Who runs Roseville?
How local government works
Have you ever wondered how our local city government works and why? What kind of authority does the city council and mayor have? What’s a city manager? Who runs Roseville? And why does it seem so confusing?
Here’s my candid take: local government isn’t confusing because people are not smart. It is confusing because it is old, layered, and patched together over time. A lot of these systems were built for a different era, then updated in pieces, with the old labels left hanging around long after the world changed. That is how you end up with “Standard Plan” cities that are, in fact, no longer standard.
Roseville’s website says the city operates “as a Plan B statutory city using the provisions of Chapter 412 of the Minnesota State Statutes. This form of city government uses a council-manager system.”
If that sounds like someone giving a legal seminar, you are not alone. This article is my attempt to translate it into normal English.
My true vocation is teaching, so let’s do a history lesson.
Townships
Before places like Roseville became cities, much of Minnesota was organized into towns or townships. Those were the basic units of local government for more rural and spread-out areas. As communities grew and needed more services, many eventually became incorporated as cities. Before Roseville became a city in 1948, it was Rose Township.
“Incorporated” just means the community formally created a city government under state law: with defined boundaries, elections, and the legal authority to provide services and set local rules.
Townships are still real governments too. They just tend to operate on a narrower set of responsibilities. But as places got more people, more roads, more businesses, and more “can my neighbor do that with their property?” questions, many communities chose to become cities.
Two kinds of cities
Once a community decided to incorporate in Minnesota, it needed a legal structure. Who runs the place? How is power divided? How much freedom does a city have to design its own system?
In Minnesota, cities took one of two paths: statutory or charter.
A statutory city uses the default framework laid out in state law (Chapter 412 of the Minnesota state statutes). A charter city adopts its own local charter, which is basically a mini constitution for how that city is organized.
You can see both models all around Minnesota. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are charter cities. Roseville, by contrast, is a statutory city.
It might be tempting to think this is just a “big cities go charter, smaller cities go statutory” situation. But that is not necessarily true. Blaine and St. Louis Park, for example, are charter cities. The real difference is not size. The real difference is how much customization a city wants in the structure of its government.
A charter city gets more flexibility to shape its own government around local preferences. It can amend its charter locally and address issues state law does not cover.
However, the tradeoff is that flexibility comes with more complexity. Charter cities have to maintain their charter, work through amendment processes, and sometimes navigate both state law and the charter at the same time.
A statutory city, by contrast, uses the state’s default framework. That makes it more standardized and generally simpler to follow, but also less flexible. If a statutory city wants to change something, it cannot just rewrite the rules on its own; it must work with the state legislature to amend Chapter 412.
The “Standard Plan” era (and why it became… not standard)
Now comes the part where Minnesota’s naming decisions start to feel like it was designed by the same person who thought 401(k) was a good name for a retirement savings account.
If a city chooses the statutory route, Minnesota offers three ways to organize City Hall: the Standard Plan, Optional Plan A, Optional Plan B.
Before 1970, the Standard Plan was the default and most common setup for statutory cities.
This plan came from an earlier era of local government. The mayor was elected. The city clerk was elected. The clerk even sat on the council as a voting member. In some cases, the treasurer was elected too.
Put more simply: the same small group of elected people were handling both policymaking and much of the city’s day-to-day administration.
That made sense when city government was smaller and simpler. “Administration” often meant keeping records, tracking money, posting notices, and making sure meetings happened.
But over time, the job of running a city changed. Budgets got bigger. Streets, parks, utilities, and public safety got more complicated. Purchasing, payroll, personnel, compliance, and audits all became more technical.
City administration stopped being a side hustle and started being a profession.
And this is the part most people will intuitively understand: some jobs should be won by experience, not electability. You probably do not want your city’s recordkeeping and money-handling roles decided by who had the best yard signs. You want elected officials to set direction and then hire people who know how to do the work. Accountability still exists; it just runs through the elected council, which does the hiring.
The Big Shift
That is the backdrop for the big shift Minnesota made in the late 1960s.
In 1967, the Legislature passed a law making Plan A the new default for standard plan cities on January 1, 1970, unless voters blocked that change in a referendum. In other words, the state was moving cities away from the old “everyone wears three hats” model and toward a more professional form of administration
The numbers show how complete that shift became. As of September 2025, Minnesota has 856 cities. Of those, 107 are charter cities and 749 are statutory cities. Among the statutory cities, 78 still use the Standard Plan, 652 use Plan A, and 19 use Plan B.
So yes: the “Standard Plan” is no longer the standard plan for statutory cities.
Plan A vs. Plan B
So if Minnesota was trying to move statutory cities away from the old Standard Plan, what exactly did it move them to?
It moved them to two more modern versions of statutory city government: Plan A and Plan B.
At a high level, both plans are trying to solve the same problem. City administration had gotten too technical to run through elected officials. The difference is in how far each plan goes.
Plan A is the simpler update. The clerk and treasurer are no longer elected. Instead, they are appointed by the council.
Some Plan A cities also create a city administrator position. This is where things can get confusing, because “city administrator” is often a locally created role, not a single state-defined office with one fixed set of powers. One city council may give its administrator a narrow coordinating role. Another may give that person broad authority over staff and operations. The title may be the same, but the job can vary a lot from city to city.
Plan B cities go a step further and hire a professional city manager to run the day-to-day operations. Unlike a city administrator position in a Plan A city, a city manager is a statutory office with powers laid out in state law. The manager enforces laws and ordinances, exercises control over city departments, prepares the budget, serves as the chief purchasing agent, and attends city council meetings with the right to participate in discussion.
One of the biggest practical differences between Plan A and Plan B is staffing authority. In Plan A, the council appoints and removes department heads like the Police and Fire Chiefs. In Plan B, the council delegates this responsibility to the City Manager.
Overall, in a Plan A city, the council remains more directly tied to the administrative apparatus. In a Plan B city, the council governs through the city manager.
How Roseville works
Roseville incorporated in 1948 and was operating as a Plan B city by 1969, a governance model it still maintains today. The Roseville we know is the product of all the history above. As city government became more complex, Minnesota moved away from a system where elected officials tried to do everything themselves and toward one where elected officials set direction and professional administrators run the machinery.
Roseville’s five-member council sets policy, budget, and priorities, and a city manager carries out the administrative work.
Roseville’s structure is not built around a strong executive mayor. The mayor does not have veto authority and cannot issue executive orders. The mayor’s vote on decisions is the same as the other city council members. Roseville’s government is built around a part-time elected city council with legislative authority and a full-time appointed city manager with administrative authority.
In plain English, the city council decides where the city is going. The city manager runs the machine that gets it there.
Why does this matter?
Understanding how Roseville operates is useful for interacting with elected city council members and the city staff. It can help set expectations as well as explain the powers and limitations of city council and city staff.
This year, Roseville voters will choose a mayor and two city council members. The current terms for Mayor Dan Roe and Councilmembers Wayne Groff and Robin Schroeder go through 2026. As of the publishing of this article, none of them have declared whether they intend to run for re-election.
Regardless of who is running, understanding the seats they are running for and what their relationship is to the rest of the city’s administration will help voters when it’s time to make a decision at the polls.
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Prajwal "Praj" Vemireddy is a Roseville resident who works in finance at 3M and currently serves as chair of the City of Roseville’s Equity and Inclusion Commission. He writes about local government and civic life to help readers better understand how their city works and why it matters. In his free time, he enjoys playing chess, reading history books, and volunteering as a coach at InnerCity Tennis.
