Who I'm Reading Today

Posted by naomikritzer

https://naomikritzer.com/2025/10/09/election-2025-saint-paul-mayoral-race/

http://naomikritzer.com/?p=24687

The incumbent, Melvin Carter, is running again and is endorsed by the DFL. On the ballot:

Melvin Carter (incumbent)
Kaohly Her
Yan Chen
Adam Dullinger
Mike Hilborn

This is a ranked-choice election and St. Paul lets you rank five candidates, so you can literally rate these candidates in order of preference, if you want.

I need to get this done ASAP: it’s my last post and I’m about to leave town. I’ve been having trouble getting motivated to do this one for reasons that are summed up well in a conversation I had tonight with my father. He asked me when I was going to do the St. Paul mayoral race and I told him I was working on it. I then told him that the only person with any real shot at beating Melvin was Kaohly Her, and he grabbed a pen to write down the name. Bad news for people who hate Melvin: if, a month out from the election, reasonably politically engaged St. Paul residents are not even aware of the name of Melvin’s main opponent, this is not much of a contest.

I mean, get out there and vote, please, whether you love Melvin or hate him or feel “eh, I mean, he’s okay?” about him, because we need your votes on the two ballot questions (vote yes on both).

tl;dr I’m going to vote for Melvin. If you don’t like Melvin you should rank Kaohly Her and Yan Chen.

Mike Hilborn

Mike Hilborn owns an exterior services business that does stuff like powerwashing. I e-mailed him to ask him if he had any endorsements or any governance experience (like, had he ever served on a city board or committee or a county advisory board or attended city council meetings as an observer)? He does not. “I do not have any endorsements.  I don’t seek them.  Endorsements come with strings to promote their agenda.  My agenda is to lower taxes, crime and homelessness.  I do not have any government experience.  I have spent the last 30 years focused on growing my business.  We are a second chance employer with 45 employees.  I’m at the point in my career where I have time to see if can save our city.  I believe my business experience is what is required to fix Saint Paul.”

I disagree that running a small business is (all by itself) adequate preparation for the job of mayor. (I also don’t know that Melvin Carter would be qualified to take over a 45-employee exterior services business. At the very least I would have a bunch of questions about whether he’s run a small business in the past and how much he knows about power washing; his Wikipedia entry does not lead me to believe that he has any relevant experience in that area.)

He also had Republican vibes and sure enough, Open Secrets showed donations to Tim Pawlenty and the Minnesota GOP. He also gave a rousing defense of ICE at one of the forums. I would not rank Hilborn.

Adam Dullinger

Adam is an engineer (he makes firefighting equipment, I think for this company) and has no endorsements or political experience. He is very earnest (though he got scolded at a mayoral forum for his lack of civility) and given his genuine interests in city design particularly as it applies to bikes, I think he should consider applying to one of the the city advisory boards. (Among other things, I genuinely think this would be a better fit for the information deep dives he wants to do than the mayor’s job.) I do not think he’s qualified to be mayor, though I’d take him over Mike.

Yan Chen

Yan Chen is a retired science professor who ran for City Council in 2023. Last time she picked up a second-choice endorsement from a labor coalition, and this time she’s co-endorsed with Kaohly by former City Council rep Jane Prince. When I asked her about her governance experience, she said that she had attended City Council meetings multiple times, had visited every district council, was a board member of Summit University District Council until she withdrew to run for office, and is a community board member for a public charter school (Career Pathways). That’s actually pretty solid from a “does this person have any real idea what this sort of job entails” perspective.

She really loves to post videos and I really hate to watch videos but I watched enough to be reassured that she is not secretly a Republican despite her focus on property taxes. I am unconvinced that she’d do a better job than Melvin, but if you’re unhappy and feeling like you want a change (any change) she’s worth ranking.

Kaohly Her

Kaohly Her is a State House Rep for 64A (a section of the middle of the western part of the city). She did an interview with WedgeLive and my primary takeaway from it is that she’d do basically the same stuff Melvin is doing but she’s pretty sure she’d do it better.

