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Dillon Gherna
Dillon Gherna (Democratic Party) ran for election to the Minneapolis City Council to represent Ward 11 in Minnesota. He lost in the general election on November 2, 2021.
Gherna completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. Click here to read the survey answers.
Elections in Minneapolis are officially nonpartisan, but the Minneapolis City Charter allows mayoral and city council candidates to choose a party label to appear below their name on the official ballot. Ballotpedia includes candidates' party or principle to best reflect what voters will see on their ballot.[1]
Biography
Dillon Gherna was born in Calumet, Michigan. His professional experience includes working as a public initiatives coordinator at the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. He previously worked leading teams of varying sizes in healthcare, nonprofits, retail, events, recruiting, and as a small business owner.[2]
Elections
2021
See also: City elections in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2021)
General election
General election for Minneapolis City Council Ward 11
The ranked-choice voting election was won by Emily Koski in round 1 .
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Total votes: 13,354 |
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 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
Campaign themes
2021
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Dillon Gherna completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Gherna's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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My name is Dillon Gherna, I moved to Minneapolis when I was 18 years old after coming out to my family and have called this amazing city home for the greater part of 15 years. I was drawn to Minneapolis by the incredible diversity of its people, excellent quality of life, and strong sense of community. But my story doesn’t begin here. I was born and raised in Calumet, a small mining community on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I am the proud grandson of a copper miner and great-grandson of dairy farmers. Growing up, my single mother did her best to provide for my four siblings and me. My childhood was trying, but like many in our community, the lessons learned were foundational to my character, and belief in the power of hard work. My blue-collar upbringing and lived experiences as an adult have kept me grounded and fuel me to improve life in Minneapolis for everyone.
I have worked hard to prove myself as a dedicated community leader. I currently serve the over 1.2 million residents of Hennepin County, as the Public Initiatives Coordinator within the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. My most recent efforts have expanded access to safe drug disposal, advanced our role in restorative justice programs, secured grant funding to reduce the economic burden on taxpayers, organized town hall events to engage with the Sheriff, and other important initiatives county-wide. Prior to this work, I have spent my career in leadership and owned a small business.
I believe we need a 21st century approach to public safety — one that is mindful and respectful of everyone involved. Let me be clear, I do not believe defunding or abolishing the police will accomplish this. This type of rhetoric and ill-informed ideology will only continue to drive a divide in the important work ahead of us to reform our police department and public safety system as a whole. The message is clear from residents across this city, we need comprehensive police reform and we need to provide tools to our police department to tackle the violent crime that is plaguing our city.
As leaders in this city, we need to do more than just put words on paper, we need to implement real action and real solutions to tackle our affordable housing challenges, invest in dignified, long-term solutions to the growing and increasingly vulnerable homeless population, as well as balance our approach in the way we grow and develop this city. Everyone deserves a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home.
- Listening, creating space, and putting people first has been what I have done my entire life. Our residents in our ward and across this city deserve a leader at city hall, one with heart, compassion, love for our city, and one that will be honest about their intentions. Our residents have spoken loud and clear, they want an individual committed to having conversations, communicating, addressing their needs, working collaboratively together to tackle the challenging obstacles we are faced with. I am that leader.
Investing in a variety of developments throughout our city to address our affordable housing needs, creating more than just apartments. Investments in innovation and adapting city code to allow for new models of homes such as tiny homes, small homes, shipping container homes, and other innovative accessory dwelling units. Development should include a variety of housing options, styles, formats, and ability to purchase versus just rent.
Expanding affordable housing and preserving existing affordable housing by prioritizing the development of diverse affordable housing solutions and types. Being committed to preserving our options for affordable housing is key and ordinances like the Advanced Notice of Sale will help to ensure we are not leaving residents without housing suddenly while I also support investing in incentives for property owners and developers to maintain affordable housing units. We also must continue to make investments as a city into our affordable housing fund to support the multi-prong approach to development of affordable housing units available to meet our needs.
Protect the rights of renters throughout our city. Throughout the majority of my life in Minneapolis I have been a renter, having personally lived in a property owned by one of the city’s most notorious poor landlords. I know first hand what its like to not have things repaired, bug/insect issues, poor building conditions, and more. We must hold landlords accountable to providing safe, clean, and affordable apartments to our residents.
