In the span of two weeks in the summer of 2017, Melvin Carter laid to rest the beloved grandfather who had been his namesake, missed winning the St. Paul DFL endorsement for mayor by about two dozen votes, and married his second wife in a destination wedding in Mexico. Carter, then the father of two young daughters, suddenly had three more stepchildren. There were more surprises to come. On an unseasonably chilly Tuesday that November, the 38-year-old former St. Paul City Council member — then known as Melvin Carter III — would win the 10-way mayor’s race with 50.86% of the vote, stepping into the national spotlight as both the first Black mayor and youngest mayor in St. Paul history. He was arguably its most progressive. It wouldn’t be long before Carter would go on to have a newborn son in March 2020, a difficult time for a nation caught in the grip of a pandemic and on the verge of racially tinged riots following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Carter, in a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday, reflected on his two terms in office, his surprise defeat in November and the state of the city. In his first term, Carter, a DFLer, wasted no time early on rolling out a municipal agenda that pushed boundaries on the city’s social priorities. But his second term would be overshadowed by concerns around the city’s rent control ordinance, rising property taxes, and a downtown left in disarray by the departure of remote workers and the implosion of Madison Equities, downtown’s largest property owner. Neighborhood issues have ranged from shuttered grocers to criticism over a proposed Summit Avenue bikeway. In August, with the mayor still dealing with the fallout of a cybersecurity attack that crippled many city services, state Rep. Kaohly Her became a surprise entrant in the five-way mayor’s race. She technically came in second on election night, garnering 38.4% of the vote to Carter’s 40.83%, but reallocation of ballots in the ranked-choice election saw her gain almost 10 percentage points, for a final split of 47.76% to 44.98%. Her, the city’s first Hmong mayor and first female mayor, will be sworn into office on Jan. 2. The Pioneer Press sat down with Carter recently to discuss his time in office. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity: Q: Let’s talk about election night. There was obvious voter frustration with things like Lunds closing downtown or Cub Foods closing in the Midway, but a lot of people still didn’t expect an incumbent mayor to lose to a challenger who had just declared in August. Were you surprised? What do you think voters were responding to? A: We were expecting it to be close. I was expecting it to be very close. You know, there’s a lot of anxiety in the world right now. There’s certainly a lot of anxiety with property taxes despite the fact that St. Paul probably has one of the lowest increases that you can find anywhere near the metro area. Some of the devaluations downtown, that creates sort of a whiplash effect on our property taxes. I’ve governed through maybe a handful of the largest crises the city’s ever gone through and there’s just a general sense on the planet of, “Let’s figure out how to turn a new leaf.” I definitely heard and felt a lot of angst. This notion that we as a city need to do something new, I think that it’s on a wider timeline, right? I think we need to do something newer than what we’ve done for the past couple of generations, not just the past couple of years. But I came in office because I trusted the voters of the city, and I have to trust the voters of the city. This city will keep pushing and we’ll all keep pushing forward. At the same time, you know, one of the things that I’m proud of was the things that I couldn’t get our city to talk about during Election Day, and during this campaign cycle. I couldn’t get anybody’s attention to gun violence this past election cycle, which is a fantastic thing. It hasn’t been that long when all of our attention was only on gun violence, but folks aren’t really worried about gun violence right now. We’ve had elections in the past couple years where all anybody was talking about was trash. We switched over every single household to a new trash hauler in the last year, and now nobody talks about trash. We couldn’t get the city to talk about how well we handled the cyberattack, because nobody was worried about how well we handled the cyberattack. Just a couple of years ago, the only conversation we were having in this city was about potholes and infrastructure, and we couldn’t get anybody to talk about the progress that we’ve made around potholes and infrastructure, because we’ve made so much progress. So, you know, I’m really proud of the way that we’ve taken on the big things that were kind of holding this city hostage, and figured out how to check them off the list. And let me tell you, I think pretty soon we’re going to see that downtown was one of those things as well, because the Downtown Alliance (partnership with downtown employers) that we built, and the Downtown Development Corporation that came out of that, the investment that we’re seeing downtown, and the plan that we all built together is full steam ahead. I think we’re going to see very quickly that we’ve positioned ourselves to be on offense. Q: The mayor-elect and others had said that they didn’t think you were campaigning enough — there just weren’t enough Carter signs. Did you start too late? A: We certainly got a late start. The plan was to cannonball into the campaign pool once we got the budget done. The great joy of being mayor means you spend all summer locked in budget conversations hours and hours every day. Obviously, that didn’t happen that way, because we found ourselves battling a cyberattack. We found ourselves battling Donald