PHOTO BY DIANA WATTERS |
Lois Lane, Empress of Uptown, and Lex Luthor, Terror of the Wedge, are pacing and sniffing the floor in that manic dog-just-let-into-the-house sort of way. The huskies trace circles around city council member Lisa McDonald as she sets food bowls down on the hardwood floors.
"You should have seen this place when I bought it," she says of the three-story stucco on the 2600 block of Bryant Avenue South. "The kitchen was a total pigsty." Today the space looks more like something out of one of the magazines McDonald has sitting on a round wooden coffee table. Martha Stewart Living. Cooking Light. A copy of the Sunday New York Times. The ceiling is painted salmon with white beams; the
 "I'm a piece of cake": McDonald sorts out committee business with Assistant City Attorney Carol Lansing |
As the sun sets outside, McDonald plants herself in a wicker chair by the fireplace, her sunglasses still propped atop her head. ("It's kind of a Jackie O. thing," she says about the glasses. "My husband gives me shit about it.") Outside, firewood is stacked on the porch, brick walkways skirt the house, and decorative vines line the eaves. Gardening is one of McDonald's passions: "It's one of the things I do to get my head out of my body," she says. "Plants don't talk back."
Few would say the same about McDonald. Now in her seventh year on the Minneapolis City Council, the 44-year-old has carved out a role as city hall's most vocal maverick, especially following the departure last year of her friend and frequent ally Steve Minn. The Star Tribune once attested her "reputation for abrasiveness and overkill"; others have lambasted her for not being a consensus-builder, and for taking politics too personally. A former colleague says, only half-jokingly, that he wouldn't have wanted to challenge her to an arm-wrestling match.
McDonald is familiar with her reputation, and she offers no apologies. "The thing that I just do not buy into is that we're one big happy family," she says of the council. "This is not my family. My family is at home. People think that we all need to go along and get along, and I vehemently disagree with that."
It's a philosophy that has frequently put her at odds with the local tradition of play-nice political decorum. In 1997 she lost the DFL endorsement for her reelection bid, and many of her colleagues actively supported her opponent. The following year she fended off an attempt by the council leadership to remove her as chair of the powerful Zoning and Planning Committee. Most recently she found herself at odds with the mayor and council leadership when she spearheaded a highly publicized move to thwart the proposed Block E redevelopment.
McDonald lost that battle when eight of her twelve colleagues voted in favor of the project and its nearly $40 million public price tag. Still, she says, she has no regrets. "I got a tremendous amount of e-mail from the public who appreciated me going to bat for them," she points out.
That support could come in handy should McDonald make good on the buzz, both around city hall and in her Tenth Ward, that she's seriously entertaining a run for mayor against incumbent Sharon Sayles Belton in 2001. McDonald will only say, "I'll make a decision by the end of the year."
But why, in a municipal government routinely described as a strong council/weak mayor system, would McDonald aspire to a job that may hold less power than she has now? "That's bullshit," she says. "Strong leadership will come to the fore wherever it is. Leadership creates power."
Only a decade ago, little in Lisa McDonald's biography suggested that she was destined for life as a power broker. "In my 20s," she hoots, "I said, 'I'll never be in politics. This is the dumbest thing in the world.'" Born in Cleveland in 1955 as the daughter of an electrical engineer and a nurse, she recalls a middle-class upbringing among six siblings. "I'm the oldest," she cracks. "What did you think?"
After graduating from a Catholic girls' school, McDonald took journalism and art-history courses at the local community college, then lit out for the eastern edge of North Dakota before her 20th birthday. She spent a few years working for the Ransom County Gazette and the Wahpeton Daily News--writing feature stories, taking pictures, pasting up the paper. One result, she says, is that "I'm not afraid of journalists." Local reporters know her as perhaps the council's most media-savvy member, a regular source of punchy quotes critiquing the city's current leadership.
McDonald also has strong opinions about how she wants to be seen in the media. Sitting in her council office, whose dominant feature is a peach Italjet Velocifero scooter, she suggests that a City Pages profile might be best illustrated with an image of her on a motorcycle. (An avowed "Euro-baby," McDonald rides a BMW R65.)
"I don't want one of those pictures that makes you look like a geek," she scoffs. Might she be thinking of emulating former Texas governor Ann
 "I'm the oldest, what do you think?" McDonald grew up in Cleveland, the first of six siblings. |
McDonald moved to Minneapolis in the late Seventies--in part, she says, to carve out an identity separate from her family. "Here I can be whoever I want to be," she says. "Eventually it became patently obvious I wasn't moving back to Cleveland." By the mid-Eighties she was living in the Wedge with her first husband, Mark Forgy; the seven-year marriage ended in what she terms a "slightly acrimonious" divorce in 1988. The court decree describes him as a security guard for Honeywell and her as "employed by 510 Groveland as a waitress with approximate gross earnings of $5,000." (McDonald's current salary as a city council member is just under $63,000 a year.)
