Budget Committee - June 17, 2026   6/17/2026

St Paul, City Council, Budget Committee, Budget Committee

City of St Paul, City Council

St Paul, City Council

Chair Johnson.

Council Member Bui.

Here.

Council Member Coleman.

Here.

Council Member Kim.

Here.

Council Member Jones.

Here.

Here.

Okay, so we have two presentations today.

First up is the presentation on

The presentation of the tree canopy and right track program.

So we'll start off, I guess, is it tree forestry?

The budget in front of me is missing my item.

But we'll go first with the forestry presentation.

Welcome, Rachel.

And is it John Ward?

John Ward.

John Ward.

Thank you.

Hello, Ms. John Ward.

I'm good.

How are you doing?

Good.

Thank you for having me today, council members, to talk about our forestry budget.

I'm going to give you a brief outlook on where we are currently and where we'll be in the future based on our current budget and an optimal budget.

And I will rely on my notes so I apologize if I'm looking down a lot.

Okay, so I thought it was important to start with kind of who we are and what we do in forestry.

During budget presentations and a lot of the City Council presentations, I understand that you typically will see the big bucket items of pruning, tree removal, and planting.

But I wanted to point out some of the other important work that we do in forestry.

Grant management is one big thing.

We currently have three grants that we are managing.

in the Forestry Division with the U.S. Forest Service and the DNR.

We host events such as Arbor Day and we have a small team of volunteers called the Tree Stewarts who do pruning and planting for us.

We currently have one urban forester who reviews all public construction and development projects in St. Paul, including anything that Public Works is doing, Ramsey County, MnDOT, St. Paul Regional Water Service, and then all of the private development.

That individual provides feedback and requirements for tree preservation and removals, tree planting, etc.

Our crews also help with those projects by pruning trees in advance as much as our capacity for that work allows.

Often those projects are planted by our contractor with forestry oversight.

Storm response is another big thing that forestry does.

I know you probably know over the last week we've had several small storms.

That work has generated

Well over 200 calls to our office for trees that are down, trees, tree branches that are down.

So we've been working through all of that.

And I think it's worth noting that the storm response is something that is entirely unbudgeted for forestry.

So where we are with budgets and then pressures in the general fund we did have a small increase in 2025 of $500,000 otherwise my understanding going back you know a couple of decades is that that budget has remained relatively level

with the exception of increases for salaries and fringes.

Historically it's been a pretty under-resourced in comparison to the workload that we have.

For EAB, if you go back to Dutch Elm Disease days back in the 1970s, there was a ton of federal funding to

to cities and states to help with Dutch elm disease.

And that really never came to fruition with emerald ash borer, although it is just as devastating of an insect versus disease.

There were some state and federal grants that we have been awarded throughout the EAB years but not the millions that were needed for the program.

The City did start a general fund for EAB management back around 2010 or 2011, but overall it was less than half of what was spent on managing EAB in St Paul.

Staffing wasn't increased substantially, so backlogs were created that we're still working our way out of.

For our capital improvement budget, that has remained level since before I started

The Port Authority funds that came in I think 2021 or so was an $18 million package over six years.

and that was to complete the EAB program which we did in 2024 and it has allowed us to start addressing some of the backlogs as well as purchasing some needed equipment for our crews.

Our accessible removals budget and I'm really not going to talk about this a whole lot later in the presentation but if you have questions on it then we can take those.

it's right now is $100,000 annually and I don't know of any increases to that budget but that basically is the budget that is used to resolve any private property abatements in the city so it goes back to the Dutch Elm Disease days when the city was marking trees on private property that were diseased and dead from Dutch Elm Disease and

We're now using it primarily to address emerald ash borer-infested dead trees, but the need well surpasses the budget there.

Grants, like I said, we currently have three grants.

And we've received varying levels of grant funds over the years since I've worked here.

It is in the millions, but it's not funding that we've been able to consistently rely on because there is a lot of competition in the state for the small amount of grant funding that's available for urban and community forestry.

