The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It’s late afternoon and State Auditor Pat Awada is negotiating southbound traffic on 35E in her white Jeep Cherokee, one hand on the wheel, the other occupied with a Marlboro Light that she ashes out her open window. She brushes a length of long blonde hair from her deep blue eyes and considers the impact that a fast rise through Republican politics has had on her family. “I haven’t tried to protect my kids from politics. I never tried.” She speaks with an even, calm tone. But her pitch drops noticeably when she describes the reception her children occasionally received during her tenure as mayor of Eagan. “They’ve suffered negative things because some parents don’t like me.”

Pat Awada is 36 years old. She is the mother of four children. During the last four years she has become the most controversial woman in Minnesota political history (with the possible exception of Coya “Come Home” Knutson). Her epic battles with the Metropolitan Council over the development of low-income high-density housing in the suburbs earned her the everlasting enmity of suburb-hating urban liberals. Her activist approach to the state auditor’s office has positively unnerved Minnesota’s local government establishment. The Star Tribune’s editorial board has yet to find an Awada position with which it agrees, and when they are not busy attacking the policies themselves, they provide an astonishing amount of space to anti-Awada letters to the editor, many of which verge on the personal.

Shrill. Aggressive. Inflexible. Tough. Awada smiles when presented with the list of adjectives opponents apply to her. “The bitch factor,” she summarizes, matter-of-factly. “I can’t worry about that. A lot of executive women get that. Maybe not from liberal Democrats, but they get it.” A moment later she smiles and softens, but her voice tightens defensively: “I’m certainly not shrill. Am I tough? Yes. Opinionated? Absolutely.” She pauses, thinks it over. “Maybe some women are less likely to be that way than men? I don’t know.”

Despite its name and status as a state constitutional office, the Minnesota Office of the State Auditor has very little to do with the $26 billion that the state of Minnesota will spend during the 2002-2003 biennium. The job is actually much larger than that: Minnesota’s state auditor monitors the spending of 4,300 units of local government, including school districts, municipalities, counties, port authorities, redevelopment authorities, even police and fire relief associations. That’s $17 billion of oversight this year alone—a significantly larger amount of money than the state spends itself.

The auditor supervises a staff of 150, including 90 auditors who perform approximately 250 audits each year. Most are housed in a diamond-shaped brick building a block from the Capitol. On the fourth floor, surveying the Capitol itself, is the chief auditor’s spacious corner office. When Pat Awada took her new job in January, she ceded that desk to one of her deputies and chose instead a small, first-floor room near a door and reception area used by rank-and-file staff. “That way I get a better sense of what’s going on,” she explains as she wheels back and forth in her office chair, sitting on one leg and rowing herself around with the other, a file folder tamping down her skirt. It’s a spartan space: There’s a desk, a small table, some bookcases. The few items that might hint at her personal or past professional life are either in unpacked boxes or scattered on the cluttered bookshelves. “If you really want to know about me, learn about my family,” she says with enthusiasm, as if recommending a good read. “They’re crazy.”

Awada’s mother, Betty Anderson, is a self-described “adventurer” and former parks administrator. On family camping trips, “She was always the first one to jump off the bridge into the river,” Awada remembers. “That was our role model.” Awada’s father, Henry, is a trained forester who retired as a machinist at Northwest Airlines. Both parents enjoyed the outdoors, and it’s a passion they instilled in their children; with a shudder, Awada remembers childhood camping trips in the Boundary Waters—in the middle of the winter. Still, the outdoor adventures seem to have made an impression on the whole family. One of Awada’s three brothers runs the Iditarod, the world’s most famous dog-sled race, in Alaska. Another jumps out of airplanes for fun. Awada reflects that her mother’s adventurous streak instilled in her not only a confidence that she could handle challenges, but that she should seek them out.Patricia Anderson spent most of her first five years at an Idaho ranger station 95 miles from the nearest town. After that, she and her family lived in several northern Minnesota locations, before settling in Forest Lake. She graduated from Forest Lake High School in 1984, and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. “I went to school wanting to be a psychiatrist,” she recalls. While she pursued a pre-med honors track, she worked at several Uptown nightspots, including an extended stint in William’s Pub’s peanut bar. “When I wasn’t working I would be there drink…” She catches herself. “Or somewhere, out.”

