30 September 2023
Just two months ago, in a front-page story in this newspaper, we learned that St. Paul and Ramsey County officials, along with the St. Paul Downtown Alliance, were calling for more workers to return downtown. The COVID pandemic invented new ways to work, hybrid, flex, remote and Zoom. A ghostliness had settled over downtown, giving a whole new meaning to the old saw about shooting off a cannon at 5 p.m. and not hitting anybody.
Even a professional curmudgeon knows that we will never return to the halcyon days of bustle and honking horns and newspapers hawked on the corner. And we don’t expect the old Christmas tinsel spread across Wabasha Street.
This is about money, as in city, state, county and federal workers not putting theirs where their mouth is. We have our own version of the Fermi Paradox.
Having lunch one day in the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, a physicist, asked a bunch of other smart guys at the table, “Where is everybody?”
By which Fermi, intrigued by UFO reports and the vastness of the universe, was certain of extraterrestrial life.
“Why don’t they come calling?”
We know there are people in St. Paul, many of whom work for the state and city. Where are they? Even the mayor apparently uses his office in City Hall only infrequently.
Come on, you people. Get back to work. If you don’t and commercial properties fail, then the city ups the taxes on homeowners to make up the difference. Our property taxes are already punitive.
I called the city’s communications director, Peter Leggett. I called for additional information. Maybe Leggett is no longer in that role. Melvin Carter’s numerous Cabinet members can bounce from job to job. Just not downtown, apparently.
I emailed outgoing Council Member Jane Prince, who will be missed. She has always been a cheerful and prompt correspondent. I wondered if city employees were still absent.
Prince wrote that the council staff came back in January 2022. Council members work their own schedules. Fridays are hybrid days with a skeleton crew and staff can work at home, she said.
The mayor’s administration is not back, or back on a hybrid or voluntary basis. Front-line workers, cops, firefighters, public works, libraries, are back. We have hoped so. Tough to plow a street from your living room.
In a second email, I asked Prince if the mayor’s Cabinet, specifically, was back.
“I see few mayoral staff on the third floor,’’ she wrote, “where we would see each other post-covid.’’
Prince also noted that the Downtown Building Owners and Managers Association pleaded with the city in June to bring staff back at least three days a week, and begged the governor to do the same. However, the state has reported that it plans to consolidate its staff near the Capitol, and will likely end long-time leases in downtown St. Paul buildings.
Great. Unfortunately, we know what that means.
Fermi never pleaded. He was just ahead of his time. Where is everybody?
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected]. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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