City Hall Monitor: Ex-Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser to buy slice of city land for $1

Sandy Colvin Roy, chair of the Minneapolis City Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee, was rattling off the next agenda item at the committee’s meeting last week, when a familiar name brought her up short: Donald Fraser wanted to buy a piece of city-owned property alongside his house for one dollar. The excess public right-of-way land was left over from the 1970s, when construction of Interstate 35W sliced the corner off the 800 block of 7th Street SE. Fraser has lived his whole life on that block — apart from time he spent in Washington, D.C., during eight terms as a member of Congress. That came after eight years as state senator and before 13 years as mayor of Minneapolis, during which he tried unsuccessfully to beef up the mayor’s role in the city’s weak-mayor system. Still, Minneapolis mayors aren’t so weak that their names go unrecognized at City Hall a mere 14 years after they leave office.

“Hmmm … I didn’t notice that earlier,” Covin Roy said, convincingly enough. What followed was a perfunctory public process with perhaps a little extra grilling of staff to ensure that the ex-mayor — who along with his wife, Arvonne, remains active in the public policy sphere and the political endorsement game — wasn’t making off like a bandit with 2,434 square feet of city property. The flat, undevelopable piece of land overlooks I-35W on its approach to the collapsed bridge site, a stretch of interstate that for the moment is comparatively quiet. Department of Public Works staff said Fraser’s appraiser, chosen from a city-provided list, found that one dollar is the city’s standard price for like properties (the currently weak dollar notwithstanding). Before the committee OK’d the deal, which returns the lot to the tax rolls, another line of questioning determined that Fraser has been mowing the property all these years, which seemed to impress the committee. It also suggested a new real estate maxim: Mowing is nine-tenths of possession. Now that and a piece of excess right-of-way will buy you a weak cup of coffee.