Rebecca Noecker - Saint Paul Ward 2
Name: Rebecca Noecker
Public Office Sought: Saint Paul City Council
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 262-484-3071
Website: www.RebeccaNoecker.com
Twitter Handle: @RebeccaNoecker
Facebook: Rebecca Noecker for City Council
Candidate Bio
I am a proud resident of St. Paul’s West Side, a community builder, an energetic optimist, a wife and a mom to two young sons. Prior to running for office, I worked as a middle school science teacher and a program manager at education non-profits in India and Minneapolis.
I ran for office because I wanted to make St. Paul a place where all our families prosper, all our residents have a place to call home, and where all our young people have access to opportunity. I work hard every day to make sure our neighborhoods are safe and welcoming, our small businesses are thriving and growing great jobs, and that city government is transparent and accountable.
In my first term, I helped launch the Open for Business initiative to support small businesses and the Saint Paul Business Awards program to recognize the local businesses that create jobs and enliven our neighborhoods. I worked to ensure that all workers have paid sick leave and a higher minimum wage. To address our city’s affordable housing crisis, I fought for the creation of the Winter Safe Space emergency shelter and supported the conversion of the Pioneer Press building into workforce housing.
Business climate
1. How would you characterize the business climate in Saint Paul?
We are fortunate to have a healthy and growing business community in St. Paul. Our business leaders are champions for the region, well-networked and deeply engaged in city affairs. New businesses are opening regularly and construction activity is strong. Still, we struggle to overcome the perception that St. Paul and the East Metro are inferior to our western counterparts as locations for major headquarters or for small businesses to open or expand. There is also a persistent sense of distrust between the business community and City Hall. Although I believe we’re moving in the right direction, through our Open for Business initiative, St. Paul Business Awards, a revitalized Business Review Council and the Downtown Alliance, I still think the City has work to do to engage businesses as equal and vital partners in city policy and practice.
2. What role do you think the City should have in attracting and retaining jobs, and what steps would you take to solicit new businesses to, and retain existing businesses in, Saint Paul?
I believe the City needs to take a leadership role in attracting new businesses to St. Paul and keeping them here. We have a number of strong partners - including SPACC, the Downtown Alliance, Greater MSP, the Port Authority and others - interested in helping us do this work, but the City should provide direction and coordination for the joint effort. As a Council member representing downtown and some of our most vibrant commercial corridors, I consider it my responsibility to be an advocate and a champion for our community. I regularly visit local businesses and promote them on social media, I started our Open for Business initiative to make it easier for businesses to navigate city permitting process and I launched our St. Paul Business Awards program as a way of saying “thank you” to the many wonderful businesses that enliven and enrich our neighborhoods.
3. Would you support hiring a business advocate as a member of the city senior staff, to concentrate on business retention and expansion; new business recruitment; and business impact of proposed regulations on the business climate in Saint Paul?
Absolutely. I believe our Business Development Director is the most important position within City Hall when it comes to economic development. However, his current position in the org chart, several levels down within the Planning and Economic Development department, keeps business concerns at a remove from the Mayor’s office and relegates business to a lesser-than position compared to the Mayor’s other priorities.
4. Do you support any other specific employment-related proposals in Saint Paul (such as mandatory scheduling notice)? If so, what specific steps would you take to understand the impact of an increase on the many types of businesses in Saint Paul and how would you define any exceptions to those policies?
I am not supporting any other employment-related proposals at this time. If one were to come forward, I would look very carefully at the pros and cons and speak with SPACC members and other members of the business community to understand the impacts of the policy before deciding whether or not to support it. As the Council member who represents the most businesses in the city, I am very concerned about what I’ve heard from business owners in my ward about the burden they are facing to comply with our Earned Sick and Safe Time and minimum wage ordinances. I believe any policy that impacts business needs to be very carefully scrutinized to make sure the benefit is worth the cost. We also need to be aware of how many regulations we enact in a given period of time, because businesses need time to adjust. It’s not enough to say we support small business on the one hand, and on the other hand, ignore businesses’ legitimate complaints and needs for technical assistance, working capital and breathing room between major policy change.
