With the blessing of the mayor and the St. Paul City Council, as well as deep guidance from city lobbyists and department heads, the city of St. Paul delivers an elaborate laundry list of wants and needs each year to state lawmakers, spelling out the capital city’s legislative priorities in order of importance.
The Grand Casino Arena needs state bond funding for a remodel. The Como Zoo needs a new enclosure for its big cats. The mayor is pushing to ban semi-automatic guns and binary triggers from the city. The wish-list goes on, usually spanning some 20 pages or more of desired projects and changes to state law, from the elaborate to the mundane.
In an unusual bit of policy housekeeping, the city council on Wednesday is poised to require that City Hall be ready for next year’s legislative session with an approved agenda in hand by the first month of session. This year, it was not.
“Basically, this is just an attempt to codify something that has been standard practice, but this year wasn’t,” said St. Paul City Council President Rebecca Noecker on Friday. “We were getting questions from legislators about what the city’s priorities were. Some folks were asking, ‘Have you actually adopted your legislative agenda?’ That’s what actually takes it from a document that lobbyists are shopping around to the official will of the city.”
Last session
When the 2025 legislative session opened on Jan. 14, the city’s legislative agenda was still in limbo, getting passed around among city lobbyists and council members.
The council ultimately adopted the legislative agenda last April, making St. Paul likely the last city in the metro to finalize its policy priorities even as major state bills were hurdling toward completion.
“By April, things are moving into the final stage of negotiation,” Noecker said. “Last year got way, way too late. It wasn’t ready. It wasn’t put into our Legistar (software) by our intergovernmental relations team. We had it shopped around to council members, but it wasn’t ready for prime time, and we were asking about it.”
The city’s top asks this past year included the remodel of the Grand Casino Arena and the big cat enclosure at Como Zoo. Neither project went on to receive state funding.
A difficult end to 2024 and start to 2025
Likely adding to delays in getting the 2025 agenda approved, the final weeks of December were difficult ones for the city council, which was mired in a budget fight with the mayor’s office.
Also, January featured an unusual start to the legislative session as House DFL lawmakers refused to convene in the state Capitol while disputing leadership matters with Republicans.
The city charter spells out that city lobbyists may only lobby lawmakers on items with official city approval, said Brynn Hausz, the city’s intergovernmental relations director, on Friday.
The council “worked really closely with me on this ordinance, and I am perfectly happy with the deadline being put in place,” Hausz added. “Having the legislative agenda before the city council in December just makes for a better process. Then we have a lead-up to the legislative session to get our bills drafted. You can’t wait until January to start drafting bills and expect to get work done.”
Proposed amendment
The council’s proposed amendment to the city’s administrative codes requires the mayor’s staff to submit the city’s legislative agenda for council review no later than the first Wednesday in December. That carries the expectation that the council adopt the agenda by the time state lawmakers convene their regular session, and sets 30 days after the start of the session as a hard deadline.
Noecker noted the city’s legislative agenda can run more than 20 pages, making it a bit unwieldy.
“Successive administrations have put down their priorities, and it’s hard to take it off once it’s there, but if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority,” she said. “We’d really like to get down to a one-page executive summary … with our few pushes for the year ahead, our short list.”
Also worth revisiting, Noecker said, is how the legislative agenda is organized. She’d like to see better separation between state bonding priorities, like the requested funding for the Grand Casino Arena remodel, as opposed to legislative priorities that might get lost in the shuffle.
The city had sought state permission to ban guns from all of its government buildings and install signs indicating so, especially outside libraries and rec centers, as schools and private businesses are already allowed to do. That request also was not approved.
The next regular legislative session is scheduled to begin Feb. 17.
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