Trump in a series of lawsuits over city funding. And the truth is, I’ve never been a mayor who has let governing take a backseat to politics. The work of the mayor didn’t slow down because it was an election year, and if I had that to do over, I’d manage the cyberattack all over again. Q: Let’s talk about your first term. When you came into office in 2018, you hired Concordia University professor Bruce Corrie as director of Planning and Economic Development, and you said at the time it was because of his focus on neighborhood-scale development, as opposed to large stadiums and huge projects. Fast forward eight years, and I think both your biggest fans and your biggest critics would agree that some of your legacy is the big projects like the Heights, Highland Bridge, maybe getting the ball rolling on a possible $400 million to $700 million renovation of Grand Casino Arena. It’s a shift from where you started, isn’t it? A: I think if we rewind eight years, maybe the biggest distinction between me and everybody else who ran in 2017 was around the Ford Plant. My argument was ultimately that we have got to do something different than what we’ve done generationally. My argument was I didn’t think we could afford to artificially limit the density or artificially limit the jobs or the housing or anything else that was the tax base that we were building. It was strange to me that some of the folks who call themselves the corporate, private-sector folks didn’t go with me on that argument, but I think that’s an example of the kinds of paradoxes that we’ve given ourselves to try to have to navigate. I don’t think I experienced it as a difference or as a shift. You know, we’ve certainly focused on Selby Avenue. We’ve certainly focused on neighborhood commercial corridors, on trying to make sure that we’re funding local developers and developing local developers. We’ve invested in the Rondo Land Trust and Inheritance Fund and a lot of those kind of things. I don’t think I ever told anybody that I wasn’t focused on the big things or that it wasn’t important to get those major developments right. Obviously downtown, the ground did shift significantly, and that’s one of the things we have to think about differently. The downtown I grew up in was centered around department stores, office buildings and the Xcel Energy Center. The internet impacted department stores. The internet impacted office buildings. The pandemic impacted, all over the globe, both of those. And so that leaves us with the Xcel Energy Center. So to me, my mental construct is, let’s make sure that we lock that in for the next generation as a centerpiece for our downtown. It’s something that we do well. We shouldn’t take it for granted. We ought to push the envelope on that. And let’s add another pillar being housing in our downtown. Downtown changed significantly in ways that were impacting all of our property taxes and the whole economics of the entire city, and frankly, will even more if we don’t address that very soon. Q: What else did you learn in your eight years as mayor about the city and its citizens? A: I think one of the biggest “ahas” for me, I get excited when we get a chance to propose things. We sort of had to check the thesaurus to see, wait a minute, can a city do this? From the Inheritance Fund to college savings accounts to forgiving medical debt, those are the things that make people the happiest, and those are the things that make people the maddest. I always tell my team, most people when they say they’re changing something, they mean they’re taking whatever is the thing we’ve always done and doing a little bit more of it, or doing a little bit less of it, not fundamentally changing the value proposition. I would argue that we fundamentally changed the value proposition for literally every single city department in a way that I’m really proud of. One of the big “ahas” for me has been realizing all of the ways in which the systems, the policies and the processes that we inherit in City Hall and maybe all across the public sector end up built on a foundational distrust in the people who we serve. We look at them and say, “Why don’t they trust city government more? Why don’t they trust county government more? Why don’t they trust state government more?” It’s because they’re surrounded by signs and signals all day long that we don’t trust them. So that’s been a key theme of the work that we try to do. Q: What was the biggest surprise you had about city government once you became mayor? A: The biggest surprise was how much we could do. If you had told me in 2018 or 2017 that we’d be able to point to medical debt work and college savings accounts, and all the different things that we’ve done across this city — the guaranteed income work that we’ve not only done in St. Paul, but led across the country, simple stuff like eliminating fines in the libraries for youth sports, like a 70% decrease in gun violence throughout our “Community First Public Safety” frame. I don’t know that I’d have believed that we would have been able to get all that done. I guess the biggest two surprises: nobody expected all the crises that we ended up having to lead through over the last eight years, and just how impactful city government could be in people’s lives and and our own systems. Q: There were definitely surprises. I was not expecting to sit through online kindergarten with my child in 2020. A: You had it worse than we did, because we had the baby. You know at that point, we had to feed her and burp her and change her, and then she goes back to sleep. And then we had the teenagers who didn’t want me involved in their life at all. We’d be doing this meeting, and they’d be sitting at the tables doing homework. Q: You tried to push the envelope on what cities traditionally focused on. Not