Twin Cities mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter address pandemic bounce back

CATHY WURZER: It's Minnesota Now live from the State Fair. I'm Cathy Wurzer. Thanks so much for being with us. Y'all made it out here after the morning storms. Good for you. Incredible storms, right? For goodness' sakes. Thanks to our listeners at home who are on the radio, listening on the radio or on the stream. We appreciate you being here as well.

So you know, of course, the fairgrounds are in Falcon Heights, kind of neutral ground, perhaps, for our next two guests, the executives of Minnesota's Twin Cities. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is with us, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter. Good to see you both. Welcome.

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MELVIN CARTER: Thank you. Good to be on.

CATHY WURZER: Actually, Mayor Carter, you just kind of bow in Mayor Frey's direction, because I mean, you know, he's kind of-- you're on the other side of the river. Did you get a passport to come over? That's great.

JACOB FREY: Well, interestingly, both Mayor Carter and I live on the same side of the river. So I live on the east side of the Mississippi, as does he. And so in this case, there's literally a whole lot more that unites us, and given that we're technically in neutral territory, although I do consider this to be a little closer to St. Paul.

MELVIN CARTER: St. Paul-ish.

JACOB FREY: I'll give the nod in your direction there.

CATHY WURZER: St. Paul-ish. I like that. So when you are at the fair, all politics is local, right? You guys both know that, obviously. When you're at the fair or a big gathering like this and you're recognized, do people have specific things they ask you about being mayors of St. Paul? You're here pretty close to St Paul. Do people bend your ear on something?

MELVIN CARTER: Oh, absolutely, bend my ear on anything. Some folks will say, I recognize you, but I'm not sure where I recognize you from. And they want to take a picture. But then we talk about anything, whether it's-- we did a press conference yesterday about kind of a slumlord in St. Paul that we wanted to crack down on, or our work on the streets, or public safety, whatever it is. It's all fair game at the fair.

CATHY WURZER: Same thing for you, Mayor Frey.

JACOB FREY: Yeah, there's something about the fair that really brings people together in a beautiful way. The first response I generally get in interaction is, I thought you would be taller. And then once we get by that, then yeah, people want to comment on the beauty of the city, what's going on in the state. Obviously, a whole lot of talk about the DNC right now, and a lot of excitement.

MELVIN CARTER: Our governor.

JACOB FREY: That's right, of our governor, now vice presidential candidate. So a really big deal.

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And then sometimes, people just want to talk about food, and I'm fine to do that as well.

CATHY WURZER: I wonder if they talk about property taxes. Let me get into some subjects here. So both of you guys are proposing raising property taxes by about 8% in each of your respective cities. And I'm wondering, with the commercial tax base struggling in the downtown areas especially, can homeowners-- how much can they foot the bill, I guess, is the question? Mayor Carter.

MELVIN CARTER: It's a great question, and it's an important question. And I'll tell you, it's the hardest job that we have every year. I think there's like a really thin fulcrum. And we always talk about the fact that if we raise property taxes too much, it'll impact our lowest-income residents and small businesses first.

Sometimes, we miss the very true fact that if we fail to invest in our communities, it'll impact our lowest-income residents and our most vulnerable businesses first. We saw that in St. Paul last year when we saw after a record breaking winter, we saw potholes everywhere, and people, you know, damage to vehicles and things like that.

And so we cannot risk, and frankly, St. Paul has risked-- over 20 years ago, I complain a lot about former mayors who sort of chose to kick the can down the road to us as opposed to having tough conversations and solving problems in real time.

I'll tell you, where the metro area is concerned, we see a lot. We see property tax proposals this year in our suburban neighbors a lot higher than 8% right now. And that's because the way the economy is going. We all know our grocery bills have gone up more than 8%. Our gas bills have gone up more than 8%. We've got to get gas in every fire truck and every police car, every ambulance. And the quality of life stuff, the basic quality of life stuff that we invest in, costs money, and I think folks know that.

And when we look at the difference between our core cities that are saying 8%, and some of our suburban communities that are saying, again, 10%, 11%, 12%, it's because somebody is doing a lot of work to make sure that we're managing resources really well. We're very proud of our AAA credit rating. It's the highest possible rating, and we're going to continue to work to make sure we're managing our resources perfectly.

CATHY WURZER: And Mayor Frey, in terms of Minneapolis, I mean, the downtown still hasn't really rebounded. There is that question about the commercial tax base, and homeowners may be footing more of the bill than they should, perhaps.

JACOB FREY: Mayor Carter hit the nail on the head in that virtually every city throughout the country is dealing with a somewhat similar dynamic. This whole concept of remote or distance work was probably inevitable, but it got expedited by five to eight years by COVID-19.

And we do have people coming back to downtown in droves. In fact, this last year, Minneapolis saw the biggest increase in traffic of any city in the country. And so we're proud of the work that's happening. Still more work to be done.

