Former Minnesota state Senator Nicole Mitchell won a seat on the Woodbury City Council on November 3rd, edging out an incumbent by 101 votes just over a year after a jury convicted her of burglarizing her stepmother’s home. The Democrat had resigned from the Legislature days after the verdict. On Tuesday, she finished second in a field of ten candidates, high enough to claim the last of two seats on her hometown council.
Woodbury voters had three city offices to fill. Mayor Anne Burt faced challenger John Sebastian in one contest, while the ten council candidates competed for two at-large seats in a separate race. Of the two council members whose seats were on the ballot, only Steve Morris sought another term. Jennifer Santini declined to run again, leaving an open seat in the same election in which Mitchell unseated Morris.
Mitchell’s arrest came while she was serving her first term in the Minnesota Senate. In the early hours of April 22nd, 2024, Detroit Lakes police responded to a call from her stepmother’s home and found the senator in the basement. She was dressed in black and had a flashlight with a black sock pulled over it. Her conversation with one of the responding officers would become evidence at trial.
An X user drew attention to Mitchell’s return to office Wednesday morning, sharing her booking photograph in a post. With all 16 Woodbury precincts reporting, Mitchell had received 7,837 votes, or 13.27% of the votes cast in the council contest, Valley News Live reported. The tally was unofficial Wednesday morning. The city’s election notice lists the council seats as four-year terms beginning in January.
At Mitchell’s trial in July 2025, jurors heard what she told officers about the items she wanted from the house. As the Associated Press reported from the trial, Mitchell said her stepmother had refused to give her belongings that had been her father’s. Among the things she told police she wanted were photographs, a flannel shirt and some of her father’s ashes.
Officer Joe Sternhagen, who responded to the call and later drove Mitchell to jail, testified on the second day of the trial. Prosecutors played the recording from his body camera for the jury. “Clearly I’m not good at this,” Mitchell told the officer, according to FOX 9’s courtroom coverage. A Becker County jury convicted her of first-degree burglary that July, and a judge later sentenced her to 180 days in jail.
Watch the body camera footage prosecutors played for the jury:
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Mitchell filed to run for the council the following July, Minnesota Public Radio reported. In making her pitch to Woodbury homeowners, she pointed to two projects from her time in the Legislature. Her campaign website credited her with helping secure $7.5 million in state money for the city’s Central Park renovation and another $3.3 million for public safety, funding she said would otherwise have come from property taxes.
Mitchell also called for residents to have a say before Woodbury allows any additional artificial intelligence data centers. On council business, she proposed cutting back on consent agendas, which allow members to approve several items in a single vote. Residents who wanted to look back at those decisions could find only four months of council videos, according to her campaign. Mitchell proposed keeping the recordings available for four years.
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.