Saint Paul ballots will include the following question:

CITY QUESTION 1 (St. Paul)

1.0% SALES TAX FOR IMPROVEMENTS TO STREETS, BRIDGES, AND PARKS

Should the City of Saint Paul establish a one percent (1%) sales and use tax over the next 20 years to generate $738,000,000 to repair and improve streets and bridges, $246,000,000 to improve parks and recreation facilities, and associated bonding costs? A vote YES means repairs and improvements to streets, bridges, parks, and recreation facilities would be funded through a new one percent (1%) sales and use tax. A vote NO means repairs and improvements to streets, bridges, parks, and recreation facilities would not be funded through a new one percent (1%) sales and use tax.

You can vote yes, or no.

I’m going to vote yes, but I’ll admit I’m doing it kind of grudgingly, despite being a Democrat who is generally happy to pay more money for better services.

There have been a number of property tax levies for schools that have run in both Minneapolis and St. Paul while I’ve lived here, and I’ve always voted yes. I’ll note that there’s always a campaign for these levies: door knocking, signs, people to answer your questions. The first thing that kind of pisses me off is that this has not felt like a campaign. It doesn’t feel like the city thinks it should have to convince me to raise my sales taxes. It feels like someone’s impatiently telling me that they need the money so I should just write the check, and that might even be true but I would like to feel like I’m being asked.

ETA: I got an e-mail today from a local lawyer with a detail I had not realized, which is that apparently cities are barred by law from campaigning for this sort of thing. From the e-mail:

I don’t think that’s quite correct. State law hamstrings Saint Paul from trying to convince you to vote for anything. Here’s an excerpt from the League of MN Cities’ outline of the law here (full document available here): 

Local ballot initiatives:

Traditionally, case law and the attorney general have allowed local subdivisions to publish and distribute publications intended merely to inform the public of financial conditions and the potential effects of the passage or failure of a ballot question.

Cities generally have not been allowed to expend funds to promote or defeat passage of a local ballot question by presenting one-sided information on the issue. Elected officials may appear before citizens to orally advocate for a position, so long as no expenditure of public funds has occurred (A.G. Op. 159-a-3 (May 24, 1966); Office of the State Auditor, Statement of Position: Expenditure of Public Funds on Ballot Issue Advocacy (pdf), Apr. 2014).

All that said: a campaign does exist (their website is here: https://www.voteyesforstpaul.org and their FB page is here: https://www.facebook.com/voteyesforstpaul and they’ve been running Facebook ads (and because Facebook is terrible, you can’t actually find the ads, you just have to wait for them to show up in your feed). This is run by a PAC (according to a comment, the treasurer is Amy Brendemoen’s husband) and I don’t think they’re doing a particularly effective job but the city clearly isn’t allowed to say “guys, could you please be better at this” so … yeah, idk. Also, All of Mpls sure didn’t seem to worry much about whether they were crossing any lines when they and their fans in elected office advocated for the strong-mayor question and against the public-safety question, I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me in any way. (End of ETA.)

Second, I feel like the campaign as it exists has been wildly disingenuous.

Here’s the informative flyer you can download with a comparison of tax you’ll pay in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Bloomington. Except instead of comparing everyday purchases, it’s comparing “a night out,” so it’s the tax you’ll pay on dinner, beer, a $125 ticket to a thing (they’re not specific) and a $200 hotel night. (The total in tax on your $381 night out is $51.77 in St. Paul, $51.97 in Minneapolis, and $52.47 in Bloomington.)

But everyone does weird stuff with booze taxes and hotel taxes and all that. Also, my concern is primarily for the people who are actually struggling, who are very unlikely to be buying a Wild ticket and then topping off their pleasant night out with a hotel stay in downtown. What sort of taxes are we going to pay on our ordinary, everyday purposes? Minnesota exempts a lot of stuff, which is good: food, clothes, diapers, tampons. But not all basic necessities are exempted. Things you will still pay sales tax on: Band-Aids; dish detergent; hand soap; pencils; a snow shovel.)

