St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s “no frills, no fun” budget proposal may be in line for some significant last-minute changes.

With a week to go before finalizing the city’s 2026 spending plan, the city council is debating up to 29 budget amendments aimed at unwinding planned workforce reductions at specific libraries and rec centers, as well as staving off proposed cuts to parking enforcement officers, St. Paul Fire Department’s overnight crew, legal services for immigrants and a “commercial corridors” business improvement program.

The council is looking to increase spending in those areas and others, despite the fact the city may end the year as much as $8.4 million in the red. Spending has overshot revenue this year due to a cyber security incident that cost the city $2.5 million and a $7.5 million legal payout in September related to the shooting death of Cordale Handy.

“We have heard do not cut hours at libraries and rec centers,” said Council President Rebecca Noecker, addressing a standing-room-only crowd during the city’s annual truth in taxation hearing Tuesday evening. “We have heard do not cut firefighters and first responders. … Our immigration defense fund is going to be more important than ever right now.”

In an interview Wednesday, Noecker said the council is working on a multi-part global amendment that, backed by consensus support, will introduce a series of roughly $4 million in budget additions.

If those 13 or more consensus amendments go through, the final council vote next Wednesday will neither increase or decrease the mayor’s proposed 5.3% tax levy increase. To fund them, Noecker said the council will rely on an increase to fire department transport fees, which are ambulance runs billed to insurance, for an added $2.5 million next year. Additional dollars will come from parking funds, employee vacancies and other budget transfers.

“There’s no reason why our taxpayers shouldn’t be benefiting from these fees that are going to insurers,” Noecker said.

Some budget cuts could be restored

Without a last-minute budget fix, the Arlington Hills Public Library is poised to open at noon instead of 10 a.m. twice a week come January, a direct response to losing the hourly equivalent of 1.3 librarians and custodians to vacancies and retirements. That adds up to about a $129,000 cut to the library system’s staffing budget. Substitute staffing would be reduced an additional $44,000, or 18%, equivalent to losing 34 hours of fill-in staffing per week throughout the system.

In another budget change, some $345,000 in funding for the city’s neighborhood district council system could be shifted from federal Community Development Block Grants to cash accounts, freeing them up from federal red tape. Another $400,000 could be restored to the Commercial Corridors initiative, which uses economic development funds for street beautification, public art, neighborhood events and business grants around 18 commercial districts.

Individual council members may bring their own additional budget amendments to the table next Wednesday, though it’s not entirely clear if they’ll have garnered the four-vote majority needed.

Council Member Anika Bowie has objected to shutting down the Rondo Community Library at Dale and University avenues for safety improvements — a construction process that could take up to a year — without greater worker and community input. She’s also called for $100,000 to support a housing program for men who have been previously incarcerated, which would be run through the nonprofit Ujaama Place. Several men involved in the effort spoke at Tuesday’s hearing.

Some frontline library staff have said the Rondo Library improvements could make safety concerns worse by moving bathrooms deeper into the structure, without addressing root concerns about fentanyl users, unattended youth and loiterers coming from the nearby Green Line station.

“I have shared with Council Member Bowie that I agree with the need to have a clear plan not just for Rondo Library, but for the entire intersection,” Noecker said. “How is it going to be any different when the library reopens? I do agree with asking for that kind of accountability and that kind of reporting, and it’s something that we can tie into library board meetings, but I don’t believe in tying it to the budget. … The budget is a very blunt instrument.”

AFSCME, property owners, Twin Cities DSA speak out

Meanwhile, the two-hour truth in taxation hearing, held in downtown council chambers, drew long lines of homeowners alarmed by property tax increases, AFSCME workers decrying what they described as poverty wages and short or part-time staffing in key areas, and others angered by the St. Paul Police Department’s involvement in a federal immigration enforcement operation on Tuesday that dissolved at times into violent clashes with protesters.

Brian Dobie, a Macalester-Groveland resident, told the council on Tuesday he’s seen his total property taxes climb from $9,705 in 2024 to $11,250 last year, with $12,384 proposed for 2026. That’s a 28% increase in two years.

“It’s unsustainable,” Dobie said. “I’m all for paying my fair share of reasonable taxes for essential services, but I think that’s the point — they’re not reasonable taxes and they’re well beyond the essential services we need.”

Calling for an increase rather than a decrease in human services, Taylor Sibthorp, a member of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America, said the city should reconsider its priorities, including the planned security improvements at the Rondo Library. “We are about to spend more than $700,000 to move a bathroom,” Sibthorp said. “Put our dollars toward care over punishment.”