And just kind of

For a comparison, the Minneapolis Park and Rec Board manages about the same amount in terms of tree numbers and the size of the city and their funding is about twice what ours is as well as staffing capacity.

I think they have around

So despite all of that, it's good to have goals, right?

So when we got the Port Authority funding, we wrapped up EAB management, but part of the process when looking at

The port funding was to develop goals associated with the backlogs that were created during our management of Emerald Ash Borer.

So we looked at what we could achieve once those funds were exhausted with sustained general fund dollars.

The ultimate goal being to reestablish lost canopy citywide, increase species diversity, and maintain both established and young replacement trees.

and so those goals did include as you can see establishing a pruning cycle and establishing a three-year tree replacement program citywide so we would be looking at you know if a tree came down due to the storm last week that we would grind the stump next year and then in 2028 we would be replanting a tree there and I'll get more into all of those things as I

So for pruning, like I said before, I've been with this city for close to 20 years and the first time we've established an actual pruning cycle was in 2024 immediately following the EAB management program.

Prior to that, I think we did say that we had anywhere from a 12 to a 15 year cycle, but that was really all complaint based.

we might be on a street pruning all of the trees one year and say we might get back in 12 years but it really wasn't doing a systematic pruning of individual areas.

I think as we all know complaint-based management of programs is not really equitable and it's not sustainable.

It's also in terms of forestry it's not good for trees so routine pruning is really the number one thing that we can

do to care for our trees in the city.

It helps with storm resilience by removing overextended, so long branches or structurally weak limbs.

It increases airflow, so if you see trees, even young trees waving around in the air, if you prune out some of the limbs, it will let airflow go through so that it doesn't snap the tree off.

It increases health and longevity by removing dead and dying limbs, increasing airflow again, which decreases fungal growth, and redirecting energy to healthy new growth.

It also helps with risk management and mitigation.

We have clearer sight lines so that people aren't running stop signs, and tree branches aren't touching roofs or structures.

So when we started thinking about what a pruning program could look like back in 2020-ish and knowing that there's not really an absolute industry standard but that five to ten years is generally

We used our tree inventory to split the city into 50 small areas with the goal of reaching five per year.

The thought process behind that is that we would be on a 10-year cycle.

We have five crews.

They would reach one of those.

Each crew would reach one of their areas in a given year, and they would go through 10 years.

10 years later, they would be back doing those same areas.

So you can see what we completed over the last couple of years, and we do have the 2026, which is year three of the program is in progress.

In 2024, there was some funding to support contractor assistance for this work.

Long term, it could have cut the first cycle, the first 10-year cycle in half, down to

to five years.

However, that funding wasn't sustained, and since then it's been 100% in-house crews doing the work.

Thank you, sorry you were on a roll.

What I believe I heard you say was these were determined based on the current understanding of what trees are where.

What's my question?

How did you determine on these, kind of based on your knowledge of the tree?

the diversity of trees that we have in the city.

Because even when I look at even the lower part of Rice Street kind of near the graveyard, I was living in that area, and every single tree on my block was taken down for EAB.

I don't know if it was like we were part of the protective border.

So I'm just kind of wondering, are those considerations being made as you think about where you're kind of prioritizing your plan based on where EAB has been, where you were taking down trees?

Sure, so the way that we generated the prune areas was really looking mainly at the number of trees in each area to try to make it as even as possible so you'll see some really strange you know squiggle in and out type of thing on that and it generally

In all of those small areas, it's around 2,500 trees.

We've done ash replacements everywhere, and I will talk about the young trees a little bit more.

But we've done them everywhere.

We also did look at the age diversity in each area, so how many young trees there were versus older trees.

But in general, it's pretty much city-wide, like there's a good mix.

But I will talk a little bit about the younger tree and pruning with those.

So we have been meeting the goals of the 10-year pruning cycle over the last two and a half years.

We have a really good start this year.

