The Minneapolis City Council has rejected a plan to spend $6 million to acquire property for a new public safety training center.
After more than an hour of debate — and after a previous vote in March was postponed — the council voted 7-6 on Thursday to deny the purchase.
The proposed training center, proposed for a site in the Windom neighborhood of south Minneapolis, would have included training and wellness spaces for first responders, including the city’s police and fire departments.
Council member Jamal Osman said at Thursday’s meeting that he supports the idea of a new training center — but questioned spending millions on the property when the city doesn’t yet have the estimated $38 million to build the center.
“The only plan I have heard from the mayor’s leadership or administration was that — let’s just buy it and hope we will find the money in the future,” Osman said. “Well, that costs a lot of money for the city of Minneapolis. We’re going to spend $6 million, plus the upkeep of the property — and we don’t know how many years we’ll be sitting on that. It might be the next 20 years. That is not a smart decision.”
Mayor Jacob Frey spoke at the meeting and said rejecting the land purchase now will only mean higher costs for a training center in the future.
North Minneapolis council members LaTrisha Vetaw and Pearll Warren implored their fellow council members to support the purchase — noting that current police training facilities are amid residential neighborhoods on the North Side, while the new site is in a more industrial area.
Council member Linea Palmisano, who also supported the land purchase, said the training center is a way for the city to meet mandates to overhaul its police department, under terms of a consent decree with the state.
“This proposal is about building the infrastructure we need for that promised reform and structural change,” Palmisano said at Thursday’s meeting. “This is how we get there. It’s about first responders training together and not in separate silos. It’s about improving our response to critical events and emergencies.”
Council member Robin Wonsley disputed that the training center is a necessity.
“I wanted to flag, again, this weaponization of the settlement agreement to constantly use as a tool to rubber stamp every request by MPD,” Wonsley said. “What we can learn from other cities is we don't need to bankrupt ourselves by fulfilling the needs of consent decrees for our police department.”
Opponents said the city has greater needs than the training center, that should be a priority for available funding.