5. Would you support modifying or repealing the new earned sick and safe time or minimum wage ordinances that apply to the city? If so, how?
I am co-sponsoring an administrative ordinance which will make our enforcement policies for Earned Sick and Safe Time and minimum wage ordinances consistent. It will also require the City to budget adequately for education and outreach to business owners to ensure that they’re aware of the policy requirements and to provide technical assistance to them through the transition. The ordinance will also require the City to conduct an annual economic development study to monitor the effects of these policies on our business climate.
Public safety
6. What is your strategy to address public safety concerns?
A safe and healthy St. Paul is a place where our streets and skyways are vibrant at all times of day, where young people have engaging options for their out-of-school time and where police are responsible to citizens for respectful service. I led the effort to make downtown skyways safer and cleaner and to bring the first Best Buy Teen Tech Center to downtown Saint Paul. I worked with the Chief of Police to create a customer-service survey to hold police officers accountable for the quality and courtesy of their interactions in our neighborhoods and I meet regularly with constituents and law enforcement officers to discuss specific public safety concerns.
Budget
7. What are your priorities for the City’s budget?
My policy priorities are early childhood education, affordable housing and economic development and these are described in more detail below. As for the budget, my priority for this year - after two years of significant levy increases - is to keep new spending to a minimum and to ensure that the dollars we already have are being used efficiently.
To that end, I am co-chairing a work group to examine whether or not to reintroduce the City Council’s ability to investigate City departments and hold them accountable for performance. It’s critical that as we ask people to pay more in taxes, we also show that we are responsible for using every public dollar efficiently. I would like to restore the Council’s ability to lead performance audits of city departments to make sure we are getting the work done in as efficient a manner as possible.
8. How do you view the relationship between commercial and residential property taxes?
Commercial and residential property taxes are interconnected and interdependent. When one receives a tax break, the other pays correspondingly more to meet the total levy amount. When property taxes go up, the share of that tax burden falls harder on commercial than on residential properties because commercial properties are weighted more heavily in Ramsey County’s property value assessment formula. Unlike residential properties, commercial properties generate more in taxes than they take up in services. When the City is able to keep taxes low due to, for example, restored local government aid, both types of properties benefit.
9. What will you do to expand Saint Paul’s tax base?
The key to expanding St. Paul’s tax base is to attract new businesses to St. Paul. As mentioned above, commercial properties are a net gain to our City because they pay more in taxes than they use in services. In addition to the efforts described in response to question 3, I will be using my role on the board of the Downtown Alliance to push that entity to aggressively promote downtown St. Paul and bring our economic development partners together to find and recruit new businesses through a streamlined game plan where every partner knows their role. I’ve been personally involved in shepherding a number of development projects through City processes, including the redevelopment of the Pioneer Press building and the opening of the Keg & Case Market. I am pushing hard for us to make better use of our vacant and developable land, working with the Met Council to release an RFP for an ambitious new development at the Central Station block, for example.
Workforce development
10. How will you work with K-12 and post-secondary educational institutions and businesses to ensure our region develops and retains an educated workforce?
I have spent my career in education and in organizations working on career and college readiness. As Director of Community Engagement at AchieveMpls, the partner of the Minneapolis Public Schools, I built partnerships between businesses and public high schools to help students learn about and prepare for careers - coordinating career fairs, engaging business volunteers as Graduation Coaches and helping students gain access to corporate internships through our STEP-UP summer jobs program. I have been in close communication with SPACC’s workforce development committee and have helped them connect with AchieveMpls to explore a possible partnership for career and college readiness activities in St. Paul. As a Council member, I have been an outspoken advocate for Right Track, the City’s summer jobs program. With my colleague Council member Chris Tolbert, I created an annual Employer Recruitment Breakfast that has netted dozens of new employers and internships over the last three years. I am currently working with a broad coalition of government and non-profit partners on Saint Paul 3K, an effort to ensure that all families in St. Paul have access to high-quality, affordable early childhood education. By making St. Paul the first city in our region to ensure affordable, high-quality early learning starting at the age of 3 for all families, we can attract new employers and young professionals and brand ourselves as a supremely attractive place to locate, hire and work.
