On the campaign trail, St. Paul City Council member Rebecca Noecker heard time and again that residents felt increasingly distrustful of government and concerned about basic services, from cavernous potholes to streetlights darkened by copper wire theft. She expected a “community conversation” she hosted, open to the public and focused on the subject of public works, to draw four or five attendees.

Instead, about 30 residents showed up.

“We ran out of time,” Noecker said. “There were 15 different topics people wanted to hear about.”

The list of priorities included homeless encampments, tree preservation, general public safety and other “really big issues that in some cases need other partners” to dig in, like Metro Transit or Ramsey County, said Noecker, who was re-elected by a large margin in November to represent downtown St. Paul, the West Side, portions of Grand Avenue and surrounding areas like Cathedral Hill.

With just two terms behind her, Noecker — who turns 40 in February — is not just the eldest member of the newly elected city council, but also its longest-serving member. It’s experience that puts her in the running for council president when the new council convenes on Jan. 10, though returning council member Mitra Jalali — who was first elected in a special election in August 2018 — is also vying for the role.

New council

The new council president will help set the 2024 agenda for a new council — four of the seven members are newly elected — that has no shortage of work in front of it in 2024, though what issues rise to the top of their collective to-do list remains to be seen.

The all-female council is the youngest and most diverse in city history, with all seven members being under 40 and six identifying as women of color. Noecker, who is white, is Jewish. Another member is due to go on maternity leave in April, once unheard of among elected officials at St. Paul City Hall.

How might that diversity of experience translate into policy discussions? Few council candidates campaigned for office with clear-cut plans for establishing new affordable housing or dealing with the growing opioid crisis that has contributed to large homeless encampments from Minneapolis to Seattle. Attitudes among council candidates toward further amending the city’s rent-control ordinance were mixed.

“I don’t think there was one concrete agenda that all of the candidates, including incumbents, ran on this time,” said Noecker, who hopes a council retreat early in the new year will help set group priorities.

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The last time the city council experienced such deep turnover was in January 1998, when four new council members were sworn in, pitching the council at least a half-step to the right politically: Jim Reiter, Chris Coleman (who would go on to become mayor), Jay Benanav and Kathy Lantry.

Two returning members — Jerry Blakey and Dan Bostrom — vied at the time for the role of council president, which went to Bostrom, one of the more conservative members. Mike Harris also had been re-elected.

This time around, the new council appears more likely to shift leftward, though attitudes on subjects as divergent as bike lanes, the opioid crisis, homeless encampments and a proposed municipal subsidy for child care remain to be seen.

Here’s how three returning members see 2024 likely to shape up.

Mitra Jalali

St. Paul Council member Mitra Jalali, center, during a swearing in ceremony for Police Chief Axel Henry in the Council Chambers on Nov. 16, 2022. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Jalali said she plans to focus this year on housing issues, climate action, community safety, and economic development and opportunity, “from supporting local business to workers’ rights, worker protection.” That includes finding concrete ways to assess what is and is not working when it comes to the rent-control policy approved by city voters in 2021 and heavily amended by the city council in 2022.

She’d like a study to zero in on rent control’s development impacts, how the policy has helped or failed to help renters, areas needed for community education and enforcement.

“I think our community deserves a policy evaluation of rent stabilization, and right now that conversation is happening in a very anecdotal way, with each individual stakeholder asserting its point of view,” Jalali said. “I know it’s near-unanimous that this council wants to do work on housing policy, and the community needs and expects it.”

In addition to rent control, Jalali said it’s time for the council to restore a series of tenant protections they approved in July 2020 and then placed on hold less than a year later following legal pushback from landlords and property owners. Among them would be an “advance notice of sale” provision giving tenants extra time to find new housing after their apartment building is sold.

Jalali said the city council is due for a formal update on the climate action plan it approved in 2018, and it also needs a more cohesive strategy around major development sites such as The Heights, Highland Bridge, Hamm’s Brewery, the Sears site on Rice Street and “things in my ward that have stopped and stalled and started again like the Luther Seminary site,” as well as residential growth downtown.

Jalali has been an advocate for an administrative citations policy that would allow city inspectors to issue non-criminal fines “to deal with everything from problem landlords to problem employers … to combat everything from wage theft to getting workers the time off they need.”

Worried about potential overuse in low-income areas for minor code violations such as peeling paint, the city’s charter commission in October 2021 narrowly voted to block a charter amendment that would have granted the council the authority to create an administrative fine schedule.

Nelsie Yang

St. Paul Council member Nelsie Yang during a swearing in ceremony for Police Chief Axel Henry in the Council Chambers on Nov. 16, 2022. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Yang is looking forward to the redevelopment of the former Hillcrest country club into The Heights, spanning up to 1,000 residences and 1,000 new jobs. She’s advocating that includes a new geo-thermal system and other environmental improvements. “The Port Authority has been really supportive of that,” Yang said. “It would go a long way toward achieving what we’ve always wanted: a carbon-neutral site.”

Yang said she’ll push “to rebuild the outdated community centers — Hayden Heights and Duluth and Case,” boost small-business corridors, craft a new version of the city’s short-lived tenants’ rights ordinance and learn more from residents about their experience with St. Paul’s voter-approved but heavily amended rent-control ordinance.

“I’m hearing that our ordinance is not really helping folks,” she said. “We’ve gotten a lot of public testimony that landlords are coming and self-certifying rent increases more than 3%. I’ve actually had a lot of senior residents on White Bear Avenue who have been displaced. They just shared with me they had to move out of their apartments. It’s really tough to hear.”

“The things we need to accomplish are big wins for our city workers who have been on the front lines during the pandemic. When we had a public hearing at the Como Pavilion, we had some workers come testify that they had yet to receive their pandemic pay.”

She added: “At the city, county, state and federal level, we all need to be putting more investments into sheltering our unhoused population, and not only for shelters, but to actually transition folks into stable housing. That’s the huge piece.”

Yang, who is expecting her second child in April, was the first St. Paul council member to ever go on maternity leave while in office. Yang said she hopes to have eight children — “for our Hmong families, that’s a huge norm” — and normalize the practice of maternity leave for women in elected office.

Rebecca Noecker

St. Paul Council member Rebecca Noecker during a swearing in ceremony for Police Chief Axel Henry in the Council Chambers on Nov. 16, 2022. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Noecker said her top priorities for the year include determining what percentage of the city’s housing stock should be built or preserved as affordable housing, a concrete number that could help guide the work of the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority.

In 2018, with the city’s apartment vacancy rate below 3%, the council adopted a wide-ranging resolution calling for “action to create and preserve housing that is affordable at all income levels.” Vacancy rates have since risen above 4%, but few new units coming online today are geared toward large families, and many units officially dubbed “affordable” tend to be priced for the upper end of the affordable housing market.

With an eye toward small-business development, she’s also calling for more municipal outreach to entrepreneurs of color, including finding ways to drive diverse businesses to Grand Avenue, which has gradually lost several of its larger national chain stores. She’s hoping to introduce a proposal to incentivize the conversion of underused downtown office space into housing and other uses, such as gyms, child care or co-working spaces, and increase the diversity of building ownership.

Other discussions Noecker would like to prioritize include wage theft, early learning — the 2024 city budget includes $80,000 to explore how municipal subsidies for child care could be structured — and community conversations exploring the needs residents have around basic city services.

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