Start with "Envision Minnesota." Homepage, accomplishments, what we envision, McKnight re:focus, Hot dish newsletter, Governor's Playbook. If you agree, fine, if you take your hot dish with a grain of salt and are not a Le Creuset crowd type, more a box from the freezer into the microwave lifestyle person, that's fine with me too. Next, to quickly understand Met Council the way I understand Met Council, this link for sure, and to a lesser degree, this and this (were it your website, would you update -- this is the most current committee/board make up listing I could find for their LCAC -- I admittedly am not a perfect searcher nor unduly creative in following links but I did Google and try a second appropriate search engine). Go along to get along, and if you Lake Elmo on Met Council, you experience the fist in the glove - learning something that big and so so graciously well fed and coddled can move fast and mean as a jaguar.
____________UPDATE____________
I have always believed Met Council, in setting quotas for towns in things as remote into the future as 2030 planning, used to slaughter a chicken, read the entrails, and add 15%. Some imported New Orleans Voodoo queen, and a prized, hidden staff crystal ball were all thought to be part of the "scientific" forecasting.
If you want to see how foggy modeling - crystal-balling is, when done with honest intent never mind adding 20% because 15% might be insufficient to allow developer exploitation discretion in a community without over setting quotas so that less preservation of a status quo is possible by forced comp planning excess -- if you want that, try this Google, (and each scholarly paper has its citation trail so that you can expand beyond work by the single author via the treeing that citation tracking entails). I got that Google by having come across this single paper. There's a lot of modeling stuff out there, online and free access, but when you read some and see the presumptions and simplifications and quality of a back-fit to past history as model validation testing, you have to say it's mostly educated guesswork.
Yet we are constrained by Met Council extortion to commit parts of the community to various growth demands, based on such a pailful of garbage guessing.
Plus they add 15-20% because the developers love that. It gives them a bigger pool for rapaciousness.
I'm sure they do exactly that, at Met Council.
Notice that they have twenty million words on their website, but never publish their forecast models. Like a jewelry store where they never say how highly alloyed the gold is, or like some jeweler who'll talk to you for hours selling or hoping for a sale, without getting into what's a real diamond and what's a rhinestone.
Go figure.