With a major funding question before St. Paul voters on the Nov. 4 ballot, the St. Paul Public Schools have rolled out their own white yard signs stamped with school district logo and a QR code that takes visitors to the district website. Once there, voters find a rousing YouTube video with parent, teacher and student interviews about the proposed special 10-year tax levy, set to stirring music.
“Vote Nov. 4. Protect their future. Invest in our community,” read the the district’s yard signs, which are popping up on lawns, school grounds and outside rec centers, mirroring the wording on the district website’s central landing page. “To continue providing high quality education to all of our students, we are asking all of our community to vote on an operating levy.”
Elsewhere on the district website, staff are “invited” to collect yard signs from district headquarters, post them in their front lawns and share them with neighbors.
Campaign finance report
It’s an aggressive push for one side of the ballot question, and apparently backed by taxpayer funds. There’s no record of a campaign finance report detailing manhours, expenses or funding sources behind the school district effort, which is distinct from that of the parent-and-teacher driven “Vote Yes for Strong Schools” campaign, which has rolled out yellow lawn signs.
“Their stuff says ‘Vote Yes.’ Our stuff says ‘Vote’,” said Erica Wacker, a spokesperson for the St. Paul Public Schools, who confirmed that the district is using an as-yet-untallied amount of its own funds for the white signs. “It’s still an ongoing project, so there hasn’t been a final (expenditure) report on the referendum, so it would take some time to compile.”
Some supporters and critics alike of the 10-year, $37 million-per-year special property tax levy have been taken aback by the degree to which the school district may have crossed the line from sharing impartial information to advocacy.
Peter Butler, who lodged a complaint against the St. Paul DFL this month around an unrelated campaign flier issue, said he has not been intimately involved in the school levy question, but he was surprised by the degree of the district’s involvement.
For ballot matters, “the attorney general is very good at saying … you can’t be using taxpayer money (to reach out) just on one side of the issue,” Butler said. “You can inform people, but you can’t advocate. It certainly sounds like they’ve crossed the line there.”
Muddy legal waters
Historically, public agencies in Minnesota have been barred from promoting either side in levy referendums, constitutional amendments and ballot questions, though they are allowed to distribute factual, impartial information, such as the size of a levy proposal and how the money will be spent. By statute, districts must send voters a mailer spelling out those particulars.
During the 2021 ballot initiative around a new citywide rent control ordinance, members of the St. Paul City Council were allowed to use their personal Facebook pages to advocate for or against its passage, but they were told not to use their official council office websites or even their political ward’s Facebook pages in that manner.
“Until recently, the question of whether public funds could be used for such activity seemed settled: With rare exceptions, the answer was no,” reads a previously-published opinion by State Auditor Julie Blaha, which was updated in June.
A 2012 case muddied the legal waters.
In “Abrahamson v. St. Louis County School District,” the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that rather than avoid promotion outright, school districts must follow campaign finance reporting laws when they advocate for or against ballot measures to the same extent as a campaign committee.
In other words, expenditures for materials that support a particular outcome can trigger requirements to file campaign finance reports detailing expenses, donors and donation amounts, among other state campaign finance regulations. By state statute, most campaign materials larger than a bumper sticker must be labeled “Prepared and paid for by the (named) committee,” and no campaigning is allowed within 100 feet of a polling place.
St. Paul’s ordinances — which cover city government — go even further to ban campaigning on government property: “It shall be unlawful for any person to use city property for a political purpose.”
Yard signs, website, video
St. Paul Public Schools has been heavily disseminating word of its $37.2 million levy proposal on the Nov. 4 ballot, with no campaign finance record-keeping in sight. The school district has encouraged staff to distribute lawn signs to their neighbors.
“A limited number of SPPS Referendum yard signs are available at the District Administration Building, 360 Colborne Street, by the front entrance,” reads The Bridge, the district’s online newsletter. “Staff are invited to pick up a yard sign to put in their yards or give to neighbors who live in St. Paul.”
Elsewhere, the school district website urges “let’s work together to protect the opportunities our students need” and explains, under the sub-headline “What’s at stake?”, that “without additional revenue, the programs that make our schools strong will be forced to take significant budget reductions or be eliminated entirely.”
The website features a public letter from Schools Superintendent Stacie Stanley, which urges readers to watch a four-minute YouTube video featuring testimonials from levy supporters, including state Rep. Maria Isa Perez-Vega and school board chair Halla Henderson, as well as a parent, teacher and students.
After about three minutes of highlighting the importance of school funding, a narrator explains the estimated property tax impacts on a median-value St. Paul home ($289,000), which would be $309 per year, in addition to the school district’s normal annual levy.
Stanley herself then appears in the video and encourages voters to go to the polls, though she never explicitly tells the viewer to “vote yes.”
‘If this doesn’t pass’
Quentin Wathum-Ocama, a school district employee who chairs the independent “Vote Yes for Strong Schools” campaign, confirmed that the school district has made stacks of yard signs available at school building open houses. He said he was not otherwise intimately familiar with the mechanics of the district’s efforts, such as whether it used its in-house print shop and marketing budget for the white yard signs, which are distinct from his campaign’s yellow yard signs.
“I can’t speak on behalf of the district,” he said, “but I know they’re walking the line and trying to do what they can within the confines of the law. They’re trying to explain what happens if it passes and what happens if it doesn’t. It feels political because the district is being really upfront and saying ‘if this doesn’t pass, we will cut programs.’ Some people say that feels like a very ‘Vote Yes!’ (effort), but it’s also the truth.”
“I do appreciate the district not sugar coating why they are asking for this,” Wathum-Ocama added. “Let’s say it doesn’t pass, and then the district says ‘we’re going to close this school.’ People will say ‘Nobody told me!’”
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