Wearing secondhand skates purchased for the occasion, St. Paul’s next mayor completed puck-handling drills Tuesday at the downtown TRIA rink as she weighed joining the Northland Cup, the annual hockey game between employees of the city and Ramsey County.
Kaohly Her has plenty of experience as an ice skater and rollerblader, but the intensity of a hockey game — even one played as a friendly fundraiser to benefit victims of domestic violence — is an entirely different arena. The same could be said for a policymaker suddenly holding executive office in a city government spanning more than 3,000 employees and serving over 300,000 residents.
The city’s “strong mayor” system of governance leaves key decisions directly in Her’s hands. Rather than contribute to a collective body like the House, the former state representative will take center stage in the contact sport that is city politics: hiring and firing city leaders, wrestling the city council over budget matters and setting the municipal agenda at a tumultuous time for the city, state and nation as a whole.
As a result of the city’s transition to even-year elections in 2028, Her’s term will span three years, giving her especially little time to do all of the above and more.
Her, the city’s first Hmong mayor and its first female mayor, will be sworn in during an inauguration ceremony Jan. 2 at St. Catherine University. That same day, she’ll attend a private ceremony with her family and members of the city’s Hmong community, where Hmong leaders will lead her through their own cultural swearing-in of sorts.
Her’s transition team still is choosing the venue for an inaugural gala, Jan. 30. In the meantime, she’s been active, if not prolific, on social media, especially Facebook, where her “Kaohly Her For St. Paul Mayor” page reads like a roadmap through the city’s cultural organizations.
In one social media post, she’s lighting a giant Hanukkah menorah. In another, she’s visiting with the West Side Community Organization about air-quality concerns. In yet another, she’s congratulating Meg Luger-Nikolai for winning the DFL primary in House District 64A, the seat Her gave up just weeks ago.
“Today I spent time helping deliver groceries to families who are fearful of leaving their homes,” Her wrote Wednesday from her “MayorKaohlyHer” account on Instagram, in a caption beneath pictures of herself at a Latin grocery. “Less than a month ago … our friends at this Eastside Mercado were stopped by ICE and interrogated. They were targeted because of how they look.”
“Thankfully but sadly, they had passports on hand and ICE could not apprehend them,” she wrote. “Many people are looking to their elected officials to do something about the chaos this federal administration is inflicting on our communities, but in all honesty, there is not much we can. What we can do is show up in community and help those in need.”
Re-evaluating city programs
Her, who won 48% of the vote in the five-way mayoral race after ballot reallocation Nov. 4, unseated two-term incumbent Melvin Carter, the city’s first Black mayor, who in his first term eight years ago also was its youngest mayor and arguably its most progressive.
Will Her stay the course on Carter’s progressive agenda, refocus it or abandon it completely? That remains uncertain, perhaps even to her. At a time of rising property taxes, growing questions about neighborhood quality-of-life issues and vacant and foreclosed properties downtown, she’s promised to reevaluate potentially duplicative services, on top of rebuilding connections with key partners, including state lawmakers and the Ramsey County Board.
So far, she hasn’t indicated whether she’ll overhaul Carter’s slate of department directors or some of the mayor’s projects and Cabinet roles, though some turnover has long been in process. Current directors have been asked to stick around for now.
Her “extended an invitation to department directors to continue in their current positions into the new year,” said Matt Wagenius, her campaign and transition team spokesperson, in a written statement on Wednesday, “so they can continue getting to know one another, ensure continuity of service across the departments, and make a proper evaluation of whether they are a good fit in their current capacity for our new administration.”
Still, some department leaders already have left, and several positions have long been in a kind of semi-permanent transition.
Fire Chief Butch Inks retired from city employment this month, and some departments — such as the Office of Financial Empowerment, which Carter created in his first term, and the department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity — have been led by interim directors or co-directors for more than a year. Brooke Blakey recently stepped down as director of the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety, another Carter innovation.
Her, who was Carter’s policy director in his first term, worked closely on establishing the city’s $15 minimum wage and college savings accounts for the city’s newborns, two initiatives she’ll now be in the position of reevaluating, alongside many others.
With regard to program priorities, Wagenius said Her received “detailed briefings from all 15 city departments as of late last week, and now she is in the evaluation phase. No decisions have been made regarding changes to existing programs.”
Hiring timeline
Applications closed Dec. 24 for a handful of positions internal to the mayor’s office, including associate of constituent services, policy aide, and the mayor’s scheduler and executive team coordinator.
Her spent two days last week at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., meeting with other mayors from across the country for a crash course in municipal leadership through the Bloomberg Center for Cities.
“We’ve been diving deep into case studies on building high-performing teams and modernizing organizational structures,” Her wrote Dec. 17 on Facebook. “I’m walking away with new tools for city management and a roadmap for fresh funding and foundation partnerships. I can’t wait to put these insights to work for Saint Paul!”
Her has also kept busy since Election Day visiting the city’s seven political wards, meeting with city council members and community leaders.
She toured Highland Park and Macalester-Groveland with Council Member Saura Jost, the Midway and surrounding areas with Council Member Molly Coleman and part of the East Side with an aide to Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who is on family leave following the birth of her first child.
Among those she encountered during her Ward 7 tour were Latino business owners concerned about federal immigration enforcement operations scaring away their customers, shop owners worried about a state road construction project along Arcade Street, a church leader raising money for a community center, and nonprofits like St. Paul Urban Tennis, which has big plans for a former dumping ground.
In the final week of December, the new mayor will tour downtown, Grand Avenue, the West Side and surrounding areas with Council President Rebecca Noecker, and the Frogtown and Summit-University neighborhoods with Council Member Anika Bowie.
In the first week of January, Her will visit the East Side with Council Member Nelsie Yang and the North End and Como area with Council Vice President HwaJeong Kim.
The professional life of a mayor isn’t a clear-cut 9-to-5 job, and Her’s semi-social calendar already is filling up outside of business hours. The World Junior Ice Hockey Championship skates into downtown Dec. 26 to Jan. 5, bringing the best skaters under age 20 from 10 countries to Grand Casino Arena and the University of Minnesota along with 250,000 hockey fans, press and entourage.
On New Year’s Eve, as thousands of visitors exit the U.S. vs. Sweden game at Grand Casino Arena, Her plans to be there to greet them.
In a festive and early start to the new year, Visit St. Paul — the city’s tourism bureau — will drop a giant, disco-themed hockey puck in downtown Rice Park around 8 p.m., immediately followed by fireworks. It’s perhaps as fitting a metaphor as any for the optimism and concerns surrounding new beginnings and tumultuous times.
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