September 12th 

This evening, without any hesitation whatsoever, my opponent Lee Helgen, voted for a 15% increase in your property taxes.  

How many seniors on fixed incomes will see a decline in their quality of life because of this action? How many families who are struggling to make their payments will be able to afford this increase? How many residents will leave our city to live elsewhere where homes are more affordable?

It is no doubt that the city faces tough choices in with the 2008 budget. However, in the same manner that my opponent blames previous decisions to leave the levy flat for his actions today, I blame him for not working hard each and every day to expand the tax base and create more jobs that will allow city revenues to rise with the cost of providing basic services. We have lost over 16,000 jobs (not including the Ford plant) since 2000. On a national scale we lost 3 million jobs from 2000-2002, but gained over 8 million jobs since for a net gain of 5 million jobs! Why did St. Paul miss out on this expansion?

He indicated at a recent council meeting that the buildings in downtown St. Paul have more economic value as homes, considering the current vacancy rates. Where will the residents of these new downtown homes work? Minneapolis?

September 6, 2007

This afternoon Historic St. Paul conducted a forum on the vacant buildings in St. Paul.  I learned there are over 1300 registered vacant buildings in the city, although the number of total unoccupied buildings could be double that number.

After listening to residents concerns and the effect that it will have on our neighborhoods we heard many panelists testify that we just no longer have the resources to deal with improving our housing stock.

The panelists did however indicate that Invest St. Paul may provide much needed resources to address this issue. Invest St. Paul is a city program that will issue over 25 million dollars in bonds which will be paid off by using roughly 2 million dollars per year of sales tax revenue to focus on key development projects in four neighborhoods (one of which is the North End).

I agree that this could be a positive step towards improving our housing stock and our quality of life. However, as is often said; it is not the plan that is the issue it is the implementation of the plan that matters.