The city of Saint Paul is spending money from lower-income neighborhoods on things like splash pads for recreation centers, while what matters most to many families is covering the basics — paying rent and buying groceries.

Families look at their budgets at the kitchen table asking: Where can we cut back to cover the basics? City Hall needs to take the same approach.

One area where St. Paul should cut spending is in our parks and recreation budget.

This isn’t about caring less. It’s about making sure we’re solving the problems people are actually facing — and being honest about whether our spending is helping the people who need it most.

Since 2018, the city’s budget has grown from $625 million to a proposed $887 million for 2026 — a 42% increase, while inflation rose about 29% — a steep jump that outpaces the cost of living.

The parks and recreation department’s annual budget is now up to $88 million — a 44% increase since 2018. On top of that, voters approved a $246 million sales tax for park and other projects over the next 20 years — a regressive tax that hits lower-income families hardest.

City Hall calls this an investment — but an investment needs a return.

Where are the transformational results?

With this level of spending, the return should be progress on our biggest challenges. Yet one in four St. Paul kids still don’t graduate high school, and nearly 20% of the city still lives in poverty. City Hall is busy building around poverty instead of building a way out of it.

That’s the opportunity cost.

Meanwhile, with commercial revenue down and barely any population growth, more of the city’s property tax burden is landing on homeowners — especially in lower-income neighborhoods where home values are rising the fastest.

When we look at the needs of the neighborhoods giving the most they have to give, all this spending feels deeply unfair.

On the East Side, families have been clear about what they need — and it’s not more recreation centers.

The Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation’s East Metro Pulse survey, which regularly polls thousands of local residents, shows just how thin the margin is: Nearly eight in ten worry about affording food, half say housing costs are tough, child care strains seven in 10  families, and most renters doubt they’ll ever be able to retire.

We have good parks and rec facilities. With all the funding, broken doors have been fixed, grass has been planted, kids are playing sports. Over 96% of residents rate our parks and outdoor spaces favorably.

But here’s the tension: Families are struggling to cover the basics — while the city’s outsized parks and recreation spending drives up rent and grocery costs.

So, we should cut 7.5% — about $6.6 million — from the parks and recreation budget.

Related Articles

Photos: 2025 Twin Cities Medtronic Marathon winners and runners

Literary calendar for week of Oct. 5

As some big names sit out St. Paul mayor’s race, others ponder city’s challenges

‘A lot of challenges’: St. Paul police chief, outreach workers tackle homelessness in the wee hours

Letters: Perhaps I was naive if I expected an esprit de corps speech from Secretary Hegseth

If we go back to the family at the kitchen table, they’re focused on the essentials. City Hall should be too.

Here are priorities we’re not funding. Let’s change that.

St. Paul faces a retirement boom that could cost the city 100 police officers in the next few years. Parking enforcement officers — who handle critical services and provide one of the best pipelines into the force — number only 10 citywide, 20 fewer than needed, while Parks and Recreation employs 634 full-time staff.

Struggling areas in St. Paul — like the CVS on Snelling and University, the old Sears site, and the downtown riverfront — have become monuments to inaction, reminders that city priorities need to shift to today’s realities.

Even in Parks and Recreation, with all the funding, the basics are falling behind. After losing tens of thousands of trees to the emerald ash borer, the city still loses thousands more each year, but despite a promise to replace them this work isn’t fully funded — leaving neighbors waiting at least five years for a tree.

Or — instead of more funding for rec centers and programs — City Hall could just give the money back to the people who really need it.

Dillon Donnelly lives with his family in St. Paul.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano was named to the newly created position of CEO of the IRS on Monday, making him the latest member of the Trump administration to be put in charge of multiple federal agencies.

As IRS CEO, Bisignano will report to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who currently serves as acting commissioner of the IRS, the Treasury Department says. It is unclear whether Bisignano’s newly created role at the IRS will require Senate confirmation.

