Cherry-Pickin'

Last July 18 Sharon Sayles Belton and Jackie Cherryhomes, then mayor of Minneapolis and president of its city council, respectively, addressed a city shaken by the sudden resignation of one of its elected officials. The day before, Eighth Ward council member Brian Herron had announced that he was pleading guilty to federal extortion charges, and the two most powerful players in city hall were scrambling to simultaneously learn the extent of the political damage and contain it.

They promised the city's voters that the one thing they could do, even without many answers, was to launch a thorough, independent investigation. They were positive, they asserted, that the investigation would find nothing remiss beyond the door of Herron's hastily vacated office. Minneapolis, they swore, was a clean city with clean leadership. And last week the investigator (a Chicago lawyer appointed after the mayor's first choice turned out to be a campaign contributor) stood before the city council proclaiming the rest of Minneapolis's officials and bureaucrats squeaky-clean.

Perhaps too clean, Cherryhomes's successor as Fifth Ward representative, Natalie Johnson Lee, complained as she stared at the empty shelf space in her new office.

Shortly after the November elections, vanquished Minneapolis City Council members began cleaning out their offices. As is customary, the city provided dumpsters for the former ward leaders' convenience as they winnowed the piles of papers they had accumulated over the years, although they were to be careful to ensure that their successors would be able to make sense of the paper trails documenting council business and correspondence with constituents over the years.

Cherryhomes, a legendary power broker who cast a wide, controlling net over many city operations, had had two of the dumpsters in her office for weeks. Before Christmas she summoned Johnson Lee to her office for a brief transitional meeting, where she assured the newcomer that she wasn't throwing away anything directly related to current Fifth Ward business. "She said she and her staff were definitely archiving in a database and setting aside transition stuff," Johnson Lee recalls. Still, she was surprised to see that "there were files going out of here by the basketful."

Not only were the filing cabinets virtually empty when she took office on January 3, Johnson Lee complains. Cherryhomes's electronic files--which can include anything from memos, correspondence, schedules, and constituent calls--were deleted from the office computers. "I haven't seen 'em, the record keepers haven't seen 'em, nobody has seen 'em," Johnson Lee says. "But nobody will say they are gone."

There has been no official response to a request made by City Pages to the Minneapolis city clerk's office on February 21 to produce the files. City employees are said to be fruitlessly searching high and low for any information related to Cherryhomes's term in office. City staffers are reluctant to say for sure that the files are gone, however. Merry Keefe, the Minneapolis city clerk, says the city is still searching. "So far, there is nothing," Keefe admits, adding that neither Cherryhomes nor her erstwhile staffers, Patti Marsh and Candra Edwards, have produced anything in response to the city's requests.

While many past and present council members say it is not uncommon for outgoing officeholders to trash some files during transition periods, all are shocked to find out the extent to which Jackie Cherryhomes and her staff purged city hall of her business. For her part, Keefe says she is not yet sure that Cherryhomes threw out or deleted anything she might have been legally obligated to save. "The question is, is anything gone that should have been saved?" Keefe says. "The answer is, we don't know. We are concerned, but we are not going to speculate. There's a lot of speculation."

Indeed, city hall insiders are quietly abuzz over what, if any, action the city should take against Cherryhomes, and what would have motivated the former council president to purge her files. Cherryhomes's 12-year tenure in the Fifth Ward, a north-side district heavily populated by poor and minority families, was clouded by controversy. In 1992, shortly after she took office, a number of the ward's poorest constituents sued the city and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development over the woeful living conditions in the north-side public housing projects. The case was settled in 1995 by an agreement--the so-called Hollman decree--under which the city agreed to demolish hundreds of units of public housing, and to create new units in more affluent parts of the city and the suburbs. Redevelopment has been slow to nonexistent, and Cherryhomes's involvement in the project has been criticized. Specifically, critics have charged that under her direction, the amount of low-income housing included in the new neighborhood has plummeted and that lucrative contracts have gone to the former council president's supporters.