As Awada progressed through the University, she began taking courses in political science and economics. Eventually, she shifted her major to international relations with a focus on political economics. She also became involved in student government, serving a term as the chair of the student fees committee, a perennially controversial position that dispenses tens of thousands of dollars in compulsory student fees to university organizations and programs. Awada recalls it with a fond smile as her “first position of political power.” During her tenure, she succeeded in rendering optional what was then a mandatory student fee paid to Boynton Health Clinic, a first notch in her belt that clearly still delights her. “If you had your own health insurance, you only had to pay part of it,” she says. “My political beliefs were pretty much set at that point.”


“Pat Awada’s father has been associated with the Libertarian Party for years and years,” explains Mike McCarty, treasurer of Minnesota’s Libertarian Party. “He was one of our first guys. It’s a family thing.” It certainly is: Pat Awada is the only elected state officer in the United States with standing as an officially endorsed Libertarian. When I tell her she’s featured as an “officeholder” on the state and national party websites, she laughs ruefully, “Oh, god!” Nonetheless, Awada does not hide the fact that she accepted the Libertarian Party endorsement for state auditor in 2002. (Minnesota does not allow multiple party endorsements to appear on its ballots, so Awada chose to run as a Republican.)

But Pat Awada is not your typical Libertarian, just as she is not your typical Minnesota Republican. She explicitly rejects the term “ideologue” as applied to her, and though she’s respectful of the religious wing of the Republican Party, she concedes that her philosophy and approach to government is not religiously motivated. (She was raised Lutheran, and she has remained so, though she and her husband have agreed to raise their children in his Greek Orthodox faith.) “I’m very pragmatic,” she explains. “Very logical.”

Awada has an intellectual independence, curiosity, and seriousness that is unusual in either major party, and she respects those qualities in her political adversaries. At a recent meeting of her deputies, she commented on DFL State Representative Phyllis Kahn: “I used to think she was a kook, but I’m beginning to like her.” Deputy Auditor Tony Sutton, a former executive director of the Minnesota Republican Party, glanced at the reporter in the room and turned white. Awada noticed him blanching but was not deterred. “She’s the only one asking questions, Tony,” she said. Referring to material that her office made available to Kahn and her fellow legislative committee members, Awada noted, “She’s the only one reading the stuff.”

Awada traces her interest in fiscal issues to the late 1980s, “when we started realizing as a generation that maybe there wouldn’t be any Social Security.” Deficit entitlement spending worried her, and she found herself gravitating to politicians who were willing to speak the politically unpalatable fiscal truths about it. In 1992, she supported Ross Perot’s campaign against the first President Bush, even though she had supported Republican candidates prior to that. “I liked Perot because he was honest and he was the only person who would tell the truth about what was going on with the budget.”Unlike her fellow Eaganite, Governor Tim Pawlenty, she refused to sign a “no tax” pledge during the 2002 campaign. “I’m very fiscally conservative, but there are certain things a community needs to do to create community. Especially in suburbia,” she says. When Awada was a suburban mayor, those things included controversial levies and bonding to acquire property for parks and to build recreational facilities. She often found herself at odds with Eagan’s anti-tax Republicans.

On a late spring evening, driving through Eagan, she points out her building projects with pride. “Why a water park? We’ve got a ton of kids out here. The Central Park? We needed a place where we could permanently hold events.” They are the sorts of projects that one might expect the daughter of a former parks administrator to support. But they are quite unusual for a statewide Republican (and Libertarian!) officeholder. “Look, a lot of Republicans see government as a negative. I don’t, but I don’t see it as a solution, either.” Transcending the labels that are typically applied to her, Awada argues that government is necessary, but that the conversation should start with a pragmatic discussion about quality control. “I think its job is simply to do things well.”