AFSCME workers arrived holding printed images of cat eyes on dark signs labeled “AFSCME Is Watching.” They said starting wages around $17 per hour for rec center workers were barely above the citywide minimum wage, and promotions for part-time Parks and Rec and library workers have been slow in coming.

“We’re not asking for much,” said Rosie Kohnen, a community rec leader on the East Side. “I mean, I barely make it. … I live in affordable housing, I’ve come up from the streets, I’ve been homeless before. I know what it’s like, and it’s very scary to think I could go back to where I was because my rent is almost both of my paychecks. And it’s supposed to be affordable housing.”

Noecker said AFSCME had brought legitimate concerns to the table. She noted Human Resources had conducted the first phase of a “pay equity” study for city employees, but council members had yet to see the results, and a more comprehensive study across all payroll categories is likely in order.

In light of Tuesday morning’s police enforcement action on the East Side, some speakers questioned why the council is increasing police spending by $3 million, a change council members have largely attributed to inflation and contractually-approved wage increases rather than a net increase in officers.

A smoother process

The council president said the final budget that will be approved Dec. 3 will not make everyone happy, but the process has been smoother and more transparent than it was a year ago, when last-minute budget wrangling ended with a series of mayoral vetoes and veto overrides.

The mayor’s office on Wednesday signaled it was poised to do what was necessary to get the budget put to bed on time. “We are committed to getting it done,” said Jennifer Lor, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

Carter’s 2026 budget proposal, unveiled in August, calls for a 5.3% increase to the city tax levy, while keeping some 40 or more job vacancies unfilled. It includes a $5 million investment in an office-to-residential housing conversion program, and added funding for other housing initiatives, including emergency rental assistance and down payment assistance.

What it will cost owner of median house?

The $887 million spending plan for the coming year would levy $232.5 million on city property owners, supporting a general fund budget of $414.4 million, which includes the library budget.

For the median St. Paul home with a value of $289,000, the new levy would add an estimated $107 to property taxes next year, with wide variation from neighborhood to neighborhood and between property types.

Increased charges related to sanitary sewers, storm sewers, water and recycling would add another $125, for a total increase of $232 in city-related taxes and services.

Ramsey County, school district levies

Ramsey County and the St. Paul School District have proposed their own levies. The county, which has planned a nearly 10% increase to its levy, will host a Truth in Taxation public hearing at 6 p.m. on Dec. 11 at the downtown council chambers at 15 W. Kellogg Blvd.

St. Paul Public Schools, which is benefiting from a $37.2 million, 10-year levy approved by voters on Nov. 4, will hold their Truth in Taxation hearing from 6 to 8 p.m. on Dec. 2 at the district administration building at 360 Colborne St. The district is trimming the current levy by 2% in 2026.

St. Paul taxes and fees for 2026

Proposed St. Paul tax and fee increases for 2026 on a median home value ($289,200):

• $107 increase in city property taxes.

• $57 increase to water charges.

• $45 increase to sanitary sewer charges.

• $18 increase to storm sewer charges.

• $5 increase to recycling charges.

• $0 increase for trash.

Total city increase: $232.

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The 12.5-acre parcel of land that has stood between Roseville and its decades-long effort to finish its Twin Lakes development has a new developer.

Minneapolis-based Hyde Development will redevelop the site, located at 1945 Twin Lakes Parkway, into a 152,250-square-foot light industrial tech building, Twin Lakes Technology. The project is expected to be completed this time next year.

The state Department of Employment and Economic Development awarded the Roseville Economic Development Authority $373,000 for site demolition and public infrastructure improvements, DEED announced last month.

“We design these buildings to be flexible to different users,” said Hyde Development CEO and owner Paul Hyde. “And the tenants we are trying to attract are medical-device companies, life science companies that would have office space, cleanroom space, maybe labs, that want to be close to the different medical-tech companies in the area like Medtronic or Boston Scientific and that skilled labor force.”

The Twin Lakes development spans about 300 acres across the city’s northwest section and its 12.5-acre parcel was previously used as a truck terminal, with the original buildings constructed in 1962. Since 2003, the site has sat vacant and soil testing has shown contamination from petroleum compounds from two former underground storage tanks.

The Roseville EDA estimates the project will create or retain 150 jobs, increase the tax base by $647,464 and leverage $24.1 million of private investment. Matching funds will be provided by tax increment financing. Hyde said he believes 150 jobs is a low estimate.

Buildings in the area include restaurants, industrial buildings, a grocery store and hotel.

