St. Paul officials respond to cafe owner's plea, move electrical boxes they placed out front

Sometimes, Mahmoud Shahin has learned, City Hall listens.

After months of frustration over having his entreaties seemingly fall on deaf ears, Shahin said that St. Paul officials have agreed to move two large electrical boxes recently placed in front of his longtime St. Anthony Park business on Cleveland Avenue, Mim's Cafe.

He credits Mayor Melvin Carter and City Councilmember Mitra Jalali for listening to his concerns and doing something to help.

"I am extremely pleased and very appreciative to many people," Shahin said of the neighbors, customers and friends who rallied to his support. "I'm also grateful to the mayor and the support that Mitra gave."

For the past two years, traffic has been rerouted while Ramsey County reconstructed Cleveland Avenue North from Como to Larpenteur avenues. When the street reopened, the city put new light poles and the electrical boxes directly in front of the cafe, a decision Shahin said proved vexing — and unchanging.

No matter how much he complained, even offering to pay part of the cost of moving the boxes, city officials said there was nothing they could do.

Then Carter and Jalali got involved. They met with Shahin, a former physics professor who has owned Mim's since 1996. Carter spent at least 45 minutes just talking to him over coffee. They promised changes.

In an interview Tuesday, the mayor said he was moved by the frustrations of a good neighbor and business owner who's served the community for nearly 30 years.

"There was an opportunity for us to go a little further and utilize the tools of city government to help," Carter said. "The city is invested in his success. That's important for our business owners to know."

Jalali said technical crews need to consider the "whole picture" of such street projects, including the "human impact" of engineering decisions. A stack of petitions from Shahin's supporters helped convince her that if something could be done to change the impact on Mim's, it should be.

"I needed the leadership of the county and the city to get involved. And I'm really glad they did," Jalali said. "Mahmoud's great and I'm really glad we could help."

Jon Schumacher, a longtime neighborhood official and a Shahin customer and friend, said the seemingly arbitrary decisions of city officials "just rubbed people the wrong way. They didn't want to think of St. Paul as a place that treats its neighbors that way."

Over the past several months, Shahin said he was given several estimates for what he was asking the city to do, from $2,000 early in the street work to $50,000 more recently. The final cost to move the boxes is still to be determined.

Officials have learned a lot from this process, Kershaw said, and plan to apply those lessons to water and street projects in the future — namely, do a better job of sharing the specific elements of those projects and then better coordinating it with residents.

On Tuesday, Shahin watched as workers moved the boxes down the street about 35 feet. He said he was feeling especially thankful.