Mpls City Council discusses MPD, driverless vehicles

Today at Minneapolis City Hall, the City Council voting on a number of key measures, including driverless cars, police overtime spending, and the council's subpoena power over the mayor. Fox 9's Emily Pofall is live in downtown for us. Emily, the council is really at odds with the mayor over much of this. Yeah, Randy, that's kind of the common theme among these big votes at the council today. It was last month that we saw council members publicly frustrated with Mayor Jacob Fry for not requiring his staff to attend meetings and answer questions in person, which brings us to our first vote. At the council's direction, the city attorney will determine if the council has any legal way to subpoena the mayor and his staff and force them to attend meetings. Fry's staff have been providing written answers to council questions. The council, though, calls that inadequate. You need to have a willing participant to do that type of collaboration, and I have not always experience that and I think that just making sure that we have the full set of tools around oversight would be important for us to get an opinion on. Speaking of oversight the council's trying to rein in the police department's spending. Audits found the department hasn't followed policy when tracking off-duty officer work and fleet maintenance. The council also voted to audit the department's use of overtime. The city's spent more than 20 million dollars a year on OT since 2022. Mayor Fry has said that's due to low staff. Council members say it's also due to mismanagement. And lastly today, the council tried to override the mayor's veto of their regulations on driverless cars. So you'll remember that Minneapolis City Council voted to require human safety monitors to sit in the driver's seat of these vehicles. Waymo, which is already testing its cars in Minneapolis, calls that rule a de facto ban. Mayor Fry agreed and vetoed the rule. Today, the council did not have the votes to override the veto. So the veto stands and driverless cars can proceed without humans behind the wheel. Rideshare drivers, though, are worried about their job loss. The mayor's veto of Workers Drive Minneapolis does represent a huge win for Google, Elon Musk, or even Jeff Bezos. We do still have thousands of working class families who are going to have conversations in the coming weeks and months about what they will do or how they will make ends meet if a breadwinner loses their income to a driverless robo-taxi. Council member Wansley, who you heard from there, says that she's going to try again with another resolution with some more regulations on robo-taxis, though at this point she didn't say exactly what those regulations are going to be. In Minneapolis, Emily Pofall, Fox 9.