everybody got on board, but is that the Melvin Carter legacy? In a Wikipedia entry, or however we record mayoral legacies in the future, when people go, “Carter, comma, who was known for blank, blank and blank, served from this year to that year ….” How will they fill in the blanks? A: I’d like it to be “Carter, comma, who was known for something he did after his 47th birthday ….” I’m still a young guy, right? The Common Cents sales tax is a big deal. Us being able to say, together, we’re going to invest a billion dollars over the next 20 years in our infrastructure. If you look at what we used to say when we were building light rail on University Avenue, if you look at a map of the United States, you can see the shadow of where the railroads once were, and that’s because where we build quality infrastructure, that’s the strongest signal to the private sector that this is a place that you ought to invest. And that’s one of the reasons why we came into office in year one, in the first budget, we said, you know what? Let’s put downtown on a path to repave every single street downtown so it looks and feels like a place that somebody would come and invest $100 million. Our parks and our rec centers and our buildings and things like that, the deferred maintenance in those buildings had them looking and feeling like places that may not have been my first choice to bring my child and bring my family. And so those investments are going to be as, I think, major as anything that we’ve ever done. I think that’s going to be important. I would argue that around our work to make youth sports free. There’s families I hear from who say, “I don’t have to choose between food and football anymore.” I think St. Paul gave the whole country a whole new playbook on economic justice and just what equity is through the Inheritance Fund. I can’t find anybody in the country who’s doing anything even comparable to what we’re doing through the Inheritance Fund, not only for Rondo, but also for our West Side Flats neighborhoods. I think some of those things are really important, but at the core, I think what we try to do is say let’s find out what happens if you really authentically engaged people in the governance process. I’m really, really proud of how we’ve done the stuff we’ve done, starting from the community hiring panels to the budget games that we’ve hosted every single year to the task forces on, you know, this, that or the other thing that we’ve just kind of kept launching, whether it’s college savings accounts or trash or anything else. We’ve increased the city’s credit rating, and that’s something that I think is nerdy-important in a way that a lot of folks don’t kind of think about. Or the other piece, and this could be a part of the fatigue as well, one of the things that we tried to do is identify the conversations that we’ve kicked down the road, identify the conversations that feel like, what are we supposed to do about that? And tackle that head on. I think in my first summer as mayor, one of the TV channels did a did a report card on me, and they did one on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and I remember them giving me, I think, a C for infrastructure. I remember thinking, “What do you want me to do in six months, change the state of our infrastructure in the city?” But complaining about potholes is our birthright as St. Paul residents, right? And that feels like something that’s so big. We decided to take it head on. In the height of the pandemic, when we saw the number of unsheltered residents increased by a factor of 10 in just a couple of weeks, the city had never had any infrastructure to address unsheltered homelessness, literally never had any infrastructure to do it. And frankly, that isn’t something that, I think before then, folks would sort of look at and say that’s the city’s job. But it was a need that was created. So I think one of the strongest things that we’ve been able to do is engage people in the governance process, which is what supercharged us and enabled us to move as fast as we have and to do as many things that we’ve done, and gave us an impatience and a courage to try to tackle the things that feel like monsters under the bed. My goal from the beginning is I didn’t want to pass those on to my successor. Infrastructure is one we don’t want to pass on. The deferred maintenance particularly in our parks buildings, is one we wanted to pass on a funding stream to address some of those things. I credit it to the sense of urgency, the impatience and the creativity that comes into City Hall when neighbors walk into City Hall. Q: Is there specific advice you’d give to Mayor Her? A: I always say, trust the city. I said it on election night. That has to be more than just a rallying cry, or more than a willingness to accept the outcomes of an election. That’s got to be around building your Cabinet. That’s got to be around building your budget, and bringing folks in. That’s got to be around making policy like fine-free libraries that trust the city, but it’s also centered around being willing to have tough conversations. I’ve been reflecting a lot lately as we were kind of closing out the campaign — we’re a city of self-imposed paradoxes in a lot of ways. We want as much economic development as possible. We want as vibrant and thriving a city as we can get, without anybody ever parking on the curb in front of our home. We want as much economic development and housing as possible, without anything being built over three stories near my home. It’s a third rail to say what I’m about to say: “Your mayor can’t say this.” For all the conversations that we’ve had for the need for more street-level vitality downtown, we’re also unwilling to even discuss the possibility of taking down that whole big infrastructure that we’ve built