Racial Equity Impact Analysis (REIA)
The Racial Equity Impact Analysis helps the City consider racial equity outcomes when shaping policies, practices, programs and budgets.
| Public Safety | No |
| Housing | No |
| Economic Development | Yes |
| Public Services | No |
| Environmental Justice | No |
| Built Environment & Transportation | No |
| Public Health | No |
| Arts & Culture | No |
| Workforce | No |
| Spending | Yes |
| Data | No |
| Community Engagement | No |
The desired impact is to increase transparency, improve collaboration and data collection, recover a portion of City costs, and generate sufficient revenue to ensure more proactive enforcement. These fees are in relation to licenses and permits from Business licensing, Health Department, and Regulatory Services.
Ben Zimmermann, Lindsey Erdmann, Amy Lingo, Maren Anderson
This action does not impact a specific geographic region. We currently do not track the demographic information of permit holders so we are unable to analyze who would be impacted by a change in the license fee schedule. As the licensing authority also charged with ensuring compliance, we want to ensure that license inspectors and the communities we serve, focus on the facts of the case before them without allowing sensitive information to influence or have the appearance of influencing a decision. We want to demonstrate that our staff and our processes are as fair, transparent, equitable, and impartial as possible, regardless of an applicant's background and regardless of the inspector's background.
We currently do not have demographic data on Minneapolis' license owners so cannot analyze the impacts. Additional data would provide a race equity lens to view the city's licensing and compliance operations. We are starting to explore how the City can collect voluntary demographic information from business license applicants. This is in the early stages of exploration and, as the licensing authority, we would want to ensure that only the necessary or appropriate personnel within the enterprise have access to this data.
| Inform | Yes |
| Consult | No |
| Involve | No |
| Collaborate | No |
| Empower | No |
By state mandate, the license fee schedule is updated each year with a required public hearing. The September 26th hearing is to serve as the action to inform license holders. Public hearing notices were sent to license holders who have active email addresses on account. The hearing notice was also posted on the Business Licenses’ website, the city’s cable channel, and the City of Minneapolis website. Notices were also sent to rental license holders and customers.
The 2024 update to the license fee schedule neither advances nor impedes the city’s racial equity goals. The limited updates to the license fee schedule are intended to increase transparency, improve collaboration and data collection, recover a portion of City costs, and generate sufficient revenue to ensure more proactive enforcement.
The City periodically conducts fee studies. This year a fee study was completed for the license fees collected by the Regulatory Services Department. Historically this study has analyzed if the City collects enough in fee revenue to cover work across the enterprise. Additional analysis would require more data be collected by the City on license holders.
The City holds a public hearing every year to inform the public on license fees.