were 113 divided votes at City Council meetings in 2022. I categorized a vote as divided if at least one councilmember voted “no.” I also assigned a general category to each vote. The categories are: Council Business, Civil Rights, Education, Ethics, Government Structure, Housing, Intergovernmental Relations, Labor, Mayor’s Office, Public Safety, Public Works, and Transportation.

Public Safety, by far, is the most common divided vote category, with 56 divided votes. Other common categories are Housing, with 16 divided votes, and Public Works and Transportation, with 9 divided votes each. All other categories had fewer than five divided votes.

An analysis of when councilmembers voted the same way as each other on divided votes shows some voting blocks. Abstentions and absences were excluded from the calculation. Based on this analysis, Goodman, Koski, and Palmisano generally vote the same way on divided votes. Chughtai, however, generally disagrees with other Southwest councilmembers on divided votes and is more likely to vote the same way as other councilmembers, especially Chavez and Wonsley.

In a follow-up article, we will look at the most contentious votes of the year and how councilmembers voted.

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