The former Ward 4 rep, Mitra Jalali, was originally elected in a special election in 2018, re-elected in 2019 and 2023, and resigned in January of this year. There are four people running in the special election to fill her seat. Election day is Tuesday, August 12th. If you’re not sure whether you live in Ward 4 or not, check the Secretary of State site. On the ballot:

Molly Coleman
Cole Hanson
Chauntyll Allen
Carolyn Will

The next normal St. Paul City Council election is in 2027 (although we have a mayoral election this year; unlike Minneapolis, we don’t try to keep them in sync.)

The SD 64 DFL has put together a great page of resources that includes questionnaire responses and a link to video of the League of Women Voter’s candidate forum. John Edwards of WedgeLIVE did interviews with all four candidates, which he’s posted on his YouTube channel or you can listen to as podcasts. There was also a climate-issues-focused forum and a housing-focused forum.

I also sent all the candidates a question by email. I’ll talk about that in a bit.

Chauntyll Allen

Chauntyll Allen is a school board rep and I have liked her reasonably well on the school board. However, there were a couple of things I hit during my research that gave me significant pause. First, during the LWV forum when the Summit Avenue bike trail project was brought up, she really sounded like this was the first she’d heard about the controversy, which suggests a weird amount of disconnection for someone running for City Council. (I mean, I’m sure that there are plenty of people in St. Paul who don’t care about the project one way or the other, but there are yard signs up about it, you know?) Second, also during that forum, she responded to a question about climate change by saying environmental work was not her jam and then saying she’d heard people talk about getting rid of gas stoves. There are a lot of decisions that effect the environment and are made by local government; I would like the people on the city council to be plugged into this issue.

But my biggest issue with her: during her WedgeLive interview, she went on a very weird tangent while talking about affordable housing. She started out talking about how a lot of the new buildings claimed to be affordable but really were not, charging $1100/month for a one bedroom apartment. (Fair complaint.) But then she went on to say, “Often, those are not the residents of the city that live in there, those are people who are from outside of the city, that are from rural parts of Minnesota or even from out of the country (…) but going to school at the University of Minnesota. (…) Who are we really building this housing for? (…) Are we building housing for people to come in and live for 5 to 7 years, find the love of their life, and then go buy property in Woodbury?”

So. OK. When she said “those are not residents of the city that live in there,” I initially thought she was going to say they were being used for Airbnbs (this is a major problem in some cities — less in St. Paul, I think?) because it would be valid to say that Airbnb rentals are being used for people other than the folks who live here. But then she went on to complain about people who have moved here. (I was so floored by this — I was working on dinner prep while listening to the podcast, and I put down the kitchen knife and grabbed a pen to transcribe.)

Students who live in St. Paul are residents of St. Paul. People who live here for five to seven years are residents of St. Paul for those five to seven years. If they go on to move to Woodbury, they stop being residents at that point but that doesn’t make them fake residents while they’re living here! Even if someone moves here with the explicit intention of moving somewhere else in the future, they’re still a resident while they’re living here. This is so basic.

I do not like this attitude. I would not rank Chauntyll for the City Council seat.

Carolyn Will

A major part of Carolyn Will’s political backstory is that she spent the last few years doing the communications strategy for “Save Our Street,” the group advocating against the Summit Regional Trail.

Honestly that was already disqualifying to me because this group’s communications have been so goddamn deceptive. So I didn’t spend a ton of time on Carolyn. However I will note that she brags in multiple locations about how she “forged a collaborative partnership with the Ohio State Retired Teachers Fund to display the 30th anniversary timeline of Circus Juventas costumes in their empty storefront windows (formerly Pottery Barn) on Grand Avenue.” “Yeah, I called up those people that have bought up a ton of property in our city and are now letting it sit empty and asked very nicely and they let us temporarily put some decorations in their windows” is just not a win that impresses me.

Here’s her WedgeLive interview, if you’d like to see her ride her bike on Summit herself. (Unlike some of the bike trail skeptics, she’s an actual biker, and one point I will concede to her is that we need a good north-south trail more urgently than an improved east-west trail. We have a number of east-west streets that are sufficiently low volume that I can ride on them without thinking I am going to die. This is not a very high bar so the fact that our north-south options don’t manage it is pretty bad.) Anyway, I would not rank Carolyn.

