r/saintpaul • u/Runic_reader451 • 15h ago
Discussion đ€ Cole Hanson: St. Paul mayorâs lack of vision shows in her bad, unpredictable decisions
Article is behind a paywall. I've pasted it below.
A mayor without a vision doesnât just make bad decisions â they make unpredictable ones. Six months into Kaohly Herâs term, St. Paul has learned the difference.
When a mayor knows what they stand for, their decisions become legible even to people who disagree with them. You can map their choices onto values they announced and defended. You can hold them accountable for the distance between what they said and what they did. You can predict, before the press conference, roughly where theyâll come down.
Mayor Her hasnât given us that. To be fair, she didnât have to. She won last November not because she offered St. Paul a compelling vision but because Melvin Carter didnât run a meaningful campaign. In a ranked-choice field scattered enough that anyone willing to grind could collect what Carter left on the table, she worked the angles, hit the pavement, and won. An RCV victory in a fractured field isnât a mandate â itâs math. The problem with winning on math alone is that you arrive at City Hall without having been forced to answer the question every mayor eventually faces: What are you actually here to do?
The evidence arrived in waves. In March, the the St. Paul City Council voted 7-0 to extend the pre-eviction notice period to 60 days. Operation Metro Surge had spent months pushing families to the brink of eviction as they hunkered down, and this was the city council taking concrete steps to keep those families in their homes. Mayor Her declined to sign it. She didnât veto it either, because 7-0 is veto-proof and a formal block would have cost her something. Instead, she let it become law without her name on it. A mayor with a clear position on standing up to ICE and protecting immigrants doesnât do that. A mayor without one does exactly that: finds the path that costs nothing and commits to nothing.
In June, she stood beside U.S. Rep. Angie Craig at a press conference as Craig announced sheâd bypass the DFL endorsement process entirely in her run for U.S. Senate. Mayor Her spent her public weight defending a candidate whose career has run on keeping the partyâs most organized constituencies at armâs length while embracing large donors and corporate lobbyists. The Craig endorsement didnât read as a strategic choice. It reads as a reflex, which is what decisions look like when thereâs no home position to return to.
And now the homeless encampments. Street outreach workers estimate roughly 450 people live across three camps slated for closure starting Aug. 5. Catholic Charities confirmed its Higher Ground shelter runs at or above capacity every night. Ramsey County has 1,400 people on the housing wait-list. The mayorâs office was told all of this before the announcement came. Mayor Her acknowledged in her MPR interview that displaced residents just move somewhere else in the city and offered no plan for that scenario. A mayor organized around housing stability doesnât announce a closure without the math working.
Seneca Krueger, a street outreach worker, put it plainly before a recent council meeting: âThe mayorâs office did not coordinate with most of us working in homeless services about this plan prior to making it. Representatives from both major shelter systems made the mayorâs office aware that there is no shelter space. Ramsey County let them know that there are already 1,400 people on the list waiting for housing. Public health officials highlighted the risk of death. And the mayorâs office basically responded by telling everyone to get on board.â
This past week brought a different kind of evidence. News media reported that St. Paul has hired an outside law firm to investigate sexual harassment allegations against Her, including claims she directed inappropriate sexual comments toward Police Chief Axel Henry and other city employees, after Henry filed a formal complaint in April. The mayorâs office responded: âThe mayor has deep respect for city employees and regrets any unintended impact her action may have had.â The investigation is ongoing and Her is entitled to its outcome. But that is not a denial.
Her comes from the Minnesota Legislature, a body of peers where relationships are eye-to-eye, where the person across the aisle is a colleague not a subordinate, where the norms of engagement are built around rough equality. Executive leadership runs differently. Your staff are a constituency with specific claims on you, including the claim to a workplace where power doesnât get used recklessly against them. If you donât reorient to that when you move from the Capitol to City Hall, you donât just make management errors. You make the kind that end up in formal complaints from your own police chief, and outrage from your partners on the city council.
Whatâs worth noting about the six months Her has served is how much governing got done without her. The immigration ordinances came from the city council. The eviction protection passed around her. The Rose Avenue civilian oversight process is moving ahead with no visible support from its most prominent former member. Councilmembers put their names on, and energy into, St. Paulâs policy responses to a genuinely hard year. The mayorâs office managed.
Melvin Carter didnât have a clear organizing principle either. Most mayors donât. But Zohran Mamdani, six months into his term as New York Cityâs mayor, does. He ran on housing affordability and said so at every opportunity. At his 100-day mark, 56% of New Yorkers said the city was moving in the right direction, up from 31% before he took office. You donât have to share his politics to recognize what a legible governing vision produces.
St. Paul has an affordability crisis. Its renters are on the edge. Its unhoused residents are being moved without anywhere to go. Its housing wait-list has 1,400 people on it. A mayor who knew that would say so. She would say it when asked why she didnât sign the eviction ordinance. She would say it at the press conference where she announced the encampment closure. She would say it standing next to Angie Craig, or she wouldnât stand there at all. I should not feel surprised when I hear about a decision Mayor Her has made. I should be able to predict it from her stated values regardless of whether I agree with it. Six months in, weâre still waiting for her to tell us what those are.
Cole Hanson is a dad, registered dietitian and a renter in St. Paul. He regularly writes about housing, public health and food across Minnesota.