11. What do you see as the city council’s role with regard to public schools in Saint Paul?
Public education is at the root of our democracy. Our ability to create a more equitable future, in which St. Paul residents of all backgrounds, races and cultures are able to thrive, understand one another and participate in our democracy, depends entirely on the success of our public education system. Our public schools and our City are based on the same premise - that we all have something to offer and that we do better when we’re together.
I ran for office because I believe the city needs to play a bigger role in the well-being of its children and young people. Our job is not only to build roads, maintain sewer lines, trim trees and approve zoning changes - it’s to recognize how our decisions about land use, affordable housing, policing, parks and rec and library programming can either harm or support our children and to be constantly striving, in partnership with our schools and our educators, to do better for our kids.
I see numerous opportunities for partnership between the City and St. Paul Public Schools - from finding efficiencies by sharing space for youth activities to collectively working to lower residents’ tax burden to ensuring that the City steps up with programming to fill the schedule gaps when SPPS shifts start times to Saint Paul 3K to affordable housing and homelessness prevention - and the list goes on. I am always looking for and open to input from all stakeholders in my Ward, which I try to elicit through the community open meetings described above. Also, the City Council is experimenting this year with a work group structure to take on systems-change issues, including those that require interjurisdictional partnerships, and I think these work groups would be a great place for formal partnership with SPFE, parents, students and other stakeholders.
Other
12. What is the biggest challenge facing the city and how would you address it?
The biggest challenge facing our City is our 22% poverty rate. We simply cannot become the city we dream of and the city we deserve when 1 in 5 of our residents lives below the poverty line. My efforts to increase our supply of affordable housing, raise the minimum wage, attract more businesses to St. Paul and create Saint Paul 3K are all attempts, from different angles, to lift families to prosperity.
13. What would be your top three priorities if elected?
I am running for office to make St. Paul a place where all our families prosper, all our residents have a place to call home, and where all our young people have access to opportunity. I work hard every day to make sure our neighborhoods are safe and welcoming, our small businesses are thriving and growing great jobs, and that city government is transparent and accountable. If I am re-elected, my top priority will be to support working families through the following initiatives:
14. What do you think should be the city’s top transportation related priority?
Data show that the world’s top cities have high quality public transportation systems and millennials have made it clear that transit, as well as excellent biking and walking options, are central to their decisions about where to live, work and visit. It is time to update St. Paul’s transit in a way that will provide access to downtown as well as neighborhoods through safe, convenient, and modern systems. I am a strong advocate for transit investments, such as the Riverview Corridor streetcar project, which will bring people from the airport to downtown, connect workers to jobs at the Mall of America and MSP airport, and make it easy and attractive for visitors to come to St. Paul. I also support infrastructure for electric cars and buses as well as expanded bike lanes throughout the Ward, including completion of the Capital City Bikeway.
15. Are there any services currently provided by the city that you believe should be cut back or eliminated? Or, are there new opportunities to share services with other entities?
I believe there are numerous opportunities for us to partner more closely with our government partners, such as Ramsey County and St. Paul Public Schools. I am chairing the Joint Property Tax Advisory Committee this year and we will be discussing ways in which we can reduce duplication amongst our three entities - because we all draw from the same tax base. As mentioned above, I believe restarting the Council’s ability to audit departments will also allow us to discover inefficiencies in how we’re doing things and to identify services that would be better provided by other partners.
16. Is there anything else you would like to share with voters not covered above?
St. Paul is at a turning point with new opportunities to make our city even more livable, attract more businesses, and foster change that will allow us to compete with the great cities of the world for talent and business development. I have been an active advocate for economic development throughout my ward and I look forward to working with SPACC on building a healthier business climate and a better relationship with City Hall in the future.