"I've been on the lows and I've been on the highs," McDonald shrugs, reasoning that her range of experience has made her a better public servant. For more than five years, she says, she didn't have a car; she went ten years without a TV. Her résumé includes stints cooking in a shelter for the homeless, running her own dessert company as a pastry chef, doing public-relations work for the University of Minnesota School of Music, and serving as executive director of the Greater Lake Street Area Council. "I guess I had my midlife crisis early," she grins.
Throughout that time she served on the board of the neighborhood association for Lowry Hill East (the formal name for the Wedge). She also edited the community newspaper The Wedge and wrote many of the news stories herself, often taking on the bread-and-butter topics of neighborhood politics. In June 1990 she penned a piece headlined "Proposed check-cashing facility raises concerns among residents." The following month she reported, with a hint of relief, that after a "very heated meeting" the proposal had been beaten back.
"I loved it," she says of editing the paper. "That really kind of got me in tune with the neighborhood." She became fascinated by urban design, zoning, planning, and land use, a passion that remains with her to this day. And she was an unabashed booster of the neighborhood's trendy features: "If money were no object and I wanted unusual gifts for my slightly skewed friends and family," read one of her holiday buyer's guides, "then I'd shop in the stores around the Lyn-Lake area." The lead story in July 1990 issue reported that "The new Lowry Hill East garden club, affectionately called the Urban Jungle Terrorists by its members, took over Mueller Park last week and planted three new flower beds." An accompanying photo of the group's principals showed McDonald, second from the left.
In April 1993 a different picture of McDonald took up a good chunk of the paper's front page: Her smiling mug accompanied a story about the DFL endorsing convention for the Tenth Ward city council seat the previous month. The author of the article, Brian Nelson, admitted to having attended the convention as a delegate and observed that "McDonald was as gracious in victory as [her opponent] was in defeat." (McDonald resigned from the editor's job that June.)
McDonald says she had decided to run for the council even before the incumbent, Joan Niemiec, announced her retirement. Among other things, she says, she was upset by Niemiec's role in the city purchase of a Lake Street property for use as a police garage. McDonald believed the city had overpaid, and that there were better uses for the site. "What compelled me to get into it was, I'm sure, what compels anybody to get into it," she reflects. "Thinking I could do a better job."
Prior to the convention, McDonald's candidacy barely registered on the DFL radar. Most insiders favored Bert Black, a party veteran who then chaired the Fifth District Central Committee. "In the typical DFL jargon, I hadn't paid my dues," McDonald recalls. "But I don't think office skills necessarily make for good politicians." And, she notes, she had built up a degree of notoriety : "I wasn't afraid to go after something or somebody. I had a reputation for being a bulldog in my neighborhood." In a field of six candidates, McDonald overtook Black and finally clinched the endorsement on the fifth ballot.
Also in this Issue
- Cyanide Pact The Minneapolis river terminal agrees to clean up its poison salt piles (City Beat)
- Snafu U The University of Minnesota's new computer system goes $22 million over budget--and the glitches still aren't fixed (City Beat)
- Off Beat Author, Author!, Positively Fifth Street, and Timber! (Off Beat)
- More articles from this issue...
About Burl Gilyard
From the Archive
- Pass the Block With all the noise about Block E, one minor detail hasn't gotten much attention: The numbers (City Beat - Mar 1, 2000)
- Iron John A court ruling sets up the latest cliffhanger in the municipal soap opera starring scrapper John Isaacs (City Beat - Feb 16, 2000)
- Stop That Train! Light-rail boosters insist their multimillion-dollar project is finally leaving the station. But first Shoreview legislator Phil Krinkie has a few questions about inflated budgets, bid rigging, and some mysterious memos. (Cover Story - Feb 2, 2000)
- Mann Over Board? City number-crunchers say the plan to renovate another old theater is a money pit (City Beat - Jan 19, 2000)
- Bladder Up A pissed-off driver challenges Metro Transit's methods of drug testing (City Beat - Jan 12, 2000)
- Overdue Books A pricey new library in downtown Minneapolis has boosters of the underfunded branches seeing red (City Beat - Dec 29, 1999)
- Ink by the Teacup Dodie Shallman had something to say about Cambridge's scandalous debt, beastly taxes, and the clowns who got the town into this mess. With the dirt-dishing Observer, the doyenne turned her crusade into news. (Cover Story - Dec 1, 1999)
- URL the Pearl While some business owners fight for their names in court, David Unowsky surrenders Hungry Mind the easy way (Browser - Nov 3, 1999)
- More articles from the Burl Gilyard Archive...