Supporting landlords investments by streamlining the licensing and permitting processes, connecting landlords with support and resources to ensure they can provide housing to our residents that is safe, accessible, and affordable. Creating space to listen to the concerns of landlords and work collaboratively together to build a strong rental market for decades to come.
Keeping homes affordable by ensuring continued development of housing options in our city, creating programs to allow seniors to continue to age in their homes, and continuing to expand the array of housing options for our neighbors with the lowest incomes
Holding developers and landlords accountable is key to how we continue to make our city an attractive place to work, raise a family, build a business, visit for entertainment or arts, and more. Developers must be held to a standard of development that will ensure safe, accessible, and affordable housing for our residents and landlords must be held to a standard of providing safe, well maintained, and affordable housing rentals.
Unsheltered resources and long-term dignified solutions for those experiencing homelessness. Projects like the Avivo village are great transitional housing projects. I support expanding transitional housing while also making investments in programs and development of more permanent affordable housing for those struggling the most.
I support investments in renewable energy projects, increasing awareness and implementation of energy efficiency and sustainability. It has to be more than words on paper, we need to connect and engage with residents in our city, scientists that work in this space every day, our utility partners, business leaders, community organizations, and other levels of government to aggressively meet our goals, but we must do this collaboratively and that is what I am committed to doing. Additionally, as a city council member, I would ensure future policy and projects are in line with our climate focus.
Rebuilding and re-imagining our police response to community needs, I do not support defunding or abolishing the police or any form that is branded in a feel good way that accomplishes the same thing (our current proposed public safety charter amendment), and it is not because of my professional career in public safety, however, I am a well informed citizen of the crime in our city and county because of that.
We need to support our chief as council members and community. I believe in the chief’s commitment to reforming our police department to be more fair, inclusive, responsive to community feedback and continually be transparent.
Officer Accountability/Civilian Oversight/Transparency/Additional Officers, we know currently there is a reduction in critical services, such as community outreach, homeless engagement, and investigators being pulled to other areas such as patrol. The massive exodus and efforts by members of the current council to defund/dismantle/abolish the police are costing residents their peace of mind, physical safety, and causing individuals and families to consider leaving our city. I have seen firsthand the hard work our police officers and sheriff’s deputies do each and everyday to serve our community and how budget cuts can really have an effect, lower numbers of officers equals increased overtime and increased burnout and chances for mistakes or judgement errors to occur. We must hold officers accountable, create increased measures for civilian and community engagement/oversight, and commit to being transparent in all that we do. The bottom line is this, we NEED more police officers in our community to serve and protect. Even prior to the large decrease in services, our officers were consistently running from call to call leaving very little time for relationship building and to learn their community. At this point, there is no reason we are not at 100% compliance with officers wearing and using Body Worn Cameras, it protects officers as well as the public. I support a consistent review of even lower level incidents to evaluate officer conduct and engagement in the community, it’s focus is to ensure we are growing and building community trust while ensuring our officers are engaging with the public the manner we as a city want our city to engage with the community.
Officer Wellness (Mind, Body, Spirit, Financial) We often forget that our police officers are humans just like each of us but they layer on incredible levels of pressures and criticism in addition to the everyday challenges we each face. Rates of divorce, substance abuse, burnout, and mental health issues in this career field are staggering. We must do better by the officers we ask to serve us and handle our darkest moments. In my official capacity, I partnered with our Tri-Wellness division to help identify funding to support the growth of this division across our agency. This issue is personal, these officers and deputies are my friends, colleagues, and by and large here for the right reason, to serve and protect each of us, we need to ensure we make the investments into them to ensure they are of right wellness to serve our community.
Hiring, Training, Recruitment are critical to ensuring we reform our police department in a way that serves our current and future needs. A lot of the conversations that we have had are so short sided in nature, we need to start looking at how to right-size our agency to serve the future needs, anticipate for retirements, staff to the needs of our 911 emergency services, and beyond that increase our efforts to engage and build relationships. We need to look at how and where we are recruiting officers from, analyze our requirements of service to community, increase the funding for new and continuing training, identify professionals in the subject matter to provide innovative training and identify the right candidates through involving community in the hiring process. We must make significant investment in Deescalation, Anti-Biased, Use of Force, and Community engagement training. Utilizing our Cadet program to identify strong talent for our open and upcoming positions, investing in our Community Service Officers to train them and groom them to potentially make that transition.
