Ward 9 rematch: Orban vs Chavez

By Cam Gordon

The Ward 9 election for Minneapolis City Council this year looks like it will be a repeat of the last election with Dan Orban and Jason Chavez both running to represent the area that includes Central, Corcoran, East Phillips, Longfellow, Midtown Phillips, Howe and Powderhorn neighborhoods.
In 2023, Chavez was elected with 3,407 votes to Orban’s 881.
Orban lives in the East Phillips neighborhood with his wife and two children. In 2021, he received a PhD from the University of Minnesota in computer science and currently works there as a lecturer in the computer science department.
“I’m an educator and a scientist,” Orban said. “I design the courses, the logistics, and the processes necessary to prepare the next generation of technical leaders.”
He believes this work has helped prepare him to be an effective city council member. “Every semester I make changes to content and policies in order to effectively instruct large numbers of students. Some policies work well for certain classes, while they fail in others. This leads to pragmatically learning from mistakes and iteratively finding better solutions tailored for specific contexts,” said Orban. “In addition, I have the unique opportunity to work with other professors and teaching assistants to build learning experiences. Together we do our best to listen and respond to positive and negative feedback. It has been a joy to talk with students through success and struggles, and I think this will translate well when listening and responding to my neighbors.”
Chavez was born and raised in East Phillips by parents who moved to Minneapolis from Mexico and currently lives in Longfellow. He graduated from the College of Saint Scholastica in 2018. Prior to running for office, he worked as a legislative aide to state representatives Carlos Mariani and Mohamud Noor.
At the Ward 9 Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party convention, Chavez was endorsed with over 90% of the delegates supporting him. Additionally, he is endorsed by the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, and other labor organization including Minnesota SEIU, Unite HERE, and LiUNA, as well as Take Action MN, the Inquilinxs Politica, OutFront MN, Sunrise Twin Cities and the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund. He is also endorsed by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, county commissioner Angela Conley and state legislators Zaynab Mohamed, Omar Fetah, Samantha Sencer-Mura, Anquam Mahamoud, Doran Clark, Aisha Gomez and city council members Eliot Payne, Aurin Chowdhury and other local elected officials from the park and school boards.
Orban is endorsed by All of Mpls, an independent expenditure political action committee (PAC).
“I am not seeking the endorsement of a political party or other political group,” he said. “The local and national polarization that exists due to political categorizations are creating extreme divisions among people, jeopardizing the moderate vote and creating enemy groups.” He is running as an independent and said that “political parties at the national and local level are tearing us apart.”
“Fortunately, we live in a democracy where constituents choose who they want,” he added. “I’m not convinced that partisanship is important for fixing streets, funding core public services, building houses, and supporting small businesses.”
Chavez has a platform on his website that includes accomplishments from the current term and actions he would take next term. They are organized into seven areas: housing; environmental justice, transit and infrastructure; community safety; police accountability; labor and economic development; equity, disability, and LGBTQIA+ justice; and public health and the opioid crisis.
On his website, Orban shares six priorities: getting back to basics and working together; public safety, environmental stewardship; affordable housing; and, freedom of speech, religion and thought; and, restoring people’s trust in public servants.
He feels the city has not done enough around public safety. “In my neighborhood, I experience and observe crime on a daily basis,” Orban said. “Many other people in the ward do not feel safe. We are exhausted by lawlessness. I believe that public safety is essential to the well-being of society, one in which all have the opportunity to grow and thrive, and one in which a healthy functioning police force is important to the safety of society. Unfortunately, there still is no 3rd Precinct Safety Center after five years of the 3rd’s destruction, leaving our force outside the boundaries of our precinct to operate from a moldy, inadequate building downtown.”
He is committed to open the new safety center and supports the Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) 911 response teams introduced in 2021. “The program is a win for the city and a beautiful example of collaboration between Mayor Jacob Frey and the city council,” he said.
Chavez lists accomplishments in community safety that include leading the effort to create the Lake Street Safety Center at 2228 East Lake Street, as well as budget amendments or policy changes to support the Little Earth Community Safety and Outreach Program, the Lake St. and Franklin Ave Safety Ambassadors, and the Midtown Phillips Violence Prevention and Safety Services. He advocates implementation of the city’s Safe and Thriving Communities plan, and helped create the newly formed Safe and Thriving Communities Work Group. He also lists securing funding for the vacant Crime Prevention Specialist role in South Minneapolis and authoring a $533,473 budget amendment for violence prevention strategies this summer among his community safety accomplishments.
In the area of housing, Chavez said he will continue to work towards establishing a tiny indoor village in South Minneapolis to address unsheltered homelessness, create an ordinance to legalize regulated outdoor spaces and micro-communities for people experiencing homelessness, and designate safe parking areas for those living in their vehicles to sleep and access services.
He is also proposing a humane encampment response ordinance that would include safe storage, eviction notices, public health services, and guaranteed housing. He supports ordinance changes that could provide tenants an opportunity to purchase their home if it is being sold, that would require landlords to explain non-renewals, and offer relocation assistance to renters being asked to leave. He also supports a city-wide rent control policy to keep housing affordable and prevent displacement.
Orban supports increasing housing supply, improving access to home ownership, building more public housing and increasing the number of clean safe shelters. He opposes any rent control or stabilization ordinance.
Workers’ rights is something that Chavez addresses that Orban has said little about so far. Chavez calls for increasing the minimum wage, eliminating sub-minimum wage laws for individuals with disabilities, and enacting fair scheduling policies to provide workers with more predictable and stable hours.
For small businesses, he is proposing a policy that would require a 60-day advance notice of sale for commercial property to allow commercial tenants the time to purchase the property.
Changing the culture at city hall and focusing on freedom of speech, religion and thought is a priority for Orban that is not addressed in Chavez’s platform.
“Our culture has become polarized and fearful. We need to understand each other respectfully, caring for the truth, but in love,” said Orban when asked to describe what he means by freedom of speech, religion, and thought. “We must discuss ideas and disagree with each other. We should exercise patience, love, hope, discernment, civility, and humility. Most importantly, there should be forgiveness for our misunderstandings. If we cannot forgive others, how can they forgive us for our offenses?”