The Treasury Department said in a statement that Bisignano will be responsible for overseeing all day-to-day IRS operations while also continuing to serve in his role as commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

Bessent said in a statement that the IRS and SSA “share many of the same technological and customer service goals. This makes Mr. Bisignano a natural choice for this role.”

The move to install Bisignano at the IRS adds another layer to the leadership shuffling that has occurred at the agency since the beginning of Trump’s term. Bessent was named acting commissioner in August after Trump removed former U.S. Rep Billy Long from the role less than two months after his confirmation, and made him ambassador to Iceland.

The four acting commissioners who preceded Long in the job included one who resigned over a deal between the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security to share immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and another whose appointment led to a fight between former Trump adviser Elon Musk and Bessent.

Related Articles

Groups sue EPA over canceled $7 billion solar program intended to help poorer Americans

Trump and Infantino: How a friendship is shaping the World Cup

Voting is underway in California on new maps that could swing US House control, check Trump’s power

Government shutdown threatens food aid program relied on by millions of families

Chicago and Illinois sue to stop Trump’s Guard deployment plan after Portland ruling

With two day jobs, Bisignano joins a number of other Trump administration officials to wear multiple hats, including Bessent, Marco Rubio, Sean Duffy, Jamieson Greer and Russell Vought.

IRS and Social Security advocates expressed concern about the new appointment.

Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, pointed to Bisignano being named to a position that appears to avoid Congressional approval.

“If the Trump Admin asked for the Senate’s advice & consent, would they really want the same person running the government’s biggest program AND overseeing the implementation of the extraordinarily complex new tax law?” she said on the Bluesky social media app.

And Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, an advocacy group for SSA recipients and future retirees, said Bisignano’s “divided attention will create a bottleneck that makes the inevitable problems that arise even harder to correct. Never in Social Security’s 90-year history has a commissioner held a second job. Bisiginano’s new role will leave a leadership vacuum at the top of the agency, especially since the Republican Senate hasn’t even confirmed a deputy commissioner.”

Bisignano has served as chair of Fiserv, a payments and financial services tech firm, since 2020. He is a onetime defender of corporate policies to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

By ALEXA ST. JOHN and JENNIFER McDERMOTT, Associated Press

Several groups and nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Environmental Protection Agency over the canceling of a $7 billion Solar for All program intended to make solar power accessible to more than 900,000 lower-income Americans.

Related Articles

Manmade island rising in Mississippi River near Hastings

A recipe for avoiding 15 million deaths a year and climate disaster is fixing food, scientists say

Study shows the world is far more ablaze now with damaging fires than in the 1980s

Trump administration cuts nearly $8B in clean energy projects in states that backed Harris

Swiss glaciers shrank 3% this year, the fourth-biggest retreat on record, experts say

They say the Trump administration’s termination of the program was illegal and they want a federal judge to direct the EPA to reinstate it. The program is affiliated with another $20 billion in green funding also terminated under President Donald Trump that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had characterized as a fraudulent scheme fraught with waste.

The EPA said in an email Monday that it does not comment on litigation.

The lawsuit is the latest legal action against the administration amid its assault on clean energy policy and related funding and programs across the country. Trump has moved to boost production of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal.

The lawsuit filed in Rhode Island by the Rhode Island AFL-CIO labor organization and others — including the public interest law center Rhode Island Center for Justice and the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors — detailed the importance of the program for local workforces and lower-income communities looking for access to clean-energy project funding.

Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, said Monday that the program’s termination kills jobs and will drive up electricity prices.

EPA rescinded Solar for All in August

The Solar for All money was rescinded after Trump’s massive tax and spending law passed in Congress in July. Zeldin said in a statement on social media at the time, “the bottom line is this: EPA no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.”

The groups argued in the lawsuit that the law only revoked climate grants not yet awarded by the EPA and that these solar funds were already awarded.