Asked about the Summit Trail thing, she said the process was flawed, which … I don’t know, honestly, I feel like there are some real problems with the communication around that project but I don’t think that means that the project is a bad idea. (I wrote about this project in my Ward 4 post a few months ago, here.) The way she talks about this project makes me worry that she will cave to pressure from NIMBYs to the detriment of everyone in St. Paul. She also talked about this bike trail like it’s an amenity for the people who live on Summit. It’s really not; the whole point of a regional trail is to provide a really good, pleasant, well-maintained trail that people can use for both recreational travel and bike commuting and Summit is terrific for this for anyone who needs to get between downtown and the river and a ton of people use Summit (for driving, biking, and walking) as their preferred route just because it’s nice. (This was the thing Adam got scolded over, incidentally; he said her answer was bullshit.)

That said: she would bring good relationships with the legislature and she clearly has the experience to do the job. I like her fine and she’d probably be a reasonably decent mayor. I’m just really not convinced she’d actually do better than Melvin.

Melvin Carter

Melvin’s WedgeLive interview is also worth watching or listening to. He has one really interesting moment where he talks about how one of the aspects of unidentified, masked ICE officers is that we had a political assassination in this state a few months back committed by a masked guy pretending to be law enforcement.

Melvin has done an outstanding job on one particular thing, which is gun violence in St. Paul — basically he worked with the police department to have them investigate non-fatal shootings with the same energy they bring to murders. This has made a massive difference in the number of shootings. I’m also happy with what he’s done with municipal garbage collection. Homeless encampments in St. Paul are dealt with by an outreach team and while they pop up from time to time this is more or less what I think most Minneapolis advocates would say is the right way to deal with encampments. (I ran searches in the Minneapolis and St. Paul subreddits to see how much people are talking about encampments and in St. Paul they mostly just are not, which is funny given that r/stpaul really hates Melvin and thinks he sucks. Or at least that’s the direction of the threads on the mayoral race.)

St. Paul’s downtown is ailing but it’s dealing with the central problem of downtowns everywhere, a reduced in-office work force. Property taxes are high, and this is a problem that is largely created by the fact that huge sections of St. Paul are owned by the government (because it’s the state capital) or a large nonprofit organization (we’ve got a truly ridiculous number of colleges) and are thus not taxable; the fall in commercial property values in downtown is a major contributing factor and this not a problem that’s going to get solved as quickly as would be nice. It’s annoying to start a business in St. Paul (Minneapolis has this same issue) and they should rethink some of the regulations; I’ll put that on Melvin. Kaohly Her says that Cub says that nobody at City Hall took their calls; Melvin says this is bullshit (except he was more polite about it than Adam) and that they complained a lot about shoplifting but then never called 911 when it was actually happening.

Fundamentally I think Melvin has done a pretty good job of fixing the stuff that he could fix. In the coming four years (because as noted, I think he’s going to win) I hope he’ll bring some of that energy to dealing with the Snelling-University vacant CVS (is that a pet peeve of mine? I mean yeah but I think it pisses off everyone who regularly passes that intersection. Seriously, what the hell) and those vacant buildings on Grand that the Ohio teacher’s retirement fund is basically just sitting on and leaving empty.

A final strategic note: Melvin’s father was a cop, and it’s pretty clear that he has a good relationship with the SPPD, enough that he was able to get them to aggressively investigate non-fatal shootings. In the current political environment, I can think of worse things than a progressive mayor who can successfully tell the cops to do stuff.

Anyway, I am currently planning to rank Melvin #1 (and Kaohly #2, and Yan Chen #3, even though I don’t think those rankings will matter.) If you’re unhappy with Melvin, I think Kaohly would make a fine mayor.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

https://naomikritzer.com/2025/10/09/election-2025-saint-paul-mayoral-race/

http://naomikritzer.com/?p=24687