A Tangent About the Summit Regional Trail

This is once again one of the issues in the race, so let me just go down a couple of points.

• The most non-negotiable part of this project is the road rebuild and the utility line replacements. There are a bunch of water and sewer lines under Summit that are over 100 years old and are in immediate danger of collapsing. The subsurface of the road is also crumbling. It is in everyone’s interest to replace these lines before they collapse; that really seems obvious. The risk to the Summit Ave boulevard trees is primarily (overwhelmingly!) from the work that has to be done on the utilities.
  
• Carolyn Will, during the LWV forum, said that they should be using “horizontal directional drilling.” This is not actually something that would work in this case, according to Sean Kershaw, the City Engineer (sorry, misremembered that) Director of Public Works, who apparently gets openly boo’ed at “Save Our Street” meetings when he shows up to answer questions but is also someone with actual professional expertise on this stuff, unlike the people running SOS. Also, the road itself needs to be rebuilt. Doing mill-and-overlay over a crumbling roadbed is like painting a house covered in rotting siding without replacing the siding.
  
• The city is taking advantage of the disruption and the rebuild to add the Summit Regional Trail. St. Paul doesn’t have nearly as good of a bike infrastructure as Minneapolis. Chauntyll, in her WedgeLive interview, said that we shouldn’t be putting a bike lane on Summit at all (she thinks bikers should use lower-volume side streets like Portland), which is just ridiculous. Summit is a gorgeous boulevard and we should absolutely be slowing the traffic, deprioritizing parking, and improving the infrastructure for bikers and walkers.
  
• The city has not done a good job of communicating with the community about what they’re doing and why. SOS has repeated their claim about 900+ trees over and over and over. If you go to the Summit Avenue Regional Trail FAQ (provided by the city about the project), first of all it’s a PDF (I hate it when the information I’m looking for is available solely as a PDF), one of the questions is “How Many Trees Will Be Impacted?” and the answer is, “Greenspace and trees have been and continue to be a priority for the Regional Trail plan and a pillar of design concepts. The trees and green spaces on Summit are significant to the parkway, trail design concepts would look to support that existing recreational condition. The Regional Trail plan will make recommendations on best practices for future construction projects to avoid and minimize impacts to greenspace.” That’s not an answer to the question! The actual answer is on page 121 of a different 277-page-long PDF about the project. (If you have 277 pages of information I’m fine with PDFs. But this is part of why your FAQ should be just a web page, because I spent a very long time scrolling before I found what I was looking for.) There are 1,561 trees along the whole corridor. If they do the roadbed and utility stuff and do not add a bike trail, 132 trees are highly vulnerable. If they do add the bike trail, it’s 221 trees. It’s not actually clear to me that “highly vulnerable” means these trees will all be taken down, but if they do, we’d lose 89 trees to build the bike trail. Also worth noting: the boulevard has lost about 34 trees per year, on average, from 2009 through 2022.
  
• The “950” figure from SOS came (sort of) from a study they commissioned from an arborist in 2022. “Giblin looked at 199 trees and speculated what would happen to them if a full street reconstruction were to be completed […] and concluded that, of the roughly 200 trees inspected, 48 would likely experience ‘significant’ impacts that could be mitigated with care after construction, and 83 would experience ‘severe’ impacts.” SOS added these two numbers together and then extrapolated to the whole boulevard. Even though (a) this number included trees that would be expected to recover just fine, and (b) the sections of Summit are really variable and you can’t just take a single section and extrapolate and get a useful number. (That streets.mn article has some really good information. Maybe the city could commission the authors to write a new FAQ?)

ANYWAY. Back to the actual race at hand. The two candidates who have significant money, endorsements, and backing are Cole Hanson and Molly Coleman.

Molly Coleman

Molly Coleman is the daughter of former St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman. I mention this right off because there are people who think she’s the daughter of former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, and that is emphatically not the case. I have loathed Norm for 30 years. Chris was fine. I think Molly stands on her own in any case, but I wanted to clear that up. She works for a national legal advocacy organization.