to make sure nobody ever has to walk on the street downtown. I’m talking about our skyways. We’ve created a number of paradoxes for ourselves that we’re not going to be able to navigate around as a city. I think it’s really important to have leaders engage us in those trade-offs and not just tell us what we want to hear. At some point — and this involves bike lanes as well — we have to build our city for a lot more people. The goal really is to build our city in a way that can accommodate more people than the number of single-occupancy vehicles that can travel down Summit, or that can travel down University, or that can travel down even I-94, or that can park in our downtown. Some of those things that feel really controversial to us, we are going to have to decide as a community how we balance our allegiance to preserving the city our grandparents love and building the city our children deserve. Q: Let me ask you about working with the deputy mayor. Early on, it became pretty apparent that Jaime Tincher was going to be extremely hands-on. There’s a joke that if someone is going to change the printer paper, Tincher wants to be there to pick it. When the homeless encampments grew on Kellogg Mall Park across from City Hall, it was Tincher going into people’s tents and talking to them one-on-one about their options. She said at the time, “This is the hardest policy space I’ve ever encountered.” There were critics of that quality. There were department heads that felt some of their projects went to her desk to die, and that it created some remove between them and the mayor, or between the public and the mayor. Was too much delegated to the deputy mayor? A: When I was on the city council, my greatest frustrations with Mayor Chris Coleman were always when he wouldn’t drop everything and just focus on the one thing that I was focused on at the time. And one of the things that I’ve learned, and it’s kind of a joke between us — every time I see Chris Coleman, I say, “Hey, sorry, I didn’t know” — one of the things I didn’t realize is the mayor never gets to focus on one thing at a given time. We’ve been really fortunate to have in the deputy mayor the most gifted crisis manager I’ve ever met, and the most gifted multi-tasker that I’ve ever known. I’ve always said my goal is to hire someone smarter than me. Q: What will you do after you leave the mayor’s office? Do you think you’ll run for office again? A: I’ll chaperone field trips. I honestly don’t really know. I’ll take a break for some period of time. I’ve never been really good at sitting still. I don’t expect to sit still for long. … I’m going to run my fastest marathon in my life. That’s my top priority for the next year. Q: You’re not running for county board? A: I’m not running for county board, no, as tempting as it looks. (Laughs) Q: I have to ask you: the rumor we keep hearing is Gov. Tim Walz asked you to be his running mate for lieutenant governor. A: Where are you hearing that? (Laughs) Gov. Walz and I have never discussed that. Q: How about vice president of the United States? A: He did tell me he thinks we need a new president. I don’t know what he was alluding to. (Laughs) Q: Hindsight being 20/20, is there something you could have done differently as mayor? A: I don’t necessarily do regrets. I think our goal from the beginning, and it’s what I said on Election Day, probably the week before we got elected, I told my wife, “We could probably maintain the status quo and hold this office forever, or we could push the limits of what this office can do, we can push the limits of what city government can do and know that we have to fight for our lives every time an election comes around.” There was no question of what our approach would be. My approach to political capital is to use it, not to store it up to save it. We very intentionally created uncomfortable conversations for this city, because our comfort zone is the problem. Mike Tyson once said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. We didn’t create a plan that said, “we’re going to do COVID and the murder of George Floyd and a major cyberattack.” There were whole chapters of the last eight years that took us out of our regularly scheduled program. Someone told me recently the mayor-elect is going to find out how hard this is. I told them, you know what? I hope no mayor in the entire future of St. Paul ever has any context for what these last eight years have been and all the crises that we’ve had to manage, from natural disasters to a 100-year pandemic to an an attack from our own federal government. My hope is that the city never has to manage that convergence of factors ever again. Q: As you leave office, how do you see the city’s trajectory? Are there legitimate concerns about St. Paul’s future? A: I see the city’s trajectory really strong. We’ve wrapped a plan around our downtown. That’s absolutely, critically important. We are building housing across our city. We are rebuilding our infrastructure across our city. And we have operationalized the public safety plan that is competent at not just responding to crime, but at literally reducing and preventing crime in the first place. We’ve got an enormous amount of investment coming into our city, whether it’s downtown or in neighborhood sites across our city. There seems to be a convergence of factors that suggests St. Paul has weathered a really tough storm and that it’s spring time. Related Articles Joe Soucheray: Ho, ho, ho, merry TIFness! Letters: Rage rear-ended by hope in the middle of a St. Paul intersection St. Paul: Mayor Melvin Carter, Russ Stark, Fire Chief Inks honored Joe Spencer: St. Paul’s budget signals bold push for a stronger downtown Former St. Paul fire station, part of ‘community for generations,’ reopens on West 7th Street ...read more read less