Public Office Sought: Saint Paul City Council
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 262-484-3071
Website: www.RebeccaNoecker.com
Twitter Handle: @RebeccaNoecker
Facebook: Rebecca Noecker for City Council
Candidate Bio
I am a proud resident of St. Paul’s West Side, a community builder, an energetic optimist, a wife and a mom to two young sons. Prior to running for office, I worked as a middle school science teacher and a program manager at education non-profits in India and Minneapolis.
I ran for office because I wanted to make St. Paul a place where all our families prosper, all our residents have a place to call home, and where all our young people have access to opportunity. I work hard every day to make sure our neighborhoods are safe and welcoming, our small businesses are thriving and growing great jobs, and that city government is transparent and accountable.
In my first term, I helped launch the Open for Business initiative to support small businesses and the Saint Paul Business Awards program to recognize the local businesses that create jobs and enliven our neighborhoods. I worked to ensure that all workers have paid sick leave and a higher minimum wage. To address our city’s affordable housing crisis, I fought for the creation of the Winter Safe Space emergency shelter and supported the conversion of the Pioneer Press building into workforce housing.
Business climate
1. How would you characterize the business climate in Saint Paul?
We are fortunate to have a healthy and growing business community in St. Paul. Our business leaders are champions for the region, well-networked and deeply engaged in city affairs. New businesses are opening regularly and construction activity is strong. Still, we struggle to overcome the perception that St. Paul and the East Metro are inferior to our western counterparts as locations for major headquarters or for small businesses to open or expand. There is also a persistent sense of distrust between the business community and City Hall. Although I believe we’re moving in the right direction, through our Open for Business initiative, St. Paul Business Awards, a revitalized Business Review Council and the Downtown Alliance, I still think the City has work to do to engage businesses as equal and vital partners in city policy and practice.
2. What role do you think the City should have in attracting and retaining jobs, and what steps would you take to solicit new businesses to, and retain existing businesses in, Saint Paul?
I believe the City needs to take a leadership role in attracting new businesses to St. Paul and keeping them here. We have a number of strong partners - including SPACC, the Downtown Alliance, Greater MSP, the Port Authority and others - interested in helping us do this work, but the City should provide direction and coordination for the joint effort. As a Council member representing downtown and some of our most vibrant commercial corridors, I consider it my responsibility to be an advocate and a champion for our community. I regularly visit local businesses and promote them on social media, I started our Open for Business initiative to make it easier for businesses to navigate city permitting process and I launched our St. Paul Business Awards program as a way of saying “thank you” to the many wonderful businesses that enliven and enrich our neighborhoods.
3. Would you support hiring a business advocate as a member of the city senior staff, to concentrate on business retention and expansion; new business recruitment; and business impact of proposed regulations on the business climate in Saint Paul?
Absolutely. I believe our Business Development Director is the most important position within City Hall when it comes to economic development. However, his current position in the org chart, several levels down within the Planning and Economic Development department, keeps business concerns at a remove from the Mayor’s office and relegates business to a lesser-than position compared to the Mayor’s other priorities.
4. Do you support any other specific employment-related proposals in Saint Paul (such as mandatory scheduling notice)? If so, what specific steps would you take to understand the impact of an increase on the many types of businesses in Saint Paul and how would you define any exceptions to those policies?
I am not supporting any other employment-related proposals at this time. If one were to come forward, I would look very carefully at the pros and cons and speak with SPACC members and other members of the business community to understand the impacts of the policy before deciding whether or not to support it. As the Council member who represents the most businesses in the city, I am very concerned about what I’ve heard from business owners in my ward about the burden they are facing to comply with our Earned Sick and Safe Time and minimum wage ordinances. I believe any policy that impacts business needs to be very carefully scrutinized to make sure the benefit is worth the cost. We also need to be aware of how many regulations we enact in a given period of time, because businesses need time to adjust. It’s not enough to say we support small business on the one hand, and on the other hand, ignore businesses’ legitimate complaints and needs for technical assistance, working capital and breathing room between major policy change.
5. Would you support modifying or repealing the new earned sick and safe time or minimum wage ordinances that apply to the city? If so, how?