Molly has a ton of endorsements from people I respect, including Bill Lindeke, Dan Marshall (who owns Misfit Toys) and Wes Burdine (who owns the Black Hart), and organizations I like, such as Sustain St. Paul. All of them describe her as smart, committed, consistent, and a person with a ton of expertise, who sees the connections between stuff. And you can see this in her interview with WedgeLive, which is great.

The major concern I’ve seen raised about her is that her donors include people who range from “ugh” to “holy shit, that guy?”: the Kaplans (rich centrists who support the Jacob Frey wing of the Minneapolis DFL), a whole lot of very well-heeled developers, and Brian Rice, who has worked as a lobbyist for the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Fraternal Association. (Her comment on the Rice donation, in the Pioneer Press article: “That is not somebody that I’ve ever had a meeting with, that I’ve ever had a conversation with. I’m committed to police accountability, I’m committed to true public safety, and using pro-active steps, not using police as our first step toward public safety.”

The thing about developer and lobbyist money is that it’s (hopefully/usually) not anything as straightforward as a quid pro quo. In some cases they know from your public stances that your principles and their interests align, or maybe that your opponent’s principles and their interests conflict; in other cases it’s an investment in having your ear to make their case somewhere down the road. Some of Molly’s stances are very developer-friendly but this doesn’t make them bad: she wants a simplified zoning code that makes it easier to build housing. In the WedgeLive interview she talks about wanting to use administrative citations to arm-twist CVS into selling that empty building at University and Snelling; giving the empty-building-hoarders a compelling reason to sell at the price currently on offer is probably a plan a lot of developers favor (and so do I).

Here’s my personal concern about Molly. I have a close friend who lives in Ward 4, very close to University Ave (and not far from that CVS), and her biggest frustration with Mitra was that Mitra did not respond to her e-mail messages. These days, I tend to have good luck getting prompt responses from candidates because they mostly know who I am. I was curious how everyone would do at responding to a constituent, so I worked with the friend, and she sent e-mail messages to everyone (with what I thought would be a relatively softball question) and I sent e-mail messages to everyone a little after she did. She heard back immediately from Cole, promptly from Carolyn and Chauntyll, and never heard from Molly.

I thought this might be a fluke so I recruited someone else to send her a question. That person also never got an answer.

Honestly that’s not great! I was hoping I could do a wholehearted, unhesitating endorsement of Molly and also, I’ll be honest, I was hoping she would win over my friend, since she disliked Mitra and low-key blamed me for Mitra. No such luck.

Cole Hanson

Cole Hanson works in public health at the U of M. He’s endorsed by the DSA. I have been struggling to write this because people have several unrelated issues with him, and organizing all this into a nice coherent summary has been a challenge.

First: he is the former Board President of the Hamline Midway Coalition, and launched his campaign before resigning. It got messy in a couple of different ways. I think the biggest point of concern is that he may have downloaded internal data (donor information, event sign-in sheets, and community contact lists) to use on his campaign. Honestly, I read the articles about this and was left completely uncertain how much of the dust-up over this was seriously problematic and how much was basically nonprofit drama. It does seem like Cole didn’t know where the rules around being a nonprofit (and nonpartisan) neighborhood board chair, and being a political candidate, intersected. That’s not ideal. It’s a good idea to figure that out before you declare your candidacy.

Second: while Molly Coleman was straightforwardly in favor of the Summit Bike Trail, and Carolyn Will is straightforwardly against it, Cole gave a lot of vague responses, both at the LWV forum and when he was interviewed by WedgeLive. I think he’s overall for it, but he repeats a lot of SOS talking points (like the “over 900 trees” thing which as I noted above, is not an accurate assessment of the risk to the trees). (This is part of why Bill Lindeke described him as a “random policy generator and maddeningly inconsistent.”) Cole has been inconsistent on enough issues that there’s a whole Reddit subthread debating what his position on rent control is.

He’s a big fan of a municipal grocery store (that sets him apart — I don’t think anyone else thinks that’s workable) and PILOT (Payments In Lieu of Taxes from nonprofits.) (Molly Coleman also likes PILOT. (I do too. It’s not clear to me if there’s a way to actually get nonprofits to pay this money. My idea, holding all their zoning variances hostage, is probably not actually legal.)

