St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, in his own words

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter is running for a third term leading the capital city. A fifth-generation St. Paulite who served on the City Council before resigning during his second term to take a job in then-Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration, Carter was first elected mayor in 2017.

In his campaign, Carter has emphasized the need to combat violence and drugs, and to build more housing — and says he thinks his administration is making progress.

He credits a St. Paul police drive to investigate nonfatal shootings with a drop in gun violence in the city, and led the push this year to weaken the city’s rent control laws in an effort to spur development.

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

Our most urgent priorities right now are always public safety. We want to build on the progress that we’ve made fighting against gun violence and build that up to help address some of the impacts that we’ve seen around the fentanyl crisis and people in crisis in our community.

We have to keep building as much housing as we can, as fast as we can, so everything that we can do out of City Hall to help facilitate that development is critical, and the future of downtown is critical for every single one of our neighborhoods and for our city tax base. … That’ll center around getting the Grand Casino arena renovated, that’ll center around turning old offices into new housing, and that’ll center around … all the construction we’re doing, building new roads and new parks and new infrastructure downtown to make sure it’s a safe and enjoyable place for everybody to get around, to live, work and play.

A thriving St. Paul is a place that’s built for the future. So many of us reminisce over the St. Paul that we loved in the ’90s or in the ’80s, or in the ’70s or in the ’60s, the way the streets were, the way the parks were, the way the neighborhoods were, the way our downtown was. And the truth is, none of those things are good enough to be able to push forward. That’s not something bad about us. That just means we have to continue to adapt and continue to change as we build the future for our city together.

But one thing that we didn’t do that I wish we were focused on 30, 40 years ago, was adding more residents. We need way more residents downtown. That’s where the opportunity to transition old offices to new housing is a critical opportunity right now.

When we transition old offices into new housing, it creates an opportunity for livability. It creates an opportunity for vibrancy. It creates an opportunity for tax base. It creates a mandate for grocery stores, a pizza shop, and those, you know, coffee shops and things like that, to be downtown because the residents are there — that’s absolutely critical for us.

It’s a challenge for all of us, and as we celebrate the reductions in violent crime — double digit reductions in literally every single category of violent crime in our community — as we celebrate the reductions in homicides and reductions in gun violence, one of the things it does is it shines a light on some of the quality of life challenges that we have in our community.

If you look downtown, or you look through the Midway, we see people who — they don’t really want my wallet, but they’re in crisis, and having a new place of people in crisis creates a challenge for all of us, including them. And so thinking about how we better serve people in crisis has been a hallmark of our administration.

That means not just having people be numbers on a piece of paper, but connecting them by name. … It means creating opportunities for people to move forward, like our St. Paul Work Now initiative, those are the teams in purple vests that you see out around our community helping to clean up.

We have to think through how we continue to push forward and invest in our community while taking steps to control our property taxes. … We passed a sales tax a couple years ago, to help us invest in our infrastructure, that’s really critical.

We have about 100,000 people who come in and out of our city every day for work or for something else, for hockey games or concerts or whatever that is. … They enjoy driving on our roads and using our parks and things like that. And before we passed our sales tax, we didn’t have a mechanism to invite them to help be a part of the solution and maintain the roads and the parks that they use. We did that so that’s not just a burden on our property tax.

Last year, we expanded our franchise fee that goes along with all of our electricity bills. We talk a lot about the large nonprofits or the churches or the hospitals that don’t pay property taxes, that’s true. They do pay utility fees, and so they do chip in to help us out through that franchise fee. That’s important to think about how we diversify our revenues.