I used Amazon for this (I stuck a $100 item in my cart — actually it might have been a $99.98 item but close enough — and then plugged in different addresses). On a $100 item, I would currently pay $8.87 in sales tax to send it to a St. Paul, address, which means that I would pay $9.87 in sales tax if this passes. I would pay $9.02 in sales tax to send it to Minneapolis, or $8.52 to send it to Bloomington (which will go up to $9.02 if their sales tax levy passes — they’re considering a 0.5% sales tax.) That’s actually pretty significantly higher than our nearest neighbors! And maybe there are good reasons for that but I am really irritated that instead of addressing those reasons, they cherry-picked a bunch of discretionary purchases where our taxes work out to the same amount.

But it’s not like the opponents are being open and honest either. The Chamber of Commerce has a graphic to illustrate that you’re being deceived. It shows an image of all of St. Paul with the caption “what people think the sales tax will fix” and then the map from the city’s website of highlighted projects with the caption “what it will actually fix.” The map is a set of high-traffic corridors in particularly grim shape that they will rebuild with the money; this will in fact free up money to improve all the streets. Part of why the streets overall are so rough is that the high-traffic corridors are, of course, the highest priority, and they’re crumbling because they’re decades past the planned replacement date, and so we’re pouring resources in so that people don’t break an axle driving down Cleveland or whatever. (I live near Hamline — one of the streets they flag — and I will note, some years back I sent an irritated e-mail to Chris Tolbert because it was such a mess. I heard right back from a staffer with the good news that Hamline was getting repaved that summer. They did a mill-and-overlay, and I swear it was much better for maybe two months, at which point it started breaking down again.)

The sales tax is mostly for roads but partly for parks, and I went looking for information on what they want to do with the park money (in part because I wanted to be sure that “new sports palace for whatever professional sportsball team” was not on the projects list. I’m fine with parks money for participatory sportsball, to be clear, but not for professional teams.) Anyway, one of the big projects they want money for is the proposed River Balcony. This looks nice. One of my friends was mildly appalled because there are already trails down by the river near downtown. I did not go run around the area to see for sure because it’s cold and I’m trying to get this done, but from Google Maps and Google Street View it looks like the trails end around Sibley, and that’s where the River Balcony would start. (Also, to address the question about stadiums: they would not be able to spend the money on stadiums.)

Apparently part of why we wound up so far in the hole financially is that St. Paul used to charge “street assessments” to nonprofits to make them pony up for street repairs, but a few years ago someone took them to court over it and in 2017 the MN Supreme Court ruled that they couldn’t do that. There’s been discussion of PILOT as an alternative (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) because that’s voluntary. I saw an article (somewhere, can’t remember where) that quoted a hospital spokesman saying “ohhhh {sadface} that would be tragic because we would have to cut back on our charity care {sadface}” (I’m paraphrasing) and that made me really want to know EXACTLY how much they were paying in assessments prior to 2017 and EXACTLY how much their charity care budget has changed, which I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear they didn’t offer up for the article.

(The MinnPost articles linked above both kind of focused on the University of Saint Thomas, and it’s thinking about how much UST draws on the resources, public amenities, and fucking patience of the neighbors in the City of Saint Paul compared to just how little it gives back in any form that fills me with rage.)

The argument for a sales tax vs. a property tax is that a sales tax lets you stick it to the people who are coming into St. Paul from somewhere else, as many people do for a wide range of reasons. Which is nice. The city has more or less said that if we don’t vote in the sales tax they’ll raise our property taxes, which goes back to my originally frustration with the fact that it doesn’t really feel like they’re trying to get our buy-in, they’re just demanding money and expecting us to go along with it.

Anyway, on an entirely personal level, I tried to come up with an extremely rough number for whether this is worth it to me personally by taking my credit card annual statement from last year, taking out the grocery store money, and figuring out what 1% of everything else is. (This includes a bunch of money spent somewhere other than St. Paul, but it also leaves out stuff I bought in cash. I probably actually am coming up with a larger number than is ideal.) Then I compared that number to what I had to spend in 2022 to FIX my FUCKING CAR because of the FUCKING STREETS and asked myself: which number was bigger?

The car expenses were bigger. So, I will vote for this, but I’m still annoyed about it. And the streets had better get better, guys. One thing that was super clear from a lot of my friends’ reactions to this referendum was how many people said, “I’d be more enthusiastic about spending this money if I actually felt like it would make things better.” We’re all Democrats! But our trust right now, in part because the streets and plowing in the last few years have been such an absolute clusterfuck, is really low.

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