For example, Awada believes that one of the things government can do well is protect the environment while encouraging energy alternatives. For instance, she is opposed to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. But unlike other Republicans who furtively oppose drilling in ANWR, Awada is willing to take her opposition one step further. “If I was President Bush, the first thing I’d do is I’d announce that we would become self-sufficient on solar and wind.” Awada is not unaware that she says this while owning an SUV with 147,000 miles on it. But when Pat Awada is confident in her views, she does not hesitate for political calculation. She goes right at it. “I own a Jeep. And I’m not gonna give up the Jeep.” Her argument comes down to a simple mandate. “You’ve gotta create new forms of energy.”

Ironically, Awada is most closely identified not with an ideology or methodology, but with a suburban lifestyle that rankles many urban liberals. Right or wrong, it’s a reputation earned back in 2000, when she stood up to the Metropolitan Council, a state-chartered planning agency for the seven-county metro area. The Council demanded that Eagan build more high-density, low-income housing, and threatened to hold hostage such Met Council programs as Park and Ride and light rail if it didn’t. Awada won the showdown by correctly pointing out that the Met Council lacks the authority to force municipalities to build specific housing types. She also won enemies: Opponents openly suggested that her opposition to the housing mandate was proof that she was an elitist, a classist, and even a racist. Awada rejects all of the characterizations as emblematic of a left obsessed with labeling opponents. “The liberals’ thing is usually just to cry discrimination or bigotry or, ‘She hates poor people’ or something,” she says with exasperation. For Awada, the argument against mandated housing types was straight logic about the limits of power. “I would never go into Minneapolis and say, ‘Your lots are too small. You can no longer develop like this,’” she huffs over a lunch of White Castles in her office. “I mean, that’s how ridiculous it is to suburbanites.”

When Pat Awada graduated from college in 1989, she was aspiring to a career in Washington, “the State Department or something,” she says. But then she met and married her husband, and dreams of Washington “died”—at least for the time being.

Mike Awada was raised in Mendota Heights, the son of an entrepreneurial Syrian and Lebanese family that Betty Anderson compares to the high-living Mediterraneans in last year’s hit film My Big Fat Greek Wedding (“The Awadas called us Andersons ‘those hot-dish Scandinavians’”).

“I met him on a Booze Cruise, if you wanna know,” his wife recalls with a snicker. She was 22 and he was 25. It was the Fourth of July, and Mike and his friends had rented a yacht on Lake Minnetonka where, for $30, participants could eat and drink all they wanted. Pat Anderson and Mike Awada dated for 18 months and lived together for nine more before marrying.

Standing over a pot of boiling spaghetti in their airy, modern Eagan kitchen, Mike Awada reflects on the challenges of being a political husband. “At political functions, I feel more like a bodyguard than a spouse. Everybody wants a piece of her.” He speaks through a wry smile. He is tall and handsome, his skin slightly olive, his hair thinning but still full. A 15-foot wall separates the kitchen from the entryway, and it’s completely covered with children’s drawings, paintings, and photographs. Near the garage entrance is an Anne Geddes calendar devoted solely to when and where the Awada kids must be driven. For the month of April, there is not a single day without at least three destinations. Both parents share responsibility for the calendar, though Pat’s public responsibilities often require Mike to assume a heavier burden. “Every now and then the kids say, ‘I miss mommy,’ and I tell her she needs to be here.” He shrugs affably. “During the campaign for state auditor I was effectively a single parent.”But Mike Awada is hardly a house-husband. He maintains his own commercial real estate business and he runs his wife’s remaining business interests now that she’s the auditor. He also chaired her 2002 campaign, and he is widely acknowledged as her most trusted advisor. Nonetheless, Peggy Carlson, an Eagan City Council colleague of Pat’s who has known Mike for 25 years, describes him as “extremely supportive of Pat’s challenging schedule. He handles a lot of the daily challenges of being a father of four, of having an energetic, motivated wife.”

