ST PAUL, Minn. — A ballot question up for consideration in St. Paul right now would authorize the city to raise property taxes by $110 million over the next ten years in order to help pay for childcare for some low-income families.

But regardless of how that vote goes, Mayor Melvin Carter said he has no plans to follow through.

“I am telling our community that, based on my judgment, it can’t be done, so we’ll continue to do the work that we’ve been doing,” Carter said. “If our voters say yes to this, they’ll say yes to authorizing us, not directing it to be done. Those two things are actually opposites.”

St. Paul city council member, Rebecca Noecker, who supports and helped craft the 2024 Early Care and Learning Proposal, said the Mayor’s stance is concerning. 

“I find it very alarming to hear an elected leader in a democracy say that he would not accept the results of an election,” she said. “That’s just, that’s really concerning from a democracy standpoint to me.”

The mayor’s argument for ignoring a voter-authorized tax hike centers on the language of the ballot question itself, which reads:

“In order to create a dedicated fund for children’s early care and education to be administered by a City department or office that provides subsidies to families and providers so that early care and education is no cost to low-income families and available on a sliding scale to other families, and so as to increase the number of child care slots and support the child care workforce, shall the City of Saint Paul be authorized to levy property taxes in the amount of $2,000,000 in the first year, to increase by the same amount each year following for the next nine years ($4,000,000 of property taxes levied in year two, $6,000,000 in year three, $8,000,000 in year four and so on until $20,000,000 of property taxes are levied in year ten).” 

“If I’m a voter, I think, if we vote yes on this, then childcare will be available in the city at no cost to low-income families,” Carter said. “This proposal would serve an average of only 404 children per year, at a total cost of $110 million in property tax increases.”

“We can’t ask (St. Paul voters) to pass the largest single property tax increase that I can ever remember on the basis of making a promise that explicitly says all children, and then turn around and say, ‘Oh, of the 20,000 children in our city under age five, we only meant 404 of them.”

The mayor isn’t the only one who has been clear about their stance for more than a year.

Advocates for the ballot question say they have been clear about who is – and isn’t – covered by the proposal since the council voted to override his veto.

“There’s never been a claim that this would cover every single child on day one,” Noecker told KARE11 back in the summer of 2023. “This is to provide low-income families with free child care, and to make it more affordable for families above that.”

Even though the proposal doesn’t come close to covering all low-income families, she stands by the language on the ballot and the information that supports it.

“Even if this does move forward, there’s just no scenario in which the city can administer this program as it’s currently framed,” Mayor Carter said during a news conference in the summer of 2023.

“I think that the ballot question is really clear as to who is going to be eligible for the program. But I think that in any ballot question, you only have so many words and so much space, and that’s why it’s so important to have accompanying information that goes along with that ballot question,” Noecker said. “This program will not meet the entire need. And that’s, that’s the case with every single public program that we have in our country.”

Despite her concern with the Mayor’s latest comments, Noecker said she remains hopeful that voters will be given the ultimate say.

“I haven’t really contemplated what happens after Nov. 5 if the mayor is not ready to respect the results of the election,” she said. “That’s something that my council colleagues and I will need to talk about and we’ll need to discuss what our options are in that situation.”

If it does pass, Mayor Carter said he’s not the only one who will have questions to answer.

“The folks who put this plan together by ignoring every concern, by ignoring everything my team and I have brought forward, those are the folks who should tell us what they plan to do if this passes,” Carter said. “The council member seems to have, essentially at this point, a two-part plan number one is ignoring all of my input and number two is counting on me to do all the work and they’re going to need a better plan than that.”

MINNEAPOLIS — Democratic candidates are being targeted with hit pieces that distort their record on clean water and PFAS “forever chemicals” in Minnesota. 

The Virginia-based Make Liberty Win political action committee has flooded mailboxes and doorknobs with mailers and lit pieces, accusing Minnesota Democrats at the State Capitol of being so busy passing a “radical agenda” that they’ve abandoned clean water efforts.

The mailers come complete with photos of trash in a lake, a mysterious green substance in a sink, and a poison warning skull symbol with the letters “PFAS” inside it.

The pieces are landing in the Lake Minnetonka area, where Democrat Tracy Breazeale is running in House District 45-A and Democrat Ann Johnson Stewart is running in a special election in Senate District 45.

“I’m a strong proponent of making sure we continue to keep our lakes clean, free of aquatic invasive species, that we’ve got clean drinking water alongside of that,” Breazeale told KARE.

She was shocked to see the mailers linking her to dirty water and PFAS, part of an onslaught of campaign literature arriving in the district in one form or another.

“Some have been hung on doors, some have been coming out through the mail. Some have been e-mail. Some have been other forms of electronic distribution,” Breazeale explained.

To start with, Breazeale has not been in the legislature. She’s serving her second term on the Minnetonka Beach City Council, which voted to build a new water tower that captured the iconic look of the old one. The council also supported a new water treatment plant that will filter PFAS beyond what’s required by the EPA.

“I’ve learned more about water infrastructure, PFAS, what it takes to build a new water tower, what it takes to build new water plant and all that goes into that,” she said. 