Anyway, I have gone back and forth on Cole multiple times. Fundamentally, I don’t think he’s ready to do this job, and here’s what brought this into focus for me. In his interview with WedgeLive, John brought up zoning reform. Here’s that conversation, transcribed:

John: Are you a zoning reform guy?
Cole: To what extent? We already just did a whole bunch of it. […] The question for me is, what more reform? Because we’ve already re-adjusted our whole zoning code a few years ago.
John: So you think we’re in a good place?
Cole: I think we’re in a good place. I think there’s some spots to touch and adjust, but I don’t think we’re in a revolutionary, change-everything phase.
John: And you think the changes that were made, were good ones?
Cole: Broadly speaking. The thing I’m a fan of is the Traditional Zoning category. I like that it’s framed as Traditional, meaning this is how things used to be, which is — you would have corner stores. You have corner grocery.

So, St. Paul’s zoning situation is a complicated and kind of terrible in a “things people thought were a good idea in the 1970s” kind of way. There is a terrific three-part series (1, 2, 3) talking about this, how there are a bunch of extremely retrograde rules that make corner stores illegal, sometimes even in a commercial building that’s right next to a commercial corridor. Cole, in the WedgeLive interview, talks about being a fan of “Traditional Neighborhood Zoning,” which is a zoning category that allows mixed use. (It’s explained in some detail in the third part of that series.) But in fact there are a ton of sections of St. Paul that are still zoned for housing only.

I e-mailed Cole to get some clarification on his thoughts on zoning. He replied quickly, and talked about his support for upzoning to allow higher-density housing, and his support for social housing. Then he said: “At the end of the day, when I talk to my Ward 4 neighbors, they’re most concerned about rising rents and property taxes, the loss of Cub Foods on University and how we can support our unhoused neighbors forced to live in tents because they can’t afford a place to stay. Zoning hasn’t been a priority in any conversation I’ve had with Ward 4 residents and until we’re meeting everyone’s basic needs, I doubt it will be.”

So here is the thing. I absolutely believe that people are saying “my property taxes are horrifying and I’m worried I will lose my house” and not “Cole, we need to fix the zoning code.” But these two things are related. The St. Paul zoning code as it exists makes it harder to open a business, harder to repurpose an empty building or parcel of land. (And harder to open a corner grocery store!) Development is part of how we lower property taxes. We want businesses that can shoulder part of the burden of keeping the streets plowed and the libraries open. The empty office buildings and empty store fronts are part of why our property taxes are going up.

It’s really important for City Council reps to listen to constituents. But it’s also really important for them to see and understand the connections between problems, to recognize that people are unlikely to call you up and say “we need massive zoning reform!” but that zoning reform is connected to a lot of the issues they are calling you about. (And this applies to a bunch of issues, to be clear! Not just zoning!) I saw Molly making these connections in her conversation with John; she talked about how people had repeatedly brought up the problems around Kimball Court and that it was critical to recognize that some of what people are blaming on the residents of Kimball Court is being attracted and fostered by the presence of that empty CVS building a block away.

I don’t think Cole is seeing those connections — at least, not yet. And in the end this matters enough to me that while I have concerns about Molly, I would rank her first. Cities are complicated, and I want the people on the City Council to have a deep and nuanced understanding of the way problems are connected. I would rank Cole second.

(I am pretty sure my friend in the ward will be ranking Cole first and Molly not at all, though, and I don’t blame her. What she wants the most is someone who gets back to her, period. She lives in a neighborhood within Ward 4 that takes the brunt of many citywide problems, and the way her neighborhood is treated vs. the way the wealthier neighborhoods are treated shows some stark differences. Her desire to have a city council rep who responds to her problems is not unreasonable.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. If this post was useful to you, consider donating to this teacher’s fundraiser to buy books for her students (young adults who are past the usual high school graduation age, but have unmet special needs and are still receiving education and services from Saint Paul Public Schools.) — OK, that funded already, here’s another one, also St. Paul. Help a Kindergarten teacher turn her students’ writing into simple bound books.

(Also, you know who does have a Patreon? WedgeLive! And damn those interviews were REALLY USEFUL.)