We've gotten most of our pruning done for the year.

However, we will have to go back and finish that up.

And that will depend on how many trees come down this summer, either just due to age, death,

whatnot and then the storms that we see throughout the year.

We also have been addressing prioritized complaints such as trees blocking stop signs and touching houses and we've done a lot of construction related requests this year, early this year.

And this is where I'll get to the butts of the program.

Constituents could wait well over 10 years to have a tree pruned.

If you're accounting for trees that were planted before we started the routine pruning cycle and depending on which prune zone they're in, so the prune zone one is what we did is year one.

Prune zone 10 is year 10.

So if a tree was planted in 2020 and they're in prune zone 10, they could wait

You know, 14, 15 years to have a tree pruned.

And I think we all know that means continued complaints, right, about where we are in our cycle and how long it's taking.

This doesn't include formative pruning, to your question, Council Member Kim, of young trees.

There are now tens of thousands of those because we've been replacing ash trees, replacing storm damaged trees,

and everything else.

We should actually have a separate program for structural pruning of young trees where they're pruned two to three times in the first 10 years.

That is somewhat of an industry standard where if you have a pruning cycle of anything between five to 10 years, that is considered good.

But for young trees, it really is that you're getting to them at least a couple of times while they're young so that you're giving them a really good structure for their

This also doesn't include park trees.

We are the Parks Department, but unfortunately we don't have a lot of capacity to do a lot of maintenance in parks.

The prune zones, the 2,500 trees that I mentioned, is really just street trees and if we get areas done early, we would go into parks and do as much pruning in those areas as we could.

So for a budget need, I think this was presented, this graphic, by Andy last week, I'm pretty sure, by Director Rodriguez.

An ideal scenario would include roughly $3.7 million annually in additional funding to support pruning contracts.

We would have the capacity, and that's included in that ideal number that is circled in red.

We then have the capacity to expedite the first round of the cycle, reducing it from 10 years down to seven.

I think that's what would be achievable now that we're already into year three of the pruning.

It would address backlogs of complaints.

I see a question as well from Council President Baker.

Can you give us a sense of how the $6.3 million for general tree care breaks down?

And you mentioned staff.

I'm curious how many staff we have, what else the money goes toward.

And then can you speak a little bit about what the expectations or the metrics are for staff per week or month or day?

setting expectations to get a certain amount of this work done that meets our goals.

and the

staff and salaries and fringe benefits.

That leaves us with around a million dollars for what is included in like supplies, services, materials.

So that's any contract work that we do.

So we do contract out our planting program.

And we do contract out our stump removal program.

and those are the two like bigger ticket items that come out of our budgets and then we have you know just smaller contract work such as crane removals which I'll touch a little bit on later that assist with our crews doing their routine work.

We have some trainings that are required for forestry staff annually so like smaller things like that safety equipment which

You'd be surprised by how much equipment is needed to do this type of work.

So I think right now for 2027, if we had stuck with the budget that we currently have, our planting program, we would use roughly $450,000 of our general fund would supplement planting, which

We are increasing some of the work that we do with the grant funding that we have right now.

For instance, the Forest Service grant that I mentioned, there is a small amount of that is going towards stump grinding.

Next year, around $300,000 of that will go towards tree planting.

and then our capital improvement, the $330,000 budget that goes towards tree planting.

So the majority of general fund does go towards salaries and fringe benefits.

That is, I think we're at 42 or 43 staff.

So there's myself.

We have two other supervisors in forestry who really, they're supervising our crews that are doing all of the work that you see getting done.

There are five crew leaders and 26 arborists that are responsible for all of the pruning, all of the removals that we're doing, which again, like removals, I'll talk about a little bit.

Those are really done in-house.

We contract out very little in terms of removal work.

And then we have our professional side where the technicians, we have

for technicians in forestry and five urban foresters.

The urban foresters are overseeing different programs, such as our planting program, park tree inventory and management.

