This was Amy Brendemoen’s ward, but she is not running for re-election; the seat is open. On the ballot:
Hwa Jeong Kim
Pam Tollefson
David Greenwood-Sanchez
Nate Nins
Pam downplays this on her site, but she’s a Republican. She’s endorsed by Republicans and although she’s tried to lock down / sanitize her social media (because she clearly knows Saint Paul is deep, deep blue) I did find a comment she left on a news article from 2018 about Trump trash-talking a restaurant for refusing to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Given her Republican connections I was sort of surprised that she says she supports the rent control ordinance as it currently exists. But fundamentally: I do not trust Republicans at any level, and I don’t trust a Republican running in St. Paul to be honest about their stance on anything. I would not vote for her. (ETA: the site where I found the recommendations for Republican voters is apparently not exactly an official Republican Party site. However, it notes that she was “recommended by HD66B GOP.”)
Nate likes talking about his “servant leader” style, which can be a right-wing Christian dogwhistle, so I did a deep dive into his social media as well and found … an open book with nothing particularly worrying. Although I did also find a post from him from last December where he said he was going to vote for Hwa Jeong Kim, who he’s now running against, which was kind of weird.
He has some public service experience (he served on the board of directors at the North End Neighborhood Organization; he serves on the steering committee for a real-estate coop; and he’s the Vice Chair of the Neighborhood STAR board.) However, his policy ideas are mostly pretty vague (on housing and homelessness, one of his proposals is, “Partner with the City, businesses, and education institutions to find creative housing options.”)
One point that I ran across where he seems to differ significantly from Hwa Jeong was in the LWV Forum, when a question got asked about a proposed “Tobacco-Free Generation ordinance,” which would ban anyone born after January 1st, 2004 from ever buying tobacco in the City of St. Paul. Hwa Jeong was for it; Nate (and all the other candidates) were against it. (I have to say, as much as I loathe tobacco I am not in favor of prohibition and people over the age of 21 have a right to take up harmful habits if they want, so I would not support this. But I also don’t see it as a particularly pressing issue.)
If you are intrigued by Nate (or unhappy with Hwa Jeong), Nate seems fine; list him first if you want (but pick a backup candidate because I don’t think most people have heard of him and I don’t think he’s going to win). The nice thing about instant runoff is that you can rank by preference.
David says that his top priority is to “restore the voice of our neighborhoods” but specifically what he means by that is, “to restore the voice of our neighborhoods specifically as relates to historic preservation.” Literally every topic he talks about comes back to historic preservation, and while I sympathize with the people who will die mad about the German School tearing down St. Andrews, I am much less inclined to center historical preservation than he is.
I’m sure no one who’s reading this will be surprised that he’s vehemently against the Summit Avenue trail, and probably will not be surprised that he presents the threat to the trees as being 100% caused by the planned bike lane. (“The city is currently fighting against our neighbors on Summit Ave to put in place a bike lane that will kill up to 950 trees (estimated).” — from his website.) The actual main purpose of the project is to replace the century-old sewer and water lines under Summit Avenue. (Note: the giant sinkhole that opened up on Girard Ave in Minneapolis last year was due to a 120-year-old sewer pipe caving in.) That’s also where the primary risk to the trees comes from: trees tend to put their roots wherever they want, some may have put their roots places where they’ll be damaged by tearing out the road, and we won’t know for sure until we do it, but also, the infrastructure under the road is over a century old and we really do need to replace it, I’m inclined to trust the Public Works director for St. Paul on this.
The SOS (“Save Our Street”) group thinks that Summit Ave should be fixed with mill-and-overlay (rather than rebuilt pavement) and that the pipes should be fixed with trenchless lining. The Public Works director for St. Paul says that trenchless lining doesn’t work as well on water pipes (and is much more expensive) and also it doesn’t work well when the pipes are already in poor condition. The bike lane is being built on the principle that as long as you’re completely rebuilding the road for a bunch of other reasons, you might as well upgrade the bike options, much like, if you had to tear out your main bathroom down to the rough-ins, you might as well put in some tile you like. If David mentioned the century-old sewer-and-water-infrastructure problem anywhere in his complaining about the Summit Ave bike trail, I did not find it.
Anyway — David would definitely not be my first choice.
Hwa Jeong Kim is DFL-endorsed and is also endorsed by a long list of other people and groups. (Nate doesn’t seem to have any endorsements. David is endorsed by a heritage preservation group but doesn’t seem to have much in the way of other endorsements. Pam is endorsed by the Republicans, so not much in the way of endorsements I’d consider a plus.) Hwa Jeong has worked as a legislative aid and served on the St. Paul Planning Commission, she was Trista Matascastillo‘s campaign manager back in 2018 (and was hired by Amy Brendemoen on the strength of her work for Trista, which unseated a long-time Ramsey County Board member who I thought was pretty terrible so good work there), and she’s currently the executive director of a group called Minnesota Voice, which I think coordinates stuff like get-out-the-vote and voter registration efforts among a large coalition of progressive organizations.
Some of her stances I’m not sold on (the Twin Cities Boulevard proposal, which she’s a fan of; the Tobacco-Free Generation ordinance mentioned above) but overall she seems like a committed progressive whose priorities are similar to mine — she’s in favor of housing, density, transit, bike lanes, public safety approaches that include alternatives to police responses, etc. She has a mix of political and policy experience that will serve her well.
I would rank Hwa Jeong first, Nate second, and David third (because at least he’s not a Republican.)
I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this music teacher at Washington Technology Magnet in St. Paul, who is raising money to buy guitars so that students don’t have to share 1 guitar between 4 students.
Will Tell Stories For Food 