The Capitol City’s five official mayoral candidates gathered on Tuesday to air their differences before a live audience, making their case on massive issues like downtown’s shaky future and immigrant protections, as well as the literal nuts and bolts of city leadership.
The forum, the second in 24 hours as the campaigns hit their race pace, featured incumbent Mayor Melvin Carter, his most-prominent challenger, DFL state Rep. Kaohly Her, along with Yan Chen, Adam Dullinger and Mike Hilborn.
In a statement ahead of the forum, ThaoMee Xiong of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders said the event was a chance for the candidates to speak directly to the communities of color that make up a near-majority of St. Paul’s population. Xiong’s coalition led the forum in partnership with the African American Leadership Forum and Future of Us, a youth-focused grassroots group.
“People of color in St. Paul have the power to determine the outcome of this election,” Xiong said.
St. Paul voters have had only a handful of opportunities so far to hear from the candidates on the issues shaping the mayor’s race, which remained sleepy until Her announced her candidacy in August.
Related: St. Paul council and mayor still at odds over the city’s 2025 budget
Her, who has served in the Minnesota House since 2018 after serving as Carter’s policy director early in his administration, said that she jumped in after seeing “no door-knocking or literature” from Carter over the summer.
“Now we’re talking about the issues,” she said.
Is there hope for downtown and affordable housing?
The first question addressed the precipitous post-COVID decline of St. Paul’s downtown. Office vacancy rates have soared into the double digits, eroding the city’s commercial tax base to the detriment of St. Paul homeowners’ bank accounts. The effective collapse of a key downtown landlord earlier this year added new urgency to the situation.
Carter defended his record. “You’re seeing so much dust” downtown because his administration is rebuilding core infrastructure, he told the audience. Along with the city’s push to bring building permitting online, that work will help attract more investment in office-to-housing conversions — projects that he said are sorely needed given the area’s 93% housing occupancy rate.
Every candidate agreed that St. Paul needs more housing, and soon, but the field split on how to make it happen.
Adam Dullinger, an engineer and self-described urbanist, said the city should support construction of “housing people can afford to live in and own.” That could include public and co-op housing, which “builds community and shared ownership,” and more condos, he said, though some developers say a state law that allows owners to sue for construction defects makes condo development difficult in Minnesota.
Another long shot candidate, biophysicist Yan Chen, agreed that St. Paul needs more owner-occupied housing: 60% to 70%, she said, up from around 50% today. She and West 7th business owner Mike Hilborn blamed excessive local and state regulation for driving up the cost to build new homes.
Carter ticked off his administration’s pro-housing initiatives, like working with the city council to carve out developer-friendly exemptions to the city’s rent control ordinance. But he cautioned that the city’s resources are finite.
Protecting immigrants and communities of color
The evening’s tensest moments came as candidates described how they’d shield St. Paul’s most vulnerable communities from overzealous federal law enforcement agencies.
Her, a Hmong refugee born in Laos, said the Trump administration’s immigration policies have impacted her family and forced many in St. Paul’s immigrant community into the shadows. Beyond simply refusing to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she said, the mayor’s office should work with the St. Paul City Council to pass an ordinance requiring name badges and banning face coverings for federal law enforcement, send out real-time alerts about their movements and work with nonprofit groups to educate residents about their constitutional rights.
Hilborn argued somewhat gingerly that St. Paul should allow ICE to operate freely in the city, prompting a flurry of rebuttals.
Carter decried “the lie they’re trying to sell” that immigrants “are the problem.” He said the city’s legal defense fund for people facing deportation and its financial support for those going through the naturalization process showed the lengths his administration would go to protect new Americans.
Her took issue with Carter, arguing that St. Paul’s immigrant legal defense fund is woefully underfunded and not well-publicized by the City Attorney’s office.
Her digs Carter on “cultural corridors”
Carter took a point of pride for his administration’s cultural corridor strategy, which he credited for creating regional destinations like Little Africa, in the Midway neighborhood, and Little Mekong, in Frogtown.
“I know people who have spent thousands of dollars to have experiences around the world that they can have on the East Side of St. Paul,” he said.
But Rep. Her pushed back. Carter’s cultural corridor strategy “never really got implemented,” and its apparent success is due more to the efforts of community groups like the Asian Economic Development Association, she said. Communities of color get less than their fair share of the city budget, she added, continuing a trend she said began under former Mayor Chris Coleman.
“Are we saying we’re investing, or taking credit for other people’s work?” Her asked.
Transparency and accountability in city government
Nuts-and-bolts issues also got plenty of play on Tuesday. Carter’s challengers repeatedly hit his administration on what they said were deficits of transparency and accountability.
“Our city hall is not responsive… there is a difference between what we’re seeing and what we’re being told,” Her said. Fellow challengers called out residents’ frustrations on issues ranging from the Summit Avenue bike lanes to basic city services, like snow clearance.
Related: Rent control is on the St. Paul City Council’s agenda once again
Her, arguing that higher-income parts of the city tend to have clearer roads and sidewalks, promised “to deploy [services] equitably.”
Carter, again on the defense, pointed to improvements in city services along with entirely new ones rolled out during his eight-year tenure.
The half-cent sales tax has allowed the city to double its street maintenance and “we have city employees picking up trash for the first time in history,” he said. There’s enough spare capacity in trash pickup, he added, for employees to make progress on the city’s illegal dumping problem. And St. Paul Regional Water Services switched on new equipment at its water treatment plant late this summer — a major milestone in a $250 million project he suggested hadn’t been publicized enough.
“You all don’t even know about that,” he said.
The post A heated mayoral forum enlivens St. Paul’s election season appeared first on MinnPost.
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