St. Paul has hired a consultant to explore selling the downtown annex building across from City Hall, which could lead to what St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter hopes will be a new era of office-to-residential conversions in a downtown that has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels of foot traffic.
After 15 years of clear-cutting ash trees from city boulevards, St. Paul has wrapped up management of the Emerald Ash Borer disease on public land and now set its sights on helping private property owners do the same.
Roughly 1,000 of the city’s 3,000 employees live in St. Paul, a number that the mayor aims to double as the city ditches degree requirements for most municipal jobs and awards extra points to contractors who hire local labor.
On top of a possible new approach toward residential snowplowing, those are some of the key points that Carter intends to hit upon in his seventh annual “State of the City” address, to be delivered at noon Monday at the downtown Xcel Energy Center. The venue is one he’s eager to see fully renovated with more public-facing gathering spaces if state Legislative funding comes through next year.
New logo for parks, roads projects
Carter, who sat down with a handful of reporters Friday to preview highlights of his remarks, said the city will unveil a new logo intended to brand parks and roads projects funded by St. Paul’s new 1% sales tax, approved by city voters in November. Resembling a penny, the rounded “Our Common Cent” logo invokes the Works Progress Administration (“WPA”) markers, which adorn public infrastructure projects from the 1930s.
In addition to the local sales tax for public infrastructure improvements, Carter noted that a regional sales tax approved by the Legislature last year will raise $9 million annually toward housing in St. Paul. The city is betting on a mix of real estate development at Highland Bridge, The Heights at the former Hillcrest Country Club, United Village by Allianz Field in the Midway and the downtown RiversEdge project.
Given the two funding sources and a recent boost in state legislative aid, “the hand that St. Paul has to play has never been stronger than it is right now,” the mayor said.
Carter, a former St. Paul City Council member and state employee, was first elected mayor in November 2017, winning 51% of the vote in a 10-way race on a progressive platform. He was re-elected to a second term in 2021, winning 62% of the vote in an eight-way race.
Among the key points the mayor plans to emphasize on Monday:
Residential plowing
Public Works will try out a new approach to snow removal on at least a handful of residential side streets, long a source of dissatisfaction with city residents who have sometimes been quick to turn their fury on City Hall. Taking a page from Duluth and Rochester, the city will test out on-street weekly alternate side parking on limited streets next winter, requiring all drivers to park on one side of the street on particular weeks. The goal is to free up space for plowing even when a snow emergency has not been called. “We’re getting ready to do limited tests on this next year,” Carter said. “We’re talking about maybe making snow emergencies obsolete.”
Hiring St. Paul residents
In an effort to double the number of city residents employed by city government over the long-term, the mayor will drop degree requirements for 90% of job titles. That includes dropping proxies or college degrees, such as “five year equivalent experience in the field,” and enrolling more young people in entry-level training opportunities such as the EMS Academy, Right Track youth internships, the city’s fleet management program and its new water services “Lead Free St. Paul” training initiative.
When ranking contractors for jobs, the city will award extra points for companies based in St. Paul or who do significant hiring in St. Paul, including companies that hire Right Track interns. Carter noted that a lifeguard training program had yielded positive results, allowing the city’s pools and rec centers to hire St. Paul kids and keep facilities open at a time when worker shortages shuttered pools elsewhere.
Staffing small business
The mayor said he’s in the early stages of exploring a jobs program that would match small businesses in need of workers with nonprofits like Catholic Charities, Ujamaa Place, the Jeremiah Program and Face to Face, which work with homeless residents, individuals transitioning out of prison and other at-risk populations. The city would cover 75% of a worker’s wages and benefits for three months, 50% for the next three months and 25% for another three months, an incentive for business owners to take a chance on a hire they might otherwise overlook. “We’re brainstorming funding sources,” Carter said. “This would be a one-time thing.”
Office-to-residential conversions
Working closely with the Downtown Alliance, the mayor said he’ll advocate for more downtown office buildings to be converted to residences, beginning perhaps with the City Hall annex building across Fourth Street from City Hall. A consultant is already looking at a potential sale, which could mean relocating hundreds of city workers into skyway and ground-level offices in private buildings throughout downtown, a needed boost for the private sector. “That’s a potential big change that is on the table for us. A lot of our downtown buildings have these smaller foot plates,” said Carter, noting modern technology firms prefer large, open-air designs. For residential conversions, “that disadvantage turns into an advantage for us.”
Housing
Carter said discussions about housing have become too siloed into big topics like homelessness, rent control, first-time homebuyer programs and residential construction. Using his “Community First Public Safety” initiative as a model, the mayor said it’s time to invite a more holistic and integrated community discussion with City Hall, under the title “All-In Housing,” which would be boosted by an anticipated $9 million in annual funding from the new regional sales tax approved last year by the Legislature. “We’ve been having a bunch of different conversations about housing in the city, and I think that’s part of the problem,” the mayor said. “We need to have one conversation on housing.”
Sales tax
Calling a growing backlog of public infrastructure maintenance the “monster under the bed,” the mayor noted that the city’s voter-approved sales tax, which goes into effect in April, is expected to generate nearly $1 billion for roads and parks in the next 20 years. The St. Paul City Council has already given Parks and Recreation and Public Works the go-ahead to move forward with some 70 to 80 projects this year alone, including reconstructing a portion of Grand Avenue from Snelling to Fairview avenue. The new “Our Common Cent” logo will roll out this year to brand projects as funded by a penny-on-the-dollar tax increase.
Emerald Ash Borer
The mayor said he was “excited to announce the end of our operations to clear diseased ash trees on city properties,” a 15-year undertaking that began when he was still a city council member. To help private property owners remove ash trees from their land, the city will soon offer low-interest or no-interest loans, and work with organizations like the nonprofit Tree Trust on citywide tree replanting.
Xcel Energy Center
The Minnesota Wild and the mayor’s office have asked the state Legislature for $2 million for initial design and planning work toward a future renovation of the Xcel Center, the downtown concert and ice hockey venue that opened in 2000. While still functional, Carter said his goal is to keep the X competitive with improvements that speak to accessibility and fan experience on the inside and engaging the greater downtown community on the outside. That could mean coffee shops, restaurants and other entertainment venues ringing the outside of the convention center. “This building was not just planned and built before the pandemic,” Carter said. “It was planned and built before 9/11. … How we gather in spaces has transformed completely.”
Big events on deck
In addition to Minnesota Wild games and big name concert acts at the X, the city has been booking “events of global and national significance,” said the mayor. Red Bull brought “Heavy Metal” — a one-day snowboard contest — to the State Capitol steps this season, and Harriet Island will host the inaugural, two-day “Minnesota Yacht Club” music festival in July. Some 250,000 hockey fans are expected in 2026 for the World Junior Hockey Championships, which will mostly take place at the X and the 3M Arena at Mariucci at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In the near term, the NCAA Frozen Four hockey championship skates into the X in April.
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