After stints with the Grunseth for Governor campaign in 1990 and a tour as executive director of Minnesotans for Term Limits from 1993 to 1994, Pat Awada had acquired enough experience to go into business on her own. “I started consulting and doing whatever I could do and it turned into my business,” she says. At home with her first child and a personal computer, Awada began Capitol Direct, a direct-mail company that specialized in political work. By 2003, when Awada sold half the firm, it was grossing $3 million annually.

It was not enough, though, for Awada to be a mere entrepreneur. At the dewy age of 25 she was elected to the Eagan City Council. Soon after, she had her second daughter. Two years later, in 1998, she was elected mayor. Those who work with Awada express awe at her ability to handle so many disparate responsibilities, and to still remain a devoted mother. Cyndee Fields served on the Eagan City Council with Awada. She says, “Pat would give up sleep before she would give up doing something with her kids.” Still, there are times when the responsibilities of being a politician and entrepreneur inevitably intrude on Awada’s efforts to be a traditional mom. Joyanne Kohler, a VP at Capitol Companies, recalls, “On the day she had [second daughter] Katie, I brought over the payroll for her to sign, and there she was in the bed doing payroll after just having had a kid.”

At Capitol Direct, Awada set up a playroom and brought her kids to work. But she wasn’t thinking only of herself. She also created a workplace that was particularly friendly to working mothers, and, according to former and current employees, an environment that was especially forgiving of the challenges faced by single mothers. “There’s a very gentle side of Patty, but it really isn’t her public image,” explains close family friend Lisa Holmquist. “My youngest child has Down syndrome and she’s one of the only people outside of my family that I’ve trusted to watch after him.” Holmquist expresses frustration that Awada’s gentler side doesn’t get mentioned by a media that seems enamored of her tough public image. “I’ve known a lot of public and political figures,” she explains. “And I always hate to see someone I know being pilloried in the press. A lot of times it has nothing to do with them.”

In 1998, the year Awada was elected mayor of Eagan, she and Mike decided to adopt a child out of a foreign orphanage. When she heard the plan, Betty Anderson remembers thinking, “Oh my god, how can they handle any more?” Sitting in the bleachers overlooking her two daughters’ ice-skating practice at Eagan Ice Arena, Awada downplays the scale of the decision. “It’s a big decision, yeah, but not any bigger than others.”

Pat and Mike eventually decided to adopt from a Bulgarian orphanage, but when Mike arrived in Bulgaria, he had a problem. “Mike couldn’t choose,” recalls Lisa Holmquist. “So they got two instead of one.” Michael was 11 at the time of the adoption in 1999; George was 10. Both boys were dark-skinned Roma, otherwise known as gypsies. Michael bore physical scars of abuse from his time in the orphanage (“he was beat with a broom”); slight George bore the psychological scars of constantly being bullied. From the perspective of a mother, there were small challenges, too. “How do I tuck them in?” Awada recalls asking herself. “How do I kiss them good-night?”

The challenges persist, and primary among them is Michael’s lingering anger about life at the orphanage. “He gets angry, explodes, hits a wall,” Awada says. That anger blew up in a very public way last May Day. Michael returned home two hours late and was informed by his father that his bicycle privileges had been suspended. In the ensuing argument, he managed to get his father in an arm-lock, and Mike Awada ended up hitting the boy on the arm with a chair. The teenager called the police and Mike Awada was charged with gross misdemeanor malicious punishment of a child.
Looking back on the adoption of the two boys in light of the incident, Pat Awada sighs. “It’s been a growth experience. Unfortunately, this is probably part of it.” She makes no apologies for either her son or husband; both were at fault, she says, and both have paid the price of having the donnybrook detailed in the media. For her, personally, the incident has been “very painful” though she is trying to keep it in perspective. “Teenage boys can be frustrating. My brothers kind of laugh at the whole thing. They understand.”

