They were heralded by some as the faces of the future — seven women elected to the seven-member St. Paul City Council, six of them women of color, all of them then under the age of 40.

Following flattering coverage by the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian and others, their inaugural council meeting in January 2024 inspired an ecstatic audience member to interrupt proceedings by circling the council tables shooting congratulatory bubbles from a bubble cannon.

Since then, the political reality has been less fanciful.

After a year as council president, Mitra Jalali announced her resignation in January, expressing concern about the impact of job stress on her physical and mental health. She’s not the only member to show open frustration with serving in the public-facing role of an elected official.

The six remaining council members — all but two of them still in their first term — have come to loggerheads with the mayor’s office, and often with each other, over unresolved issues related to rent control, police overtime, the city budget, the appointment process around Jalali’s replacement, and most recently, trash collection.

Personal conflicts between members boiled over this month with a defamation lawsuit against the city, filed last Monday by a council member’s former legislative aide. More than three months into the calendar year, there’s still disagreement within City Hall about whether the city should be operating under the budget proposed by the mayor’s office — which has prevailed to date — or a rival budget approved by the council late last year, just as the budget clock ran out.

No Ward 4 member appointed

Over the past month, the failed process around choosing an interim member to fill Jalali’s vacant Ward 4 seat has become no less contentious, driving some council members near tears during a highly-charged meeting Wednesday that ended without an appointment.

City Council President Rebecca Noecker said Friday that having an even number of council members didn’t help.

“With four brand-new members, we’ve tackled some significant policy issues, and issues with major potential for conflict successfully, and I don’t think this latest issue is evidence we can’t get the job done,” she said.

Still, failure to compromise has effectively ceded the appointment-making authority to the mayor, taking more than one elected official aback. Almost to a person, council members on Wednesday described the council’s own politicking around the process as painful and beneath their own standards.

“Council members felt pretty strongly that the person they chose should be on their side on the issues of tenant protections and rent stabilization, which are coming up,” Noecker said.

“In terms of the Ward 4 decision, I was working extremely hard to bring us to a consensus candidate, and we weren’t able to get there,” she added. “Handing that authority to the mayor is not a good outcome.”

Acrimony

For council members, getting to yes internally has been complicated by a lack of face time.

A Pioneer Press review of a year’s worth of meeting minutes shows attendance has become an issue, with the council convening last year with all seven members present in just 19 out of 43 Wednesday afternoon meetings.

“It strikes me as very low,” said former council president Kathy Lantry, who in 17 years on the council rarely missed a meeting, even during cancer treatments. “Our lives revolved around Wednesdays.”

Meanwhile, acrimony between two council members has reached the courts. In December, the city substantiated a workplace-conduct complaint filed by Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who accused fellow Council Member Anika Bowie of bullying, offensive and harassing behavior.

On Monday, Bowie’s former legislative aide, whom she fired after five months on the job, filed a defamation lawsuit against Bowie and the city.

For voters, the backdrop to these political disputes has been little short of startling.

In late March, downtown St. Paul lost its last grocery store — a Lunds & Byerlys that had been a key draw for residents moving into converted office buildings — and a series of downtown commercial buildings have gone vacant, fallen into foreclosure or lost virtually all value, with some going up for auction for as little as $1.

The general taxpayer is already bearing the cost. Property tax statements that were mailed in late March have revealed eye-popping tax increases that city officials have acknowledged are likely to get worse with time in the face of both falling commercial values and limited new housing construction.

Last Monday, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter called a state of local emergency in response to a council decision to effectively block FCC Environmental Services, St. Paul’s new citywide trash hauler, from its designated base of operations through zoning controls with two weeks to go before the launch date. In response, the council agreed on Wednesday to extend the emergency declaration 90 days, allowing trash collection to move forward from the 560 Randolph Ave. site for now.

Reaction from voters, former officials

Some observers say they have had enough.

“My only involvement is as a female voter who lives downtown and was excited to see an all-female city council and who is disappointed in the results,” said Victoria Fritz, a St. Paul chef and self-described progressive feminist, in an email. The council “seems very disconnected from its constituents and honestly, dysfunctional at this point.”

More than once, elders in the Black community have asked former city council member Debbie Montgomery to reach out to the council and share similar frustrations or mediate conflicts.

“We as taxpayers, we need to get on them,” Montgomery said. “My community calls me and asks me to go down to City Hall to talk to the council about issues when they see things that people said they were going to get done and they’re not doing.”

“People are looking for the leadership of their representatives,” she added, “and they’re just not seeing it.”

In an op-ed column last month written for a newspaper that publishes elsewhere in the Twin Cities, conservative commentator Andy Brehm recently called the city council “unserious” and overly focused on “national progressive political issues it has no business in” while downtown struggles.

The column drew a written response from Noecker, who noted the council recently spent two days at a strategic planning retreat, fleshing out their ideas around five priority areas — climate, housing, economic development, fiscal resilience and public safety.

Among their plans, the council intends to commission an economic-development study to identify key industries to attract to St. Paul, and they’ve created a $1.4 million “Commercial Corridors Fund” to support small businesses. Another $1 million is being put toward a program that seeks to incentivize office-to-residential conversions for developers, Noecker wrote.

Key votes ahead

Key votes in coming weeks center on residential tenant protections and rent control amendments, she noted, as well as the creation of a new public safety committee within the council. Supporters say the committee would be internal to, and sharpen, existing council operations, but critics fear inexperienced council members are attempting to micro-manage public safety departments they have no background in.

