Star Tribune
Seeking hockey rinks, street repairs and more, cities make case for new sales taxes
There aren’t enough hockey rinks in Edina.
Or at least, that’s the case the city is making to persuade voters to extend a sales tax that would pay for another sheet at Braemar Arena, plus 100 new parking spots.
Edina Parks and Recreation Director Perry Vetter made the pitch on live-streamed video last week: More ice could mean less out-of-town practice for Edina youth hockey players, and more revenue for the arena.
Edina is one of 37 cities in Minnesota looking to sales taxes to fund their wish lists — and deploying city staff and resources to explain to voters what exactly they would be getting in exchange for their approval. More than a dozen such requests will be on local ballots this fall, with the rest expected to go before voters in 2024.
Under branded campaigns like “Renew Rochester,” “Edina at Play” and “Bloomington Forward,” city communications staff are rolling out websites, videos and newsletters, and dispatching other staff to public meetings and events to talk about all the goodies voters could get by approving sales taxes.
None of this is unprecedented, but after the Legislature approved a record number of sales tax proposals in 2023, voters across the state will be bombarded with messages from local officials about what a sales tax could pay for in their community.
Maple Grove spent about $40,000 in 2022 on a similar marketing effort for a half-cent sales tax meant to bring in $90 million to fund a new community center.
City Administrator Heidi Nelson said she thought it was worth the expense for residents to understand what they would be voting for and what they would be getting with a higher sales tax. Explaining the benefits alongside the obvious costs of raising taxes seemed important amid economic uncertainty.
“We were going to the voters with this local-option sales tax question at a time of high inflation,” Nelson said. “We really felt our role was to make sure voters are informed when they’re going to the polls.”
Bloomington has spent about $45,000 on a website and the services of a communications consultant — the “Bloomington Forward” campaign would have been too much work for city staff, city communications director Janine Hill said. City workers have staffed booths at local farmers’ markets, and the city has pushed out information in its newsletter, social media channels and with online videos and the dedicated website.
There are tricky lines for cities to navigate as they endeavor to educate voters, because city staff are not supposed to directly advocate for or against policies.
“We are constantly reaffirming we are not advocating for this,” Hill said. “We are very careful about language that we’re using.”
In St. Paul, an outside advocacy group, Vote Yes for St. Paul, has formed to push for the sales tax, under the leadership of former City Council President and Public Works Director Kathy Lantry.
“It is a fine line,” Lantry said of the divide between education and outright advocacy. “In my mind, what we’ll be talking about is not what will be done, but why we need to do it and why we need to do it with a sales tax.”
The St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce has come out against the effort to pass a sales tax to rebuild major local streets.
Amanda Duerr, the chamber’s vice president of government affairs, said the chamber understands that St. Paul’s streets have suffered from years of disinvestment and that the city has real challenges when it comes to raising revenue through property taxes. But chamber members worry a higher city sales tax will push customers to the suburbs.
The relationship between residents of a city and people who just shop there has been a key point in many cities’ education campaigns.
Many cities and counties have engaged Bruce Schwartau, leader of the community economics program at University of Minnesota Extension, to estimate how much of a local sales tax would be paid by non-residents.
Schwartau said he has worked with about 30 cities and counties that have looked for estimates of how the burden of a sales tax would fall on residents and nonresidents. The splits can vary widely, he said, depending on how many visitors and non-local shoppers a city gets.
In Edina, for example, Vetter said the estimate was that non-Edinans would shoulder about 54% of the cost to expand Braemar Arena by paying $17.1 million in sales taxes over the next 19 years.
City education efforts and sales tax advocates are both underlining the idea of divvying up the cost of projects beyond residents of one city.
Lantry compared the idea of a sales tax to dining out with friends. Sure, she said, you could pay for everyone’s meal. But wouldn’t it make more sense to split the bill?
“For me it’s an easy argument to make, because we have people who come to our city all the time and don’t contribute to the maintenance and reconstruction of our streets,” Lantry said. “You get the people who are using the service to assist in paying for it.”
Star Tribune staff writers Katie Galioto and Trey Mewes contributed to this story.
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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