Councilmember Linea Palmisano said she feels motivated to run for another term, after serving 11 years in office, because she simply likes the work.  

Palmisano was elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 2013, served as its vice president from 2022-2024, and is now running for a fifth term as the Ward 13 councilmember, with no one running against her this November as of late April.

Palmisano said she prefers it when the City Council isn’t making headlines, but her record of lone no votes on newsworthy ordinances make headlines, all the same. She does not vote in line with the majority of councilmembers yet remains popular with the majority of her constituents (Palmisano routinely gets over 60% of the vote during re-election, even with a DFL challenger).

Palmisano lives in Linden Hills with her husband, Matt, and their two children, Charlie and Oliver.

‍Melody Hoffmann interviewed Councilmember Linea Palmisano on April 11 at Càphin after a “Lunch with Linea” event with the City of Minneapolis tax assessor. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Southwest Voices: Why do you think you're running unopposed?

Councilmember Linea Palmisano: I don't pretend to know. Honestly, in this Trump presidency, people are turned off by the idea of being in a local election. Trump tends to really ruin the cache that comes with being an elected official.

I like doing the work. After 11 years of doing this, I think people know that I do the work and I show up on a regular basis. I don't want to make headlines. I don't walk around like a celebrity. I think it's usually the case that our government is functioning better when we're not making big news headlines. I really enjoy serving the community, so I don't know if people notice that and think it's an uphill battle. I don't know.

SWV: How do you specifically connect with and advocate for your constituents? What's your style?

LP: My style with constituents is pretty informal. I don't have formal office hours, but those end up as group discussions. I spend a lot of time, usually on Fridays, meeting with constituents one on one, about things they don't want shared broadly.  It’s personal. And it's what I love about my job. It feels very personal.

This is why I brought the head tax assessor, Rebecca Malquist, out today. A lot of people largely don't understand what the assessor's job is. They think that if you've increased my home value by $60,000 that's because you want to increase taxes on me. That's not how it works. So, trying to help them understand what the assessor does. I felt like it was a good discussion.

SWV: What do you think the City's role should be in supporting small businesses?

LP: I think we should support small businesses in terms of helping to have vibrant corridors. Having active small businesses is a part of our safety strategy. It's a part of having a great city that people want to live in. Having a walkable city is super important. In terms of helping businesses to be successful over time, we've had it for a while now, to help people buy their buildings that they're operating–the Ownership and Opportunity Fund. I've worked a lot on helping small businesses finance green energy upgrades.

I think that our role with small businesses has to be, in certain licensure instances, a lot of education. We have to make it easy to open a small business. And I've seen our health department really do special things with that. Language and cultural appropriate training and the different considerations that go with keeping food safe, which comes with keeping the people that come to your restaurant safe.

There's a lot that we need to try to keep barriers low and cut down bureaucracy. A specific idea I had was about how do we help small businesses to compost? There's a lot of County grants and things available that I think small businesses don't have time to seek out until it's like practically foisted on them. Small businesses need help and education in meeting regulations. We need to make it easier for them to green up their space.

SWV: How do you feel about the trajectory of public safety in Minneapolis right now?

LP:  Every single one of my council campaigns, it started with safety. It's always been the main piece. I came into this role having in college been an EMT, so a first responder myself, I know what you show up to. I know a bit about the chaotic situations that happen. Everybody knows what safe should feel like, how they get there might be different ways. Different things make people feel safe, but everyone has to feel safe and served by our public safety system.

I learned last night at our MSTAT meeting, we are doing good in nearly every single category. Then in terms of causality, if it was all about cops, yes, they will have a nod to different partner organizations. Six homicides this year is still too much. [Editor’s note: Seven by the time of publication.]  

We now have, in terms of the police, a settlement agreement and almost a consent decree. If we don't officially have a consent decree, we're still going to be doing all that work of the consent decree. It was figured out for years. We're committed to that. I do see progress for the first time since 2019. We have more officers at the end of the year than we had at the beginning of the year. I've worked to support more measures that increase police staffing, whether that's contract things, the recruitment and retention bonuses for officers, the Imagine Yourself campaign, that was going really well, and then my colleagues cut that off.