I am co-sponsoring an administrative ordinance which will make our enforcement policies for Earned Sick and Safe Time and minimum wage ordinances consistent. It will also require the City to budget adequately for education and outreach to business owners to ensure that they’re aware of the policy requirements and to provide technical assistance to them through the transition. The ordinance will also require the City to conduct an annual economic development study to monitor the effects of these policies on our business climate.
Public safety
6. What is your strategy to address public safety concerns?
A safe and healthy St. Paul is a place where our streets and skyways are vibrant at all times of day, where young people have engaging options for their out-of-school time and where police are responsible to citizens for respectful service. I led the effort to make downtown skyways safer and cleaner and to bring the first Best Buy Teen Tech Center to downtown Saint Paul. I worked with the Chief of Police to create a customer-service survey to hold police officers accountable for the quality and courtesy of their interactions in our neighborhoods and I meet regularly with constituents and law enforcement officers to discuss specific public safety concerns.
Budget
7. What are your priorities for the City’s budget?
My policy priorities are early childhood education, affordable housing and economic development and these are described in more detail below. As for the budget, my priority for this year - after two years of significant levy increases - is to keep new spending to a minimum and to ensure that the dollars we already have are being used efficiently.
To that end, I am co-chairing a work group to examine whether or not to reintroduce the City Council’s ability to investigate City departments and hold them accountable for performance. It’s critical that as we ask people to pay more in taxes, we also show that we are responsible for using every public dollar efficiently. I would like to restore the Council’s ability to lead performance audits of city departments to make sure we are getting the work done in as efficient a manner as possible.
8. How do you view the relationship between commercial and residential property taxes?
Commercial and residential property taxes are interconnected and interdependent. When one receives a tax break, the other pays correspondingly more to meet the total levy amount. When property taxes go up, the share of that tax burden falls harder on commercial than on residential properties because commercial properties are weighted more heavily in Ramsey County’s property value assessment formula. Unlike residential properties, commercial properties generate more in taxes than they take up in services. When the City is able to keep taxes low due to, for example, restored local government aid, both types of properties benefit.
9. What will you do to expand Saint Paul’s tax base?
The key to expanding St. Paul’s tax base is to attract new businesses to St. Paul. As mentioned above, commercial properties are a net gain to our City because they pay more in taxes than they use in services. In addition to the efforts described in response to question 3, I will be using my role on the board of the Downtown Alliance to push that entity to aggressively promote downtown St. Paul and bring our economic development partners together to find and recruit new businesses through a streamlined game plan where every partner knows their role. I’ve been personally involved in shepherding a number of development projects through City processes, including the redevelopment of the Pioneer Press building and the opening of the Keg & Case Market. I am pushing hard for us to make better use of our vacant and developable land, working with the Met Council to release an RFP for an ambitious new development at the Central Station block, for example.
Workforce development
10. How will you work with K-12 and post-secondary educational institutions and businesses to ensure our region develops and retains an educated workforce?
I have spent my career in education and in organizations working on career and college readiness. As Director of Community Engagement at AchieveMpls, the partner of the Minneapolis Public Schools, I built partnerships between businesses and public high schools to help students learn about and prepare for careers - coordinating career fairs, engaging business volunteers as Graduation Coaches and helping students gain access to corporate internships through our STEP-UP summer jobs program. I have been in close communication with SPACC’s workforce development committee and have helped them connect with AchieveMpls to explore a possible partnership for career and college readiness activities in St. Paul. As a Council member, I have been an outspoken advocate for Right Track, the City’s summer jobs program. With my colleague Council member Chris Tolbert, I created an annual Employer Recruitment Breakfast that has netted dozens of new employers and internships over the last three years. I am currently working with a broad coalition of government and non-profit partners on Saint Paul 3K, an effort to ensure that all families in St. Paul have access to high-quality, affordable early childhood education. By making St. Paul the first city in our region to ensure affordable, high-quality early learning starting at the age of 3 for all families, we can attract new employers and young professionals and brand ourselves as a supremely attractive place to locate, hire and work.