So we have one urban forester who's doing the park trees, doing inspections in parks, making sure that we're keeping up on the minimal amount of work that we can

we have a forester like I talked about before who does all the construction related work and then we have two foresters who kind of have split the city in half who are doing all of the general inspections of our street trees and they're also doing all the private property abatement work so if they're going onto private property to mark trees and the four technicians we have

support our customer service so they're taking turns answering phones specifically for forestry that are routed to them and assisting with all of those other programs and then running some of their own smaller programs and helping with grants or partnerships for grants.

In terms of what

is expected of a daily workload.

It really varies based on what they're doing for the day.

So if they're doing removals for a crew, it could be that they're removing 50 small trees or two large trees.

So it varies pretty significantly.

As far as the pruning work goes, I think crews were generally completing

and I don't know if I have the numbers off the top of my head but they've been going pretty well and probably pruning around a hundred trees per crew per week I think so they have been getting through that work pretty efficiently and

The routine pruning program, I think, where it varies pretty significantly from the complaint base, as I'm sure you'd understand, is if we get a complaint for one tree, we are going to go and resolve that one tree.

We're not going to say, oh, every other tree on the block is also low.

We should do this, too, because it kind of is never-ending at that point.

So to go into an area and prune every tree on the street

you know, once or within a short time frame is really a much more efficient way of going about the work.

Yeah, I really appreciate just kind of the deep dive.

It's very interesting to me that we haven't previously had a budget for storm contingency, thinking about a week like last week where I assumed that was a ton of the work with storm cleanup.

So I'm just curious how that plays out.

Do we end up spending more than budgeted for?

Is it that other work isn't getting done when we have big storms?

If we have a super stormy summer, that just sort of throws us off on every other metric.

And then the second part of the question is sort of looking to, if we were able to add that million dollar budget for 2027, curious how that would be spent.

Would it be more staff?

Would it be more equipment?

Sure.

Thank you for the question.

To your first question, I think all of the above.

It does throw our schedule off, obviously.

It also can generate hundreds.

I think last year, with the storm in late July, and it didn't help that there was also a cyber attack, I think, the week of.

So that made it a little more difficult to resolve issues.

But that was close to, I think it was close to 1,000 calls.

So numbers of trees obviously for removals increases during the year.

It can pose issues if you're trying to stay on a pruning cycle.

It definitely impacts the budget in terms of all of the overtime that is done.

So when we have a large storm like that, even the storm last week, our crews did work until I think 7 p.m.

So if we have a large storm, they are working 12 hour days at least, which there's overtime involved, and potentially on weekends, depending on the size.

We do have contractors assist, which then it's kind of up to people like Dave over there to try to find money within the park's budget to

We're typically looking at contractors helping with things like park trees, because on our list of priorities, parks come in towards the bottom of the list when we're trying to clear streets for emergency vehicles, get trees off of cars and houses, so the park trees are kind of at the bottom, so we'd have contractors help with that.

We, you know, depending on the size of the storm, we have contractors hauling material so we might set up a number of marshalling yards or dump sites where we would have contractors then hauling all that material down to Pig's Eye because it's more efficient for us to

drop it at Como Park if we're working in the Como Park area than to drive all the way down to Pig's Eye to dump loads of material down there.

So it's kind of a variety, and I think the $1 million we've looked back at storms in the past and the larger storms have cost that much.

so I think the 1 million mark would be for a large storm but just to have that funding available if there was storm damage.

We've also had a few storms I think since I've been here where it was a large enough storm that the city decided that we needed to expedite tree planting for instance for those areas that were hit hardest or to I know of

at least one storm where we did haul all private brush along with the public brush which is a lot because people do take advantage of that and will have every tree on their property pruned and put it on the boulevard for us to haul so it varies I think by storm but that's kind of what it would assist with.

All right, so for tree planting, let's see.

So our objectives now for planting are increasing diversity, incorporating climate-adapted species, increasing canopy in underrepresented areas, and utilizing volunteers for work with that.