And at the same time, as Mayor Carter pointed out, it's not like there's a ton of bells and whistles in these budgets. The reason for the increase in taxes is because we have an increased cost in labor. And the reason for the increased cost in labor is the people doing the labor have increased costs themselves.

And so this was an essential increase, and at the same time, it's increase where people will feel the benefit in the form of the service that we're providing. And you know, it's not just Minneapolis and St. Paul that are seeing this. The surrounding suburbs are seeing between a 10% and I believe a 20% increase as well.

And there's some really good things in the budget that are going to help us kind of get through this ring of fire and on to the next area. We are not mayors that are going to be kicking the can down the road. We're going to own it. We're going to take a leadership responsibility, and we're going to try to do the right thing.

CATHY WURZER: Speaking of services, let's talk about policing for just a moment. Actually, crime, because that's an issue on the campaign trail, because we're hearing some of that, obviously. Major crimes in the Twin Cities have dropped or remained steady from last year.

Homicides, shootings, car thefts, though, remain above pre-pandemic levels in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So experts say it'd be kind of a big mistake to be waving the victory flag here at this point. What efforts in both cities do you have ongoing right now that hold the most promise to push these crime rates down further, that you're most excited about? Mayor Frey.

JACOB FREY: The area where I am most optimistic is this provision of a comprehensive approach to public safety. And what that means to me is that when you call 911, you are able to get a response from a skill set that matches the experience taking place on the ground.

Sometimes, oftentimes, that's a police officer. Oftentimes, that's a mental health responder. Maybe it's a social worker. And we are building out this comprehensive approach right now that will culminate in part with a Southside Safety Center housing all of these services under one roof that will be open next year.

And so it's a massive effort. And to your point, yeah, we are seeing generally a positive trajectory, but a positive trajectory does not mean that we're blind to the challenges that we have. We recognize that there's a lot of work to do specifically around gun violence. We recognize that when you have illegal and legal guns coming into the city by the truckload, it's problematic for both our communities and police officers.

And we recognize that we have to hold perpetrators accountable when they're responsible for some of the gun violence that we've seen. And so there's a lot of work that's happening both through our commissioner and our chief. We're making some positive progress. Still have a long way to go.

CATHY WURZER: Mayor Carter, what's happening here in St. Paul.

MELVIN CARTER: Yeah, we're doing similar work. My first year as mayor, we started building what we call our community-first public safety framework, which centers around the exact same thing. We like to make a distinction between public safety and emergency response.

I think some of the problems that we've had in our traditional public safety systems, we all grew up with public safety systems that really weren't public safety systems at all. They were emergency response systems. And emergency response is critical. It's sacred. It's an important part of a comprehensive strategy.

But when we want to keep our kids safe, we know that the conversation doesn't start with what happens after something terrible happens. It starts with car seats and gates on stairs, and outlet covers and things like that to prevent something terrible from happening in the first place. And so that's one of our goals, is to get as far upstream as we can.

You know, we can talk about this for a whole week, but one thing that I think we're doing, and you know, we're doing a lot of the similar stuff, with optimal responses to different types of 911 calls. Less than half of 911 calls in St. Paul, Minneapolis, in our country, less than half of them are because somebody's committing some violent crimes somewhere. Most of them are actually because somebody has a concern about somebody who is experiencing a mental or chemical health crisis, or something like that. So having those optimal responses is critical.

One of the things we have to know is a lot of what we experience is a result of cycles. So we're identifying ways to break cycles. For example, if someone's a survivor of gun violence, they in that moment become infinitely more likely to become either a survivor or perpetrator again in the future.

So we engage. Our teams go straight to the hospital at 1 o'clock in the morning, at 2 o'clock in the morning, to go engage and make sure these families have what they need to say, how do we prevent sort of echo violence or retribution from happening in our communities?

We have incidents where two neighbors will get in a fight, and that'll kind of blow up into gun violence or something like that. They go, somebody goes to jail, somebody goes to the hospital, but then they get out and they're still neighbors. So we have to figure out how to relocate folks. And so like doing some of that type of stuff is a relatively new body of work that we've crafted in the last couple of years that's proving effective at helping to reduce gun violence in our community, because it breaks those cycles.

CATHY WURZER: I wish I had more time with you two, but we're at the State Fair and it's over the noon hour, and I bet you want to have lunch. So I appreciate you both being here, by the way. By the way, who pays for lunch?

MELVIN CARTER: I got to go get a pork chop on a stick.

CATHY WURZER: Pork chop on a stick?

JACOB FREY: Going fried pickles.

CATHY WURZER: All right. I appreciate you both being here. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, thank you so much. Enjoy the fair.

MELVIN CARTER: Thank you for having us.

CATHY WURZER: Appreciate it.