Hyde Development has a history of being able to work with previously polluted sites, also called infill sites or brownfields, like the Twin Lakes site, Hyde said.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years and our focus is on industrial buildings, developing industrial buildings on infill sites, which are typically, have a past life and some pollution and other issues that we have to address in order to complete the new development,” Hyde said.

Cleanup of the site is estimated to cost $7.2 million, Hyde said. Hyde Development has an approved cleanup plan with the state, which is expected to be funded through grant funding, some of which has already been secured, Hyde said. Other grant solicitations should be answered in December before closing on the land, with cleanup expected to be completed through the spring. Construction is expected to be completed by around this time next year, Hyde said Thursday.

Much of the pollution is petroleum chemicals and chlorinated solvents, found in degreasers for cleaning truck parts, Hyde said. Grants “level the playing field,” Hyde said, making it easier for developers to develop sites where pollution would otherwise be a cost barrier.

“Minnesota was one of the first states in the country to create these programs under brownfield legislation that goes back to the mid-90s. And it’s a really powerful tool in cleaning up a lot of these urban, polluted sites,” Hyde added.

Multiple parties will help clean up the site, including Hyde Development, the city of Roseville, Ramsey County and potentially the state through the Metropolitan Council and DEED, according to Janice Gundlach, Roseville’s community development director.

The construction firm for the project is Mortenson, with St. Paul-based Pope Design Group as the building designer. Mike Bowen and Matt Oelschlager with CBRE will be the leasing brokers.

“The City is interested in seeing the property cleaned up and developed with a use that contributes positively to the area and tax base, as well as bring jobs with competitive wages,” Gundlach said in an email.

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Although the Thanksgiving story is typically associated with the harvest feast of Pilgrims and Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 404 years ago this fall, the national holiday Americans celebrate every fourth Thursday of November only began thanks to a presidential proclamation from Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the same year he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

That’s not just historical trivia. What we are meant to commemorate on Thanksgiving isn’t merely a mythologized version of our origins. It’s a celebration of American rebirth — and of the possibilities, personal and political, that go with it.

The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. “A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women,” wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hale’s biographer, “includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College, the first college for women.”

That wasn’t all Hale did. She wrote a bestselling antislavery novel. She spent decades as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the United States before the Civil War. She wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And, beginning in the 1840s, she petitioned president after president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Why was Hale obsessed with setting a national date for Thanksgiving? “There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing in which a whole community participates,” she wrote in 1835. But her purposes were also political: A national holiday, she argued, could help preserve the Union. Among her fiercest opponents, unsurprisingly, were Southerners who thought that designating a holiday was an issue for the states to decide.

In September 1863, following the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Hale again petitioned the president for an “annual Thanksgiving” to have “a National and fixed Union Festival.” In Lincoln and William Seward, his secretary of state, she found receptive ears. On Oct. 3, Lincoln proclaimed “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

The proclamation, drafted by Seward, is somewhat verbose. It extols American plenty even amid the carnage of war. “Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle or the ship.” But there are also unmistakably Lincolnian touches. It speaks of “our national perverseness and disobedience,” implores “the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation,” and commends “to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers.”

Those lines would echo, more poetically and profoundly, in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. They are also of a piece with Lincoln’s larger political project, which went beyond saving the Union or even abolishing slavery.

It was about the perpetuation of our political institutions — the subject of Lincoln’s first significant political speech, at the age of 28, in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838. How does one keep faith with the spirit that animated the founding of a liberal republic once the founders are long dead? How does one establish a “rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” as he put it in an 1859 letter in honor of Thomas Jefferson?

Part of the answer, Lincoln believed, lay in ritual. In 1838 he had spoken of the need to create a “political religion of the nation,” to which “the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.” In 1863, Hale supplied him with an ingenious solution: a festival in which everyone could — and would want to — participate, not from a sense of obligation but with a feeling of joy.

That’s the genius of the holiday. Nobody — except your uncle — likes to talk about politics at the Thanksgiving table. Nobody should need to, either, because the occasion itself is inherently political. It’s an opportunity for families and friends and, by extension, communities, states and the country itself, to have a national reset. It’s when we remember that we can still be capable of setting everyday arguments aside, of recalling common bonds, of indulging a soft patriotism that’s also potent because it’s so unobjectionable. Thanksgiving, far more than the star-spangled Fourth of July, is what makes us Americans all over again.

That was also the spirit of the Gettysburg Address, another purported act of remembrance of the dead that is, in fact, an opportunity for rededication by the living — a “new birth of freedom.” The question for successive generations of Americans is: What kind of freedom should it be?

