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Betsy Hodges

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Betsy Hodges
Image of Betsy Hodges

Nonpartisan

Prior offices
Minneapolis City Council Ward 13
Mayor of Minneapolis
Elections and appointments
Last election

November 7, 2017

Education

Bachelor's

Bryn Mawr College

Graduate

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Personal
Profession
Community organizer
Contact

Personal website

Betsy Hodges is the former mayor of Minneapolis in Minnesota. First elected in 2013, she lost a re-election campaign in the general election on November 7, 2017. Although municipal elections in Minneapolis are officially nonpartisan, candidates can choose a party affiliation to appear on the ballot.[1] Hodges ran as a DFL candidate.[2]

Hodges previously served as a member of the Minneapolis City Council, representing Ward 13 from 2006 to 2014.

Biography

Email editor@ballotpedia.org to notify us of updates to this biography.

Hodges earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College and a master's degree in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her experience includes work for the Minnesota Justice Foundation and as the founder of the Women's Health Project, the development director for Progressive Minnesota, and an aide to Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman.[3][4]

Elections

2017

See also: Mayoral election in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2017) and Municipal elections in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2017)

Minneapolis, Minnesota, held a general election for mayor, all 13 seats on the city council, both elected members of the board of estimate and taxation, and all nine members of the park and recreation board on November 7, 2017. The filing deadline for candidates who wished to run in this election was August 15, 2017.

Incumbents ran for re-election to all but two of the city council seats. Ward 3 Councilman Jacob Frey filed to run for mayor instead, and Ward 8 Councilwoman Elizabeth Glidden opted not to run for re-election.[5]

Minneapolis Mayor, 2017, Round 5
Candidate Vote % Votes Transfer
Betsy Hodges (i) - Eliminated 0% 0 −26,875
Raymond Dehn 42.8% 34,971 7,613
Al Flowers 0% 0 0
Jacob Frey - Winner 57.2% 46,716 7,348
Tom Hoch 0% 0 0
Gregg Iverson 0% 0 0
Nekima Levy-Pounds 0% 0 0
Aswar Rahman 0% 0 0
Charlie Gers 0% 0 0
L.A. Nik 0% 0 0
Troy Benjegerdes 0% 0 0
Ron Lischeid 0% 0 0
David Rosenfeld 0% 0 0
Ian Simpson 0% 0 0
Captain Jack Sparrow 0% 0 0
David John Wilson 0% 0 0
Christopher Robin Zimmerman (Write-in) 0% 0 0
Theron Preston Washington (Write-in) 0% 0 0
Undeclared Write-ins 0% 0 0
Exhausted 22,835 11,914
Total Votes 104,522 0
Note: Negative numbers in the transfer total are due to exhaustion by overvotes.


Legend:     Eliminated in current round     Most votes     Lost






This is the first round of voting. To view subsequent rounds, click the [show] button next to that round.

Presidential preference

2016 presidential endorsement

✓ Hodges endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic primary in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[6]

See also: Endorsements for Hillary Clinton

Campaign themes

2017

Hodges' campaign website listed the following priorities:

“

Closing the gaps.
Mayor Hodges is leading on the greatest challenge of our time: to build an equitable city through transformational efforts to tackle and eliminate the disparities between white people and people of color. To that end, Mayor Hodges:

  • Proposed Minneapolis’ Earned Sick and Safe Time ordinance in April 2015, and signed it into law in May 2016. The ordinance — the first of its kind in Minnesota — will protect more than 40 percent of Minneapolis workers, the large majority of whom are people of color, from having to choose between getting well and getting paid, and will improve public health for everyone.
  • Founded her groundbreaking Cradle to K Cabinet to prevent racial disparities from ever arising in our smallest children — work that no other city is doing. It has already leveraged $4.3 million in public and private funds to provide housing for families needing shelter, and to implement the “Talking Is Teaching” literacy program that is designed to close the “word gap” between children from low-income families and children from middle- and upper-income families.
  • Has been a national leader in the My Brother’s Keeper initiative to support, engage, and lift up young men and boys of color as one of our community’s greatest assets.
  • Has vocally defended Minneapolis’ trans, LGBT, Muslim, and immigrant communities against attack.
  • Has begun transforming police–community relations by:
  • Keeping her promise to put body cameras on every police officer;
  • Getting all police officers trained in implicit bias, procedural justice, and crisis intervention;
  • Making it easier to file and track complaints against officers;
  • Creating new classes of Community Service Officers, which are more than half people of color; and
  • Investing significantly in community policing, one of the pillars of building relationships and trust with community.

This body of work amounts to changing the DNA of Minneapolis city government, fundamentally reorienting it toward achieving racial equity in our city. This includes work such as funding implicit-bias training for all City employees, establishing the Office of Equity and Inclusion, implementing the Promise Zone for North Minneapolis, and guiding the work of the Bloomberg-funded Innovation Team to support renters and small businesses in communities of color.

Growing a city for everyone.
Mayor Hodges’ growth agenda is rooted in the proven, well-documented fact that inclusive growth is the most effective and beneficial growth model for our time.

  • She has invested $40 million in affordable housing in the last three years.
  • She has strongly support ed workforce development and entrepreneurship targeted to immigrant communities and communities of color.
  • Despite many obstacles, Mayor Hodges has kept Minneapolis moving forward on more options for development-oriented public transit — including light rail, bus rapid transit, and modern streetcars — with a strong emphasis on serving best the low-income communities that most rely on it. She has also continued to invest in bike infrastructure that has made Minneapolis the nationally recognized best bike city in the country.
  • To make sure that businesses in the city thrive, especially small businesses, Mayor Hodges implemented the Business Made Simple initiative, stripping away out-of-date ordinances and regulations that were getting in the way of doing business effectively. She also worked with small business owners, community leaders, and City Council Members to add a team of navigators that will help make it easier for small businesses to start up and grow.

