St. Paul mayoral candidate Kaohly Her, in her own words

State Rep. Kaohly Her is challenging St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, her former boss and mentor, in Tuesday’s election. Her has represented parts of St. Paul in the Legislature since 2019. In running for mayor, Her said she wants to lean not just on her political experience, but on her years working in finance, her time as a stay-at-home mother and her upbringing as the child of refugees from Laos.

She entered the race in August and has said the assassination of Melissa Hortman in June catalyzed her decision.

As part of its coverage of the St. Paul mayor’s race, the Minnesota Star Tribune invited Her and Mayor Melvin Carter to address a variety of campaign issues. Her’s comments have been edited for length and clarity.

It depends on a person and their circumstances. If I’m a senior living on a fixed income, property taxes, this is the greatest issue that I’m worried about. But if I’m an immigrant family or refugee family, what’s happening with ICE is the biggest issue right now. If I’m a small business owner and that’s my livelihood, like being able to survive in our city is the most pressing issue to you. It really is at the intersection of all of these pieces together and why it is that we have to solve them as looking at all of them as pressing issues.

I would say that a thriving St. Paul is a St. Paul in which people feel like they can really live their life.

People always feel like we have to do this big, showy thing to say, like our city is working well. And that’s not necessarily true. It’s people’s ability to go about living their lives, raising their children, going into their retirement, being able to get to work, that shows me that we are functional and a livable city, that shows me that our city is thriving and doing well.

And then, do people see themselves reflected in the city, do they feel like their voices are included in what is happening in this city?

It has to be a mixed use of housing, commercial, arts and culture, small businesses. Like, everyone has to come to the table in order to re-envision what this downtown looks like.

I think that housing is a part of it, absolutely. I mean, we need to create greater density ... and we have a lot of opportunities, whether it is the Hillcrest site — the former Hillcrest [Golf Club] site — or continuing to encourage development at the former Ford site.

But truthfully, downtown is our greatest opportunity that we have. The Downtown Alliance has done a great deal of work around assessment of buildings. Our partners, who have been working on this issue for years, have a plan for what we can convert. But there are just some buildings that will need to come down because we can’t easily convert them into residential.

We have to look at other revenue sources that is not a tax and that it does not fall on the shoulders of our current residents now. And so I proposed … the St. Paul urban wealth fund, and we’ve seen this successfully executed in cities across Europe and in Asia.

And what we do with the urban wealth fund is that we leverage the city’s assets in order to generate revenues for us to run our city operations, in order for us to address some of the most pressing needs and the cost of that.

Everyone has an idea of what should be done. There are ideas that we should arrest everybody who is doing drugs openly, or that we should just give everybody housing, and then that’s going to solve the problem.

And those are all pieces of solving this.

I think that our [police] officers are feeling very torn in that they are here to enforce the laws, but they also know that it’s not compassionate to just take someone and lock them up.