Identifying ways to handle non-emergency or low-level enforcement calls that will free up the officers to focus on proactive policing and relationship building throughout the city. Some of these call-types can be routed to city support services, our Community Service Officers, and other county agencies to layer on support as it makes sense.
911 Dispatch Emergency Services, supporting our dispatchers in providing advanced training, mental health/substance abuse support integrated in the call-taking process with a focus on a connection to resources, support, and professionals integrated in our 911 services to triage calls better that will ultimately yield more positive outcomes by connecting trained professionals and case management to those who need it most.
Officer Discipline has to be foundational to how we continue to reform our police department. The police chief should be able to terminate an officer and that termination be upheld. I support a review process but do not believe an officer who has caused harm, done something to break the law that we expect community members to follow, or another gross violation of policy or standards, should be able to return to the job serving the community. Implementing community review processes and input can aide in the transparency and oversight that will help ensure this is supported. Additionally, I believe we need a system to flag officers displaying at-risk behavior based on investigated complaints or behavioral with options to remedy by the chief. This is no different than how other components of the business/employment world work, development and training is a significant component in delivery of discipline.
Mental Health & Violence Prevention has to be a fundamental focus of ours as we focus on reforming our public safety system, as a whole. We need to make investments to further expand mental health co-responder programs, social work intervention, case management, victim services and resources, violence prevention, and restorative justice programs. Many of the above programs or pilots have shown great promise in large metropolitan cities. A significant component of violence prevention is youth engagement, making investments in after school programming, youth events, avenues for career exploration, unique neighborhood/business sponsored activities, and thinking outside of the box on creating new avenues for youth engagement and support. We have to stop treating this as a one size fits all solution.
Learning from other cities, agencies, jurisdictions. We do not have to re-create the wheel of police reform if there are things that are working in other agencies or jurisdictions around the country that we can try. Not everything will work here in Minneapolis, but it does not mean that we should not invest in researching what is working, what is not working, and new innovative ways to deliver public safety services.
Investing in tools, increasing the tools and technology for officers to be able to quickly de-escalate situations. The reality is, each and everyday companies around this country are researching and creating tools to aide in the de-escalation, intervention, and reduction of use of force such as BOLA WRAP, a non-violent tool used to temporarily restrain a potentially violent subject so officers can safely take them into custody.
Partnership across governmental lines is a critical piece in our reform efforts. Police officers are licensed PEACE officers in the State of MN and are licensed through the POST board. We need ensure we are continually working with local, state, and federal officials to ensure our city operations and policy are cutting edge, in line with the standard of policing that we expect as a state, county, and local municipality. We must also work to ensure we have the funding support and legislative support for changes to policing at a state level, being the largest metropolitan city in the state our work has significant impact across the entire state.
Community education and resources is a piece we miss all too often. The more the community is trained in safety, awareness, and operational information, the greater understanding each citizen will have when interacting with the police and in some cases, preventing the need for an interaction with the police. Making investments in community education and resources should be on the priority list of how we move forward.
Tools to track and document performance are critical to ensure our city police department and leadership are delivering on the commitments made to reform, reimagine, and serve our city. By having specific KPIs (key performance indicators) and creating tracking/performance measures for the chief and the department, there will be less political influence and maneuvering and more in line with running a department in a large organization. Allowing the chief to specifically address key areas of opportunity and allowing city government a tool to followup on performance.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Note: Community Questions were submitted by the public and chosen for inclusion by a volunteer advisory board. The chosen questions were modified by staff to adhere to Ballotpedia’s neutrality standards. To learn more about Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection Expansion Project, click here.
Campaign website
- Click here to view an archived version of Gherna's campaign website.
See also
2021 Elections
External links
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Candidate Minneapolis City Council Ward 11 |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ City of Minneapolis, "Common questions about filing for office," accessed September 10, 2025
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 28, 2021
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