The still non-existent seventh member, when appointed, could be a decisive vote on all those issues and more. Following public hearings scheduled for this Wednesday, final votes on rent control and tenant protections will likely be held May 7, due to planned council member absences on April 16 and April 23.

On social media, critics have attempted to attribute a lack of cohesion among council members to their gender, ethnicities or progressive politics and partisan ties, even though the council has had female members for decades and women like the late Ruby Hunt took the lead in writing the city charter.

Some former politicos see things far differently: a council made up mostly of first-time elected officials that lacks strong mentors. Jalali’s departure as council president left Noecker, the longest-serving member, as president almost by default, with individual council members owing her few favors.

“I do think this amount of turbulence is not uncommon, (but) I think how people end up handling it is,” said Lantry, who spent more than a decade as council president before stepping down in 2015. “When I was there, there were all sorts of conflicts, and much more of it got handled privately.”

“They want to be open and transparent, but there are some things you want to have honest conversations about that don’t have to happen in the public eye,” Lantry said. “You have a lot of new council members who are trying to find that balance, and with the change of leadership for the council, that exacerbates a difficult problem.”

Attendance at issue

Meetings that start late. Members that arrive late. Absences and early departures. Resolutions and amendments introduced at the last minute, leaving staff scrambling to upload them to the online agenda for public consumption.

The city council has been plagued by all of the above, drawing some concern last year from Jalali, who was then the council president, around attendance in particular. The council hosts its primary weekly meeting at 3:30 p.m. every Wednesday, except for holidays and the fifth Wednesday of the month. Of the 43 regularly-scheduled Wednesday afternoon meetings held last year, all seven members were present together for just 19 of them, or 44% of the time.

Even after excluding the 12 meetings where Council Member Nelsie Yang was out on maternity leave, that means the council was in full attendance about 60% of the time. Council members are paid about $77,000 annually for what’s officially classified as a part-time job.

Absent more so than most was Bowie, who repeatedly arrived too late for the opening roll call and the first orders of business, and then HwaJeong Kim, the council’s vice president, who runs the get-out-the-vote nonprofit Minnesota Voice. The two members each missed about one-in-six meetings last year, for an attendance rate of roughly 85% apiece.

Neither council member responded this week to multiple requests for comment.

It’s unclear if uneven meeting attendance has swayed the outcome of particular votes. A month after Jalali stepped down, a March 4 council meeting drew just four members — Bowie and Kim were both absent — as the council revisited variance requests proposed by the Ryan Cos. for a series of one-story buildings planned in the Highland Bridge development along Ford Parkway.

Council Member Saura Jost noted at the time that it takes four votes to officially deny or approve the appeal, which had previously drawn a 3-3 tie vote on Feb. 19. With time running out on a 60-day clock, the variances were granted by default. Noecker, the council president, said at the time that she doubted the outcome would have been different had all six members been in attendance on March 4.

“I would push back on the narrative that we’re not able to get the job done,” said Noecker on Friday. “Had we had seven members, we would have made that decision, too.”

Key questions loom

Backed by labor unions, the St. Paul DFL and progressive organizations like Faith in Minnesota and TakeAction Minnesota, most of the city council ran for office in 2023 on “social justice,” environmental and housing platforms that raised identity and inclusion issues, like the need for diverse council voices in a diverse city.

Any cohesion generated by those common ties appears short-lived to some observers.

“Progressives, they want to make everybody happy and have all the progressive values honored, but there’s always going to be trade-offs, and progressives have a harder time with that,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, who ran twice for mayor and once for city council as a Green Party candidate. “It’s just a big learning curve.”

Early fault lines emerged in February 2024 when pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly interrupted council meetings, demanding that the council issue a resolution condemning the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli bombing of Palestinians in Gaza. During those five weeks, Jalali repeatedly blocked Yang’s attempts to move forward a ceasefire resolution, and on more than one occasion council members stood up and left the chamber, turning their backs as protests unfolded around them.

The impasse was broken that March when Johnson read a resolution into the record recognizing the loss of life on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Budget issues unresolved

Meanwhile, political observers have called an unresolved dispute with the mayor’s office over the 2025 budget unprecedented. In the waning days of the last budget season, the council sought to cut $500,000 in general fund spending from a police non-emergency overtime budget of $2.3 million.

Among their concerns, council members noted that budgeted numbers have been far divorced from actual police overtime spending in recent years, which can exceed $6 million, exacerbated by staffing shortages and heavy turnover among officers.

By a vote of 5-1 (Jalali was opposed and Yang was traveling), the council approved the 2025 city budget on Dec. 11, only to have key aspects — like $1.8 million for council chamber renovations — line-item vetoed by the mayor a week later. The council quickly voted, unanimously, to override the mayor’s veto, but Carter’s office continues to maintain their vote happened too late under the city charter to have sticking power.

“The mayor has directed the Office of Financial Services to upload (his) version of the budget, and so that is the budget that has been published and is available online,” said Jay Willms, the council’s operations director and its former chief budget officer, on Thursday.

“There is still disagreement about whether or not the council acted in its authority to override the veto,” Willms said. “At this point, the city attorney has advised the mayor that the council did not act within its authority. However, we do think that the action was valid. We’re at a bit of a stalemate in how to proceed.”

Still, the mayor initially called for a 7.9% property tax levy increase, and later offered a compromise of 6.9%. The final levy adopted by the council and now in effect is 5.9%, which Noecker called a significant accomplishment.

“In my decade on the council, we have not seen a 2% reduction in the levy that the mayor proposed,” she said.

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