Minneapolis continues to grow dramatically. Our city’s population now tops 412,000, the highest number in 50 years. Cranes dot the sky around the city and the tax base continues to grow, with the value of building permits surpassing $1 billion each year for the last three years. Mayor Hodges has also been the lead fundraiser for the completion of the new Downtown East Commons, and has actively helped win the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four, and the X Games to Minneapolis.

Yet while our economy has never been stronger, it is still not benefitting everyone equitably. Mayor Hodges continues to invest in inclusive growth because she knows we do not need to choose between equity and growth: rather, everyone will benefit when our growth is inclusive growth.

Running the city well.
From her combined 11 years as Mayor and a City Council member, Mayor Hodges knows that racial disparities cannot be effectively addressed, nor can inclusive growth be sustained, if city government is not run well, with attention to delivering the basics well, innovation and constant improvement, and strict fiscal responsibility.

While on the City Council as the member for Ward 13, she served as chair of the Ways and Means/ Budget Committee and the Intergovernmental Relations Committee. Among her many accomplishments, then-Council Member Hodges led the fight to reform a broken closed-pension system that served neither the pensioners nor taxpayers well. Her efforts helped avert a $20-million increase in the property tax levy in 2012.

As Mayor, Mayor Hodges has:

  • Shifted the center of gravity around public safety by investing more than $1 million int o innovative community-led initiatives to improve safety on the ground. This work includes: a mental-health co-responder pilot project that responds to years of community requests; an innovative approach to encouraging violent offenders to stop offending or face real consequences; and consistently supporting and expanding ground-breaking efforts to keep our youth safe and out of the criminal justice system, such as youth-violence prevention, youth outreach workers, and juvenile-justice reform.
  • Helped lead the historic agreement between the City and the Park Board to rebuild ourneighborhood parks and city streets for the next two generations.
  • Increased the number of sworn firefighters for the first time in many years.
  • Expanded Minneapolis’ efforts to fight and build resilience to global climate change, including by: fully funding citywide organics recycling; partnering with our utilities to promote renewable energy and help consumers save energy and money; increasing funding for small businesses who want to adopt greener business practices; winning a 3-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to become one of only 100 cities worldwide that are putting climate resilience in the forefront of their work; and leading a plan to make Minneapolis a zero-waste city.

Mayor Hodges has accomplished all this work with structurally balanced budgets, reasonable tax policy, and fiscal responsibility. She has successfully fought attempts to stray from this foundation.[7]

”
—Betsy Hodges' campaign website, (2017)[8]

Endorsements

2017

Hodges' received endorsements from the following in 2017:[9]

Noteworthy events

#Pointergate

On November 6, 2014, KSTP, a Minneapolis-based news outlet, published a photograph of Hodges with a local activist and nonprofit volunteer named Navell Gordon. In the photograph, Hodges can be seen pointing to Gordon as the latter points back. KSTP described the photo as "Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges posing with a convicted felon while flashing a known gang sign."[11] At the time the photo was taken, Gordon was on probation for drug possession and the illegal possession of a firearm.[12]

In response to the KSTP story, a spokesperson for Mayor Hodges said, "Mayor Hodges was pointing at Mr. Gordon." Hodges' office later released an official statement, saying, "It was a diverse group, including people who have made mistakes in their past. ... The more supportive that we all can be of people who are making better choices now, the better off we all will be in the future."[13]

KSTP reported that the Minneapolis Police Department found the photograph on Gordon's Facebook page.[11][14]

As the incident began to attract national attention, social media users labeled it "#Pointergate" in reference to the pointing involved in the photograph, and posted images of themselves or celebrities pointing in the same manner as Hodges and Gordon.[12]

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Betsy Hodges Minneapolis. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Betsy Hodges - Google News

See also

Minneapolis, Minnesota Minnesota Municipal government Other local coverage
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External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ MinnPost, "Minnesota Loves to Brag About Turnout. But Minneapolis and St. Paul Residents Are Actually Pretty Bad About Voting in Municipal Elections," July 7, 2017
  2. ↑ City of Minneapolis, "Official Ballot," accessed November 3, 2017
  3. ↑ LinkedIn, "Betsy Hodges," accessed October 23, 2017
  4. ↑ MPR News, "Snapshot: Who's Running for Minneapolis Mayor and Why," October 16, 2017
  5. ↑ Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Elizabeth Glidden Won't Seek Re-election to Minneapolis City Council," December 12, 2016
  6. ↑ CBS Minnesota, "Hodges Backs Clinton For President," June 26, 2015
  7. ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
  8. ↑ Mayor Betsy Hodges for Minneapolis, "Platform," accessed October 23, 2017
  9. ↑ Mayor Betsy Hodges for Minneapolis, "Endorsements," accessed October 27, 2017
  10. ↑ Minnesota Daily, "Editorial: The Minnesota Daily's Endorsement for Minneapolis Mayor," October 30, 2017
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 KSTP, "Mpls. Mayor Flashes Gang Sign with Convicted Felon; Law Enforcement Outraged," November 6, 2014
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Vox, "#Pointergate: what happened after the mayor of Minneapolis posed with a black man," November 12, 2014
  13. ↑ New York Daily News, "Minneapolis mayor slams report she was flashing gang sign with convicted felon-turned-community activist," November 10, 2014
  14. ↑ Facebook, "Navell Gordon," accessed February 16, 2016
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