Saint Paul has a lot less on the ballot this year than Minneapolis, because no one here cares if the mayoral and city council races aren’t in sync, so they just aren’t. We have a mayoral race that I’m planning to write about at some point, and two ballot questions. Even if you don’t care about the mayoral race, you should definitely go vote on the ballot questions if you live in St. Paul! tl;dr: vote yes on both.
Here’s the question that appears on the ballot:
Approval of New School District Referendum Revenue Authorization
The board of Independent School District No. 625 (Saint Paul), Minnesota has proposed to increase the School District’s general education revenue by $1,073 per pupil, subject to an annual increase at the rate of inflation. The proposed new referendum revenue authorization would be first levied in 2025 for taxes payable in 2026 and applicable for ten (10) years unless otherwise revoked or reduced as provided by law.
This is a school funding referendum, and to be clear, it is on top of an existing school funding referendum (the current one expires in 2029, so I am sort of guessing there will be another school funding referendum to replace that one in 2028.) Here’s the post I wrote about that one, in 2018.
Here’s the site for the Vote Yes campaign. You can see how much it will cost you, specifically, on this site but since it looks things up by parcel number rather than address (wtf guys) you’ll have to go here to get your parcel number. (The Vote Yes site says that a house valued at $289,200 would pay about $26 per month/$309 per year; I’m not sure if they picked $289,200 because that’s the actual median home value or if they went based on vibes.)
The explanation for why they need more money basically goes back to, “Republican governor Tim Pawlenty fucked everything up back in 2003, and state funding ran way behind inflation for years, and while the DFL trifecta helped, it did not fill in the giant hole the Republicans created in school budgets.”
I always vote yes on school funding questions, because I want the schools in my city to have adequate (ideally abundant, but AT LEAST adequate!) resources, and I will vote yes on this one. Also, let’s keep electing Democrats statewide and ask them to increase state funding (done through income taxes) so we don’t have to do quite so much through property taxes.
This one’s more complicated to explain. (I feel like most people know what a school board funding referendum is for.) This is an amendment to the city charter (the “constitution” of the city) that would allow St. Paul to issue administrative citations for code violations, which is to say, it would let the city make people pay fines. Part of what’s confusing is that so many people assume that the city can already do this, because (a) we do get fined for parking violations (because the state gave the police department authority to do that) and (b) every other large city in the state of Minnesota already has administrative citations and it’s actually incredibly weird that we don’t. Minneapolis has them, Duluth, Bloomington, Apple Valley. In St. Paul, currently, here are the options the city has if you violate the city code: (1) They can send you a sternly worded letter. (2) They can charge you criminally, and the city page about the proposed charter amendment talks about how this has affected people. (3) There are a couple of things where they can do an end-run that feels to people like a fine even though it isn’t — if you don’t shovel your walk, they will send city workers to shovel your walk and then bill you for their time, which many people read as a fine even though technically it isn’t.
The City Council passed administrative citations last year (unanimously — which is required, for a charter amendment) but instead of being implemented it was put on the ballot by a couple of local perennial cranks who did a petition drive and also wrote an infuriating and inaccuracy-riddled letter to the editor to the Highland Villager newspaper. Among their claims: “the ordinance will give the city unbridled authority to impose monetary penalties” — the city’s authority is inherently bridled by the fact that things have to be passed by the City Council. “The legal end-around of the democratic process is a unanimous City Council vote” — that’s not an end-run around the democratic process, that is a democratic process, we elected the City Council. “Supporters argue that each proposed civil penalty will have three readings and a public hearing. But they fail to disclose that only four City Council votes are needed to pass any civil penalty ordinance” — no one is failing to disclose that it will require a majority of the City Council to pass city ordinances because most of us understand that this is the normal way you pass city ordinances. (Patty Hartmann is a climate-change-denying vaccine-denying Republican who ran for City Council a couple of times, and Peter Butler’s hobby is petition drives followed by lawsuits against the city when he doesn’t get enough signatures.)
I am STRONGLY IN FAVOR OF THIS AMENDMENT. I am in favor for all the reasons discussed on the Vote Yes website (created by Vote Yes for a Fairer St. Paul, which appears to be run by the SEIU labor union in the sense that they share an address.) Like SEIU, I am in favor because we need every tool available to handle wage theft. (The St. Paul city site describes a case where it took four years to get group of health aides compensated for sick time they were denied in 2020; currently, the only thing the city can demand is the back wages, so there’s no downside to the employer of dragging things out. If the city can also impose fines, they can create an incentive to the crooked employer to pay what they owe promptly.) Like HomeLine, I am in favor because we need every tool available to handle unsafe rental properties that are not being repaired by the landlords. But most of all, I want administrative citations to be an option to fine the everliving crap out of motherfucking CVS for sitting on an empty building for so long that it appears as a boarded-over building on Google Maps:
Not to mention the asshole investors who bought up half of Grand Avenue in order to let storefronts sit empty for literal years.
(This is not magic, there are blighted buildings in Minneapolis as well, but it is at least a tool that gets added to the available options.)
(I also am in favor of criminal charges for employers who commit wage theft, but realistically, that’s going to be treated as a last resort. We know that “certainty of punishment” is a much better deterrent than “severity of punishment,” and “if I short my employees their wages I’ll wind up having to pay twice as much in the end” is much more likely to discourage wage theft than “there is about a 1% chance that I will go to jail.”)
Will this be used against citizens who annoy their neighbors? I’m not saying it will never, ever happen but it’s clearly not the goal here, this is not a major problem in other Minnesota cities, and as the Fairer St. Paul website points out, we are a city that completely abolished library overdue fines a few years ago and cut fines and fees for a huge number of things during the pandemic. Back when I lived in Minneapolis I got an order to fix something minor (a short stretch of rotted fascia on the side of my garage) and I was annoyed about it but also, I just went ahead and fixed it and did not get fined. Also St. Paul will also order you to fix stuff like this (okay, maybe not a foot of rotted fascia, my friend who fixed it for me said “did you piss off one of your neighbors?” when he looked at it) and most people have assumed for years that they can fine you if you don’t do it so I don’t think it will actually change all that much for most people! (Also, this won’t affect parking violations — we can already get fined for those — and I’m pretty sure that those are far and away the thing people get fined for most often, statewide.)
I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)
I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)
Will Tell Stories For Food 