Mayor Carter is using crisis as cover for questionable hires

Mayor Carter is using crisis as cover for questionable hires

By Shirley Erstad,

Dave Durenberger and

Laura Goodman

The year is more than half over and what a ride it has been. Globally, we have been dealing with a pandemic, economic uncertainty, social unrest and more signs of climate change, all with a presidential election in three months amid questions about how it will be safely, effectively and accurately carried out.

These situations cause communities to ask themselves how to cope, be good human beings and chart a sustainable course. They require us to take stock of where we are and to reflect on past decisions, plans and commitments. Which brings us to the question, “How are you, Saint Paul?”

We wouldn’t know, given the mayor and city council’s lack of transparent governance. Our leaders have used the pandemic, economic collapse and racial unrest as cover to make questionable and highly expensive hires that on the surface seem to be working only to inflate the mayor’s image. We cannot afford a fireworks show in the capital city, but the mayor needs three chiefs-of-staff and a political director to communicate with the seven-member city council.

Mayor Melvin Carter recently told Saint Paul’s legislative delegation that our city budget needs to be cut by $20 million in 2020. In March, Saint Paul implemented a hiring freeze due to COVID-19 and the unknown yet likely devastating economic impact on our city.

In 2019, Saint Paul broke a decades-old record of homicides in a year. Even before the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd, the city was already on track to break the shots-fired record that was set only last year. While violence may be increasing nationally, that is no excuse for not dealing with our own issues.

In December 2019 Mayor Carter proposed, and the city council approved, a supplemental city budget. One of the components of that budget was $1.7 million for Community First Public Safety (CFPS) to fund several programs already in place, including Right Track, which facilitates youth employment, and Community Ambassadors, which support citizen interactions with police on the street. As early as February, before COVID, city council members Jane Prince and Nelsie Yang asked the mayor’s office why that money was not being spent. Months later, city council member Rebecca Noecker asked Mayor Carter that same question at a city council meeting. However, she was speaking only to an image of the mayor’s name, since he had left the meeting before any questions could be asked.

Later, Mayor Carter’s response was that a CFPS coordinator needed to be hired. As of this writing, that has yet to be done and the CFPS money remains unspent, even for programs already in place. Much angst and extreme passion have been expressed throughout our country that policing systems and structures need to be addressed. This makes the mayor’s inaction on CFPS that much more confusing and disturbing.

Hiring mayoral staff seems to be one of this administration’s fortes. Not only has the CFPS coordinator position been created, a single chief-of-staff position has morphed into three chiefs-of-staff and we’ve seen the creation of a second deputy parks director. There are now 13 assistants to the mayor on the city payroll plus the recently filled position of executive project lead for redevelopment.

The director of Planning and Economic Development (PED) position has been vacant for a year. Why was a project lead hired for $180,000 per year instead of a qualified PED director?

Also hired since the COVID lockdown began is a new political director for the mayor, ostensibly to replace the outgoing press secretary. This hire, which the mayor said is necessary for him to communicate with the city council, comes from the local AFSCME union, which endorsed Mayor Carter’s candidacy in 2017 (even though there was no DFL endorsement in the mayoral race) and the candidacy of every city council member. The mayor’s new political director has been employed since April, without the required approval of the city council. Despite that glitch, it stretches the imagination that the mayor and city council cannot communicate with one another without a highly paid intermediary.

In addition to these under-the-cover-of-crisis hires, $50,000 of public money is being paid to a public relations firm to bolster Carter’s image as the “economic mayor.”

We cannot escape the math. Many highly paid staff positions take funding away from other things our community needs, like mill and overlay projects for our pot-holed streets. Renters and homeowners alike are already feeling the heavy weight of city taxes.

Elected leaders and citizens have responsibilities to one another, including transparency and accountability. As we have seen at the national and now city level, some questionable things are being done during this time of uncertainty. It is our civic duty to demand accountability to stop that from happening.

Shirley Erstad, Dave Durenberger and Laura Goodman are members of St. Paul STRONG, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving representative government in St. Paul by empowering citizen participation and encouraging open and transparent public processes at City Hall.