The facts don’t support the claim that Democratic lawmakers have abandoned clean water efforts. 

Since 2009 your tax dollars have gone to the Clean Water Fund, to protect and restore water quality in lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. Part of your lottery money has gone to the outdoors, which includes water quality initiatives.

In the 2023-2024 session, the DFL-controlled legislature voted to spent $318 million from the Clean Water Fund to clean water projects for 2024 and 2025. Those include environmental mitigation as well as assistance with water treatment plants.

In the same budget cycle, lawmakers devoted $25 million in lottery proceeds to water quality projects. In the current two-year budget cycle, Democrats also devoted $45 million to PFAS mitigation and filtering projects across the state. 

Lawmakers passed some of the toughest laws in the nation regulating PFAS in products.

“This is a beautiful community. Water is really important. Lake Minnetonka is literally the centerpiece of our district,” Ann Johnson Stewart told KARE.

She’s a civil engineer who specializes in environmental engineering and infrastructure, who served two years in the Senate in 2021 and 2022, when Republicans controlled that chamber.

“I’ve already met with all the engineers, and the public works directors and the mayors, because when you have small communities like this, they have to share water, or they share sewer interceptors, or they share maintenance kinds of activities.”

She was surprised by the messaging in the mailers, looking to pin dirty water and PFAS on her and her fellow Democrats. It’s especially significant because the battle for control of the legislature is largely fought in mailboxes and doorknobs.

“I mean, water is the whole reason that I’m really motivated in my job to make sure everybody has clean water, and that we don’t have PFAS. So, it was pretty ridiculous and just one of many pieces we’ve seen.”

Make Liberty Win has not responded to KARE’s inquiry, as of the deadline for this story.

Here’s a summary of the PFAS-related provisions from HF 2310, the 2023 Environment and Climate Budget bill, as prepared by the nonpartisan Minnesota House Research staff:

• $2,070,000 each year from the environmental fund for the Pollution Control Agency (PCA) to develop and implement a program related to emerging issues, including Minnesota’s PFAS Blueprint.
• $500,000 for a report on firefighter turnout gear and firefighter biomonitoring (see below for more information).
• $50,000 from the remediation fund for a work group to develop recommendations for PFAS manufacturer fees (see below for more information).
• $63,000 in fiscal year 2024 and $92,000 in fiscal year 2025 for the commissioner of health to amend the health risk limit for PFOS.
• $25,000,000 for grants to support planning, designing, and preparing for solutions for public water treatment systems contaminated with PFAS and for the PCA to conduct source investigations of PFAS contamination and to sample, address, and treat private drinking water wells.
• $4,210,000 in fiscal year 2024 and $210,000 in fiscal year 2025 for PFAS reduction grants, which includes $4,000,000 for grants to industry and public entities to identify sources of PFAS entering facilities and to develop pollution prevention and reduction initiatives.
• $1,163,000 in fiscal year 2024 and $1,115,000 in fiscal year 2025 from the environmental fund for rulemaking and implementation of the new PFAS information requirements and product bans (more information on the policy below).
• $478,000 from the environment and natural resources trust fund (ENRTF) for the University of Minnesota to develop novel methods for the detection, sequestration, and degradation of PFAS in Minnesota’s lakes and rivers.

That legislation also contained the following policy provisions, according to the memo from nonpartisan House Research staff:

• Article 3, Section 1, requires manufacturers of a product containing intentionally added PFAS to submit certain information to the PCA by Jan. 1, 2026. The section also bans certain categories of products (carpets or rugs, cleaning products, cookware, cosmetics, dental floss, fabric treatments, juvenile products, menstruation products, textile furnishings, ski wax, and upholstered furniture) containing intentionally added PFAS beginning January 1, 2025. The PCA is given authority to ban additional products through rulemaking and a total ban on products containing intentionally added PFAS becomes effecting January 1, 2032, with exceptions for products where the use of PFAS is currently unavoidable as determined by the commissioner.
• Article 3, Sections 18 & 19 modify PCA reporting requirements related to the 3M settlement and east metro private well testing for PFAS.
• Article 3, Sections 25-27 & 31 prohibit the use of firefighting foam containing PFAS effective January 1, 2024. Certain exceptions would apply, including exceptions for airports and oil refineries and terminals.
• Article 3, Section 30 requires the PCA to establish a work group to review options for collecting a fee from manufacturers of PFAS in the state and submit a report to the legislature by February 15, 2024.
• Article 3, Section 32 requires the PCA to submit a report to the legislature regarding PFAS in turnout gear by January 15, 2024, including recommendations and protocols for PFAS biomonitoring in firefighters.
• Article 3, Section 33, requires the PCA to adopt water quality standards for six PFAS by July 1, 2026.
• Article 3, Section 34, requires the commissioner of health to amend the health risk limit for PFOS by July 1, 2026.
• Article 9, Section 9, allows St. Louis County to use a portion of its environmental trust fund for projects to protect Lake Superior and other waters in the Great Lakes watershed from PFAS contamination from landfills.