I think we've worked hard to incorporate data back into public safety responses like behavioral health group violence intervention and more, like (Group Violence Intervention) wasn't around when I first came into office. I find GVI specifically to be very impactful.

Someone asked me the other day if they thought we were just spinning our wheels, or if we thought that there had been some good impacts. I absolutely think we've made progress.

For having the spotlight on us since the murder of George Floyd, I think we've actually made significant progress. I don't know of another, not just a singular program, but I don't know of another, major U.S. city that has something different that we want. We used to want the behavioral crisis response team, now we have it. We could incorporate it better and we can make it more robust, and that takes time. But I don't really see any other places that we should be doing things differently. More of things, increased focus on them, yes.

Data-backed decision making. You know, I need to hold true to that. Now that we have this data, this John Jay Cure Violence model of treating violence like public health. It's not a virus. If we’ve signed up for this model, we’ve got to make decisions based on that. As policy makers, as decision makers of money, we have to have the discipline to follow these things that academically or philosophically seem like the right direction, and we need to have the courage to do that. I haven't seen us really have the courage to do that.

SWV: MPR News recently had an interview with Davis Moturi, who was shot by his neighbor, and I think that's one situation in Southwest Minneapolis specifically that's counter to everything that you've been saying.

LP: I think we're doing a thorough review of how it came to that. We need to have different ways for these things not to fester. The only thing that the public really knows is when it came to this crisis point and there was a shot fired. It's awful that it's between neighbors, but I think it could have been about any two people in a community. We need to improve things. All of the new ways that officers need to document their fair and just policing practices I think is going to get us to a better place.

SWV: The City released new statistics that said that unsheltered homelessness, or at least encampment levels, are down significantly. How do you think the City should address homelessness and the unsheltered encampment issue that we have?

LP: Different from other cities, we’re one of the only cities making progress on these numbers. Anybody without a place to sleep is too many, and we are making very meaningful progress on decreasing homelessness.

It takes a lot of coordination with people who are able to be service providers or property managers. Neither of these things are things that, when the City steps into them, that we are good at. The County is good at being property managers and service providers. Our City has gotten more impactful through our homeless navigators. They do a tremendous job at making connections and getting to know the very few people that are in encampments.

I don't think it's healthy for a city to tolerate homeless encampments. I don't think that's a fair way for anybody in our city to live or to live near. There's still more work to do here, but we're making meaningful progress. Unfortunately, it can be totally outdone by some of these federal cuts to funding. If the federal government starts funding our veterans less and less, and they fall into experiencing homelessness, we have a real problem on our hands.

SWV: What's your stance on rent control?

LP: Rent control doesn't work. We need tools to build more housing in our city that's affordable. We need to help people age in place. Rent control does not help people age in place or provide a mechanism for people to stay in their community over time. It really creates contrived market conditions. Unfortunately, in terms of lenders and financial markets, oftentimes outside lenders see the Twin Cities as one market. They don't separate St. Paul. Progress we've made on affordability around here has been difficult these past few years.

SWV: Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn’t get to?

LP: I think the diversity I bring to the City Council body right now is that next year, without Andrea Jenkins and Jeremiah Ellison coming back, if re-elected, I will be the only council member that was there before 2022. I come with experience, experiences of going through tough budget times, an incredible variation of things, civil unrest that has really honed what I have to offer. I bring historical knowledge of things, but I also just bring experiences of ways that we have moved through the past 11 years.

We need to make progress as a City and move things that have been seemingly paralyzed for too long because of fraught divisions on the City Council and more. But I really look forward to us being able to get this together and move forward. I continue to run for office because I really enjoy serving our community, and that doesn't just mean Southwest. I think we're going to be running into some difficult financial times with the federal government, and I think I'm the best person to be one councilmember to help a group of people through that.

Southwest Voices' full 2025 election coverage.

Downtown Voices' full 2025 election coverage.