Summer is well upon us, downtown is in full swing both day and night, the Minnesota Twins are one of the best teams in baseball, and I am excited to help you welcome everyone to Minneapolis. As the City Council member for Ward 3, I represent our entertainment district, the Mill District, and the North Loop, plus seven neighborhoods in Northeast Minneapolis.

I want our downtown to be a welcoming and safe destination 24 hours a day, so I am focused on increasing the activation of our streets to encourage as much positive activity as possible. In my first eighteen months in office, I have worked to implement and expand our late-night food truck program, keep our streets open after bar time, implement best practices for event promotion, and push for more street-level retail to keep eyes on the street.

This year, and for the next few, we have the extra complication of the Hennepin Avenue reconstruction project and some other key streets as well. This is critical infrastructure work, and it’s going to be so much better when it’s done, but it has moved bus routes and displaced a lot of street activity to other locations. Our Public Works Department has adjusted signal timing to make sure traffic keeps moving.

Ride-hailing options like Uber and Lyft really have the ability to clog things up at bar-time, so we have barred pickups on Hennepin during the project (and along the light rail tracks on 5th Street, permanently), and this summer we are piloting some designated pickup locations to mitigate their impact on 1st Avenue North.

The more we can create a fun and welcoming atmosphere downtown, the more we will attract the kind of activity we want to see. Unfortunately, we have also seen some violent crimes in the entertainment district downtown this summer, and that understandably raises anxiety about public safety on the whole. While violent crime in the First Precinct (which encompasses all of Downtown, the North Loop, Elliot Park, and Cedar-Riverside) is up compared to last year, it is also still substantially lower than two years ago. No amount of crime is good, and we have plans in place to even further reduce crime downtown so that everyone can feel safe and have a good time. Most of the headline-making crime has occurred on slow nights, when there was not much positive activity to deter bad behavior, which gives the city an extra reason to root for your business to be successful and active.

This year, we established an Office of Violence Prevention in the Department of Health, and last month they selected organizations for contracts for violence prevention work downtown, including Mad Dads, Hennepin Theatre Trust, Green Minneapolis, and St. Stephens. This is critical work to deter bad behavior and prevent violent crimes before they happen – I have seen it in action personally, and it works. They have been up and running for the last couple of weeks, and we’re already seeing positive results.
As Meet Minneapolis partners, you are the face of Minneapolis for thousands of visitors every day. Over the rest of the summer and beyond, I want to work with you to attract positive activity downtown to make it a safe place for all of us to live, work, and play. I thank you for your efforts, and I hope you will join me in mine.

En Avant,

Steve Fletcher
Minneapolis City Council, Ward 3

Read Council Member Fletcher's full bio.