Moorhead City Council

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

A member’s displeasure with the mayor’s appointments to a city commission took up much of the Moorhead City Council’s meeting Monday.
All council members periodically nominate Moorhead citizens to the city’s 11 boards and commissions, from the Airport Committee and Arts and Culture to those advising on parks, planning and public housing. Members typically appoint members to each to represent their wards, with the mayor appointing those who serve at large. The appointments are normally approved in a group along with other technical measures presented on the biweekly consent agenda.
On Monday, however, for the first time in at least recent years, one of Mayor Shelly Carlson’s two at-large appointments to the city’s Human Rights Commission was challenged at length by council member Deb White.
Carlson filled two vacancies on the seven-member commission, replacing departing members Kani Aden and Sajid Ghauri with Lila Lovgren and Mohamed Ahmed. White challenged the naming of Lovgren, a 75-year-old Moorhead resident and retired employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but not Ahmed, who recently completed graduate school at Minnesota State University Moorhead who is listed as president of the International Market in Fargo.
White moved that the appointments be removed from the consent agenda for discussion, then asked that the two appointments by the mayor be considered separately. That motion failed by a vote of 2 to 6. She then focused on what she called the mayor’s “hurtful selection of [her] friend. “Your actions have been hurtful and have led people to question whether our gestures to reach out to underrepresented communities are merely empty words,” she said, adding that “there are plenty of marginalized people in Moorhead who don’t have a seat at the table.”
Carlson noted that her appointment of Lovgren fills a largely unrecognized niche of marginalized people, those who are affected by ageism. She said, “The definition of diversity, equity and inclusion goes well beyond race and gender. We seldom look at age bias – discrimination against older citizens because of negative stereotypes.” She cited a broader range of factors including religion, abilities, gender, sexual preference, socioeconomics and age. “Awareness and representation are important,” she concluded.
White countered that there are plenty of older people on the city’s boards and commissions, noting that those in their 60s and 70s outnumber those under 30.
The Human Rights Commission is made up of seven members – one appointed to represent each of the four wards, two at-large named by the mayor, and a representative of the council, currently Sebastian McDougall.

Opinions clash on Gaza resolution 
Eight people, seven of them from Moorhead, took to the podium earlier in the meeting to express their support for or opposition to the council’s issuing a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
It was the third meeting in which individuals from the two cities have used the 15 minutes set aside for residents to address the council to advocate for a cease-fire in the Hamas-Israeli conflict. Similar appeals have been made to the Fargo City Commission in recent weeks.
Five people spoke in favor of a resolution supporting a cease-fire to halt the humanitarian disaster among the Palestinian people, including Cell Veis of Fargo and Amir Duranovic, Mary Habib, and Sajid and Amanda Ghauri of Moorhead. They talked of tens of thousands of deaths, starvation and suffering among the children and adults of the territory.
Three Moorhead residents – Marilyn Proulx, Barbara Benda and Janine Hanson, – either opposed issuing such a resolution or urged that it even-handedly address both sides of the conflict, including its instigation by a terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians.
At this point, neither the Fargo commission nor Moorhead council has taken action on either request.