In a subsequent court hearing, Mike Awada was given a “continuance with dismissal”—basically an assurance that the charges against him will be dismissed so long as he completes his current counseling program and remains law-abiding for one year. The child protection case has since been closed.In 2001 Pat Awada was approached to run for Congress, but decided against it for several reasons, including her unwillingness to stress the family by splitting time between Washington, D.C. and Eagan. Instead, she decided to run for state auditor, a position that more closely paralleled her interests in local government finance. At the same time, she recognized that she could not take her political career to a statewide level and continue to grow her business. So, after the election, she sold half her business interests. Awada recounts the decision while tying her daughter Katie’s skates at the Eagan Ice Arena. “It’d be better if I told you I did it for the kids. But I didn’t.” She pauses and tightens a knot. “I just couldn’t do both politics and business at the same time. The family, I can handle.”

A week later, she reflects on the balance she tries to maintain between her professional and personal life. Awada explains, “Politics is my job. It’s not my whole being. There’s a division between who I am professionally and how I act personally.” She begins to smile devilishly. “Just because I’m a mom doesn’t mean my primary issues are families and children. Mommy issues,” she says with sneering contempt before pulling back with her customary chuckle. “Does my husband have to have daddy issues?” In many ways, this willful compartmentalization is a significant departure from the politics practiced by so many female leaders—from Geraldine Ferraro to Hillary Clinton—who have staked reputations and careers on “feminist” or “feminizing” issues. Pat Awada is a fiscal conservative first. “Mom” is something she leaves at home.

She is presently one of only seven female state auditors in the United States. Though elected less than a year ago, she is regularly mentioned in Republican circles as an attractive and likely candidate for higher office. How much higher? Awada’s interest in local government issues would make her an obvious candidate for governor, and she does not rule out future interest in the office, though she is quick to add that, “the current governor is a good friend and I have no intention of challenging him.”

It’s 8 p.m., a school night, and Pat Awada is standing in her garage, having just completed a bedtime negotiation with her two daughters. Her husband is inside finishing off the details. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of Marlboro Light 100s. She wears a purple coat that matches one worn by her daughter; she wears black sweat pants that stop just short of her ankles, and white stockings that begin just beneath them. She wears running shoes, though she does not exercise. Her long hair is relaxed, foppishly falling over her eyes. “This is my life,” she says, waving the now-lit cigarette at the white Jeep, the toys, the sports equipment, the old political lawn signs. “I’ll give you a tour of the backyard before I go in for the night.”

The Awada home is a modest gray rambler set on a narrow rectangular lot on the bluffs overlooking Interstate 35E in Eagan. If not for the pink door, it would be anonymous in its subdivision. “I just wanted a pink door,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “Probably the only pink door in all of Eagan.” The front yard is grass but for a couple of saplings and a “Liberate Iraq” lawn sign. She gestures at a window well. “That’s where we had some leakage after the floods.” It’s now plugged with one of her spare “Support the Central Park” lawn signs.

Awada is suddenly distracted by motion in a basement window. “What’s going on in there?” She peers through the shades and sees 15-year-old Michael doing his best N’Sync imitation in front of a spinning police light. “Oh god, he’s dancing.” Snickering, she knocks on the window and Michael practically hits the ceiling in embarrassment. “My son!” She doubles over in smoky laughter, more teenage girl than 36-year-old mother. “He’s so busted!”

Continuing around to the other side of the house, she points out two freshly planted trees. “Those are my China trees,” she explains, having been inspired by a recent trip to Beijing and the massive forestry efforts being undertaken on its outskirts. “Those trees right there?” She points at her neighbor’s property. “He had some real ugly scrub over there. Real ugly trees. They were blocking the sun for my garden. So I told him if he didn’t cut them down I’d poison them.” She smiles puckishly. “One day he had a contractor out and he cut them down. As he was doing it, he was giving me a look. But we’re cordial.” She pauses, apparently sensing my skepticism at her willingness to break out the Round-Up. “No, really. I did!” She laughs, unapologetic. “Look, I’ve gotta get inside and help Mike.” She says good night and walks through the open garage door without even a glance back.