For Lincoln, the new birth meant saving government of, by and for the people, and a nation where all are equal. For Hale, it meant extending the boundaries of opportunity for women. For Thomas Edison, it was about advancing the reach of science: In 1877, just 14 years after the first national Thanksgiving and while Hale was still alive, he read “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for the first-ever phonograph recording.

Down the generations, what we can most give thanks for isn’t just abundance. It’s the abundance of freedom, created by people for whom possibility and renewal, even in a world of bitterness, was theirs — and ours — to seize.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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When President Donald Trump claimed that members of Congress deserved the death penalty last week, he showed yet again that he doesn’t respect the rule of law.

The president turned to social media last Thursday morning to accuse six Democratic members of Congress of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” The commander in chief made this astonishing comment in reaction to a video these elected officials, all former members of the military or the intelligence community, had posted the day before. In it, they remind current military service members: “You can refuse illegal orders” and “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

The Democrats’ message could have supplied better context, and perhaps spelled out what sort of “orders” they were worried about. Republican pundits are probably correct to suggest that Democrats also made the video to garner political attention.

But the video simply states the obvious: Every member of the military takes an oath to obey the Uniform Code of Military Justice — which states they must not obey an order if it “is contrary to the Constitution” or “the laws of the United States” even if it is given by a superior officer or the commander in chief.

Trump was so rattled by the video that he unleashed a stream of 19 posts or shares that included the all-caps: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” A predictable surge of threats against the lawmakers followed, prompting the House Sergeant at Arms and the U.S. Capitol Police to provide them with additional security.

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt weighed in, saying the president would never authorize an illegal order, she inaccurately claimed the Democrats were “encouraging” members of the military “to defy the President’s lawful orders.”

The reality is that the situation is entirely of Trump’s own making. For weeks, military service personnel have been seeking outside legal counsel about orders they’ve received, especially the U.S. strikes against alleged drug boats and the military deployments to American cities. The legality of the attacks on boats in the Caribbean is disputed and federal judges have ordered the administration to halt its National Guard deployment to U.S. cities while lawsuits proceed.

The torrent of questions raised by all of this has led to a spike in inquiries to The Orders Project, a nonpartisan program independent from the federal government and run by the National Institute of Military Justice. It was created at the end of the first Trump administration to assist military personnel in understanding their options when faced with orders they believe may not be legal.

Lt. Col. Frank Rosenblatt, a former U.S. Army lawyer who runs the program, told the PBS NewsHour that most of the calls are coming from military officers, not lower-ranking enlisted members, and often from those not directly involved in the operations. Callers have indicated that “they’re feeling pressure from their higher-ups” to concur with the Pentagon’s decision to carry out the strikes, he said.

The impact of all these legal arguments can be challenging for the rank-and-file military, said Gen. Randy Manner, a retired two-star Army Major General. While there are a few clearly illegal orders that every military member knows, such as firing on unarmed Americans or shooting prisoners of war, it’s a mistake to assume that individual junior members of the military can analyze every order to ensure it is legal, he told me.

Manner said he spent part of his active-duty career working with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force and the Army helping them “ensure that legal reviews were done of all intent and all actions” before they were sent to the various combatant commanders.

“The average soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, does not understand the nuances of the law,” he explained. “By the time orders get to a junior enlisted person, they should have absolutely been vetted by the generals, the admirals, the senior officers with JAGs to ensure that the orders they receive are lawful.”

Trump has not only made the jobs of the military commanders more difficult, recent decisions by what is now called the Department of War may compromise the ability of new enlistees to assess the legality of their orders. Under Trump, the department has removed from basic training instructions on the Geneva Conventions.

“Without that training, our soldiers and sailors and our Marines are not going to know what right looks like,” Manner said.

With the lack of transparency about Trump’s military operations, and the legal questions around them, the president created the conditions for the Democrats’ video.

Sen. Mark Kelly, a 25-year combat pilot in the U.S. Navy and a Democrat from Arizona, told CNN on Thursday that they made the video because Trump continues to talk about sending troops into more U.S. cities, invoking the Insurrection Act, and in 2020 asked his then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper about whether he could shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs.

“That is an example of an illegal order — if it was given,” Kelly continued. “He didn’t give the order, but it’s obviously rattling around in his head.”

If Trump is disturbed by the reaction to his decisions, he should be. But the best response is not to seemingly call for the execution of members of Congress, but to reconsider how he ought to use the world’s most powerful military.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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