11. What do you see as the city council’s role with regard to public schools in Saint Paul?
Public education is at the root of our democracy. Our ability to create a more equitable future, in which St. Paul residents of all backgrounds, races and cultures are able to thrive, understand one another and participate in our democracy, depends entirely on the success of our public education system. Our public schools and our City are based on the same premise - that we all have something to offer and that we do better when we’re together.
I ran for office because I believe the city needs to play a bigger role in the well-being of its children and young people. Our job is not only to build roads, maintain sewer lines, trim trees and approve zoning changes - it’s to recognize how our decisions about land use, affordable housing, policing, parks and rec and library programming can either harm or support our children and to be constantly striving, in partnership with our schools and our educators, to do better for our kids.
I see numerous opportunities for partnership between the City and St. Paul Public Schools - from finding efficiencies by sharing space for youth activities to collectively working to lower residents’ tax burden to ensuring that the City steps up with programming to fill the schedule gaps when SPPS shifts start times to Saint Paul 3K to affordable housing and homelessness prevention - and the list goes on. I am always looking for and open to input from all stakeholders in my Ward, which I try to elicit through the community open meetings described above. Also, the City Council is experimenting this year with a work group structure to take on systems-change issues, including those that require interjurisdictional partnerships, and I think these work groups would be a great place for formal partnership with SPFE, parents, students and other stakeholders.
Other
12. What is the biggest challenge facing the city and how would you address it?
The biggest challenge facing our City is our 22% poverty rate. We simply cannot become the city we dream of and the city we deserve when 1 in 5 of our residents lives below the poverty line. My efforts to increase our supply of affordable housing, raise the minimum wage, attract more businesses to St. Paul and create Saint Paul 3K are all attempts, from different angles, to lift families to prosperity.
13. What would be your top three priorities if elected?
I am running for office to make St. Paul a place where all our families prosper, all our residents have a place to call home, and where all our young people have access to opportunity. I work hard every day to make sure our neighborhoods are safe and welcoming, our small businesses are thriving and growing great jobs, and that city government is transparent and accountable. If I am re-elected, my top priority will be to support working families through the following initiatives:
- Saint Paul 3K - a city-led effort to ensure that all families in St. Paul have access to high-quality, affordable early childhood education
- Affordable housing - I am exploring policies that will allow greater infill density, reduce the cost of new affordable housing and make it easier for low-income residents to own their own homes.
- Economic development - Despite the success of our Open for Business initiative, we still have a long way to go to make it easier for small business owners to navigate our City permitting processes, open and expand. I’m especially interested in the creation of a working capital fund to help small businesses adapt to changing economic and regulatory environments and weather hard times.
14. What do you think should be the city’s top transportation related priority?
Data show that the world’s top cities have high quality public transportation systems and millennials have made it clear that transit, as well as excellent biking and walking options, are central to their decisions about where to live, work and visit. It is time to update St. Paul’s transit in a way that will provide access to downtown as well as neighborhoods through safe, convenient, and modern systems. I am a strong advocate for transit investments, such as the Riverview Corridor streetcar project, which will bring people from the airport to downtown, connect workers to jobs at the Mall of America and MSP airport, and make it easy and attractive for visitors to come to St. Paul. I also support infrastructure for electric cars and buses as well as expanded bike lanes throughout the Ward, including completion of the Capital City Bikeway.
15. Are there any services currently provided by the city that you believe should be cut back or eliminated? Or, are there new opportunities to share services with other entities?
I believe there are numerous opportunities for us to partner more closely with our government partners, such as Ramsey County and St. Paul Public Schools. I am chairing the Joint Property Tax Advisory Committee this year and we will be discussing ways in which we can reduce duplication amongst our three entities - because we all draw from the same tax base. As mentioned above, I believe restarting the Council’s ability to audit departments will also allow us to discover inefficiencies in how we’re doing things and to identify services that would be better provided by other partners.
16. Is there anything else you would like to share with voters not covered above?
St. Paul is at a turning point with new opportunities to make our city even more livable, attract more businesses, and foster change that will allow us to compete with the great cities of the world for talent and business development. I have been an active advocate for economic development throughout my ward and I look forward to working with SPACC on building a healthier business climate and a better relationship with City Hall in the future.