“The Trump administration’s rollback of the Solar for All program is a shameless attempt to prop up fossil fuel companies at the expense of families,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, one of the nonprofit legal advocacy groups representing the plaintiffs.

“This program would provide families with low incomes access to clean, affordable solar power: energy that lowers bills, improves air quality, and keeps people safer during extreme heat,” she added in a statement.

The lawsuit cites previous EPA estimates that the program would have saved recipients about $400 each year on electricity bills and cumulatively reduced or avoided greenhouse gas emissions by over 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The program was part of a larger, climate-friendly funding push

The $7 billion Solar for All program was part of the $27 billion “green bank,” formally known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. It was established in the Democratic-backed climate law passed in 2022 under former President Joe Biden.

The other $20 billion, canceled by the Trump administration in March, was slated for eight community development banks and nonprofit organizations for tens of thousands of projects to combat the effects of climate change, such as residential energy efficiency projects to larger-scale investments such as community cooling.

Groups have also sued over the cancelation of that money — with a federal judge saying they must have access to some of the funds — though recently, an appeals court ruled that federal officials can move forward with its termination.

Trump’s assault on environmental policy and regulation

The Trump administration has targeted a host of programs and policies dedicated to clean energy.

Just last week, the administration canceled $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of climate-friendly projects across 16 states. It has also interfered with nearly complete offshore wind developments, moved to rescind the crucial ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, is looking to end greenhouse gas emissions reporting requirements for large polluters, and taken a slew of other deregulatory measures.

Read more of AP’s climate coverage.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By MICHAEL MAROT, AP Sports Writer

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Former NFL quarterback Mark Sanchez is now facing a felony charge of battery involving serious bodily injury in addition to the misdemeanor charges stemming from a weekend incident in Indianapolis that led to his arrest.

Marion County prosecutor Ryan Mears made the announcement about the new charge, which carries a potential sentence of one to six years in prison, during a news conference Monday with Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Chief Chris Bailey. Mears said the investigation is ongoing.

“One of the challenges you have in a case like this is that you are dealing with individuals who are receiving medical care and that’s, obviously, the most important thing, that individuals are treated appropriately,” Mears said. “But once we were provided with additional information about the victim’s current medical condition, it became clear to us that additional charges needed to be filed.”

Sanchez had been scheduled for a court hearing Tuesday on the original charges but that was rescheduled to Nov. 4. Sanchez remains hospitalized and was listed in stable condition Monday morning.

One of Sanchez’s attorneys, James Voyles, declined to comment on the case.

The Fox Sports analyst was pepper-sprayed and stabbed multiple times during a late-night altercation in a downtown Indianapolis alley over the weekend, which resulted in criminal charges against him, according to court records filed Sunday.

A police affidavit alleges that Sanchez, smelling of alcohol, accosted a 69-year-old truck driver who backed into a hotel’s loading docks, leading to a confrontation outside the vehicle that prompted the driver to pull out a knife to defend himself.

Sanchez was hospitalized with stab wounds to his upper right torso, the affidavit signed by a police detective said. The truck driver, identified as P.T., had a cut to his left cheek, it said.

Related Articles

DOJ contradicts DeSantis: Some detainees at Everglades detention center likely never in removal proceedings

Venezuela denounces alleged ‘extremist’ plan to attack shuttered US Embassy complex

Chicago and Illinois sue to stop Trump’s Guard deployment plan after Portland ruling

10 more deportees from the US arrive in the African nation of Eswatini

US stocks tick toward records as the AI frenzy keeps leading the way

Mears said his office received an amended probable cause affidavit Monday, which led to the additional charge because the truck driver suffered serious injuries.

Mears said police are still gathering information and have several outstanding warrants.

“The chief and his team continue to work on this matter, continue to track down additional details for us and really supplement that probable cause affidavit,” Mears said. “I cannot say enough good things about the work that took place at IMPD. There’s a ton of information to sift through and gather.”