I mentioned grants earlier and that we have three, but two of them are

planning related grants.

They prioritize plantings in underrepresented areas.

Our DNR grant is a one-time funding which will support around 560 trees being planted this fall.

And then the Forest Service grant that we have is a five-year program.

It includes a job training component, so we are still working with tree trust.

We had been

for the five years before that to do a job training program and the job that they do is tree planting.

that also supports a bit of stump removal work.

And Miss Joan Ward.

You got it.

I appreciate it.

They're not connected questions, but connected to different slides.

So my first question is around the last slide around increasing canopy and underrepresented areas, and so how it connects to your pruning schedule.

So you said each area is about 2,500 trees, and some areas are larger than others.

So for example, it looks like zone 10 is quite large in comparison to zone

to

We don't know what our canopy percentages are in neighborhoods right now.

I know that there are national calculators out there, but we do.

One of the grants that I mentioned is through the DNR, and I should have the contract back hopefully today, and that will support a new urban tree canopy

assessment which is really needed.

We did one in 2010 and so the goal would be to do one yet this year and that would go down to the neighborhood and even the individual property to show the canopy percentages and then to develop an urban forest management plan.

So we would look at that.

I think that the size of the area more is an indicator of

you know if there's properties there's some more industrial areas right like in down in District 3 you'll see a really large area and that's because it's the airports down there and it's more industrialized and there's larger lots and not as many boulevard trees so it's not necessarily the the size of the tree or the amount of canopy in an area.

was sort of related to like the staffing question but also recognizing like your staff have gone through like EAB and you're like fighting against this like massive tree disease and while also trying to increase the biodiversity of the canopy and the existing like forestry that we have and all the stumping and it sounds like not even within our parks

So it sounds like maybe even in our Parks Department there are forestry staff as well.

So it's just trees on trees on trees.

So my question is really related to staffing.

So even recognizing like when a surge of a storm happens, like the one that we saw very recently and the one that we had in Como last year, like entire trees were like chopped in half or split apart.

That amount of work is incredibly cumbersome.

I'm wondering, and this doesn't have to be a today question, but I am sort of interested in the turnover or attrition of your staff, given the demands.

What I'm hearing this entire time is that you're understaffed, sort of not as well equipped as you'd like to be to respond to storms.

What does that look like for your staff numbers?

How have they been

For, like I said, the professional side, there's not a lot of turnover.

I think that if we post a position for a technician or a forester, we have at least 50 candidates and a strong candidate pool.

And people in general, I think, in that group really do love working here.

We've had one forester leave.

In 2018, we had a pretty large group of people who had been here for a long time.

And they slowly, a lot of retirements happened over the first few years.

and then COVID and so we have had a bit more turnover in that group but it's honestly been you know maybe a couple of people per year and they have left for various reasons so it I haven't heard from anyone in that group that it's because they hate their job and they feel like they're overworked in general I would say the opposite people

typically will come here from the private sector where they might be working 12 hour days all summer and then in the winter they might not have as much work so it's a more consistent schedule and we do make it very clear during the hiring process that storms happen and when they do the expectation is that staff are

So does that answer that question?

Okay, great.

All right, so with a little bit with our planting numbers and where we are with those, the port funding, again, it was an opportunity for us to kind of close the gap on some backlogs that were created by EAB management.

I think a few years ago we probably had close to

10,000 vacant sites.

We're moving into 2027 with about 4,300 vacant sites.

So we have had the capacity to reduce that backlog pretty significantly over the last few years.

2023 through 2025 we averaged about 4,700 trees planted per year.

This year it will be a bit less and that's including grant funding.

and what we're looking at for 2027 is planting roughly 2,000 trees.

So that is anticipating that our funding would support planting less than half the number of trees that we would like to in order to close that gap.

that is up there basically shows those numbers.

The yellow is annual planting numbers under current funding.

Green is planting under optimal funding.

And so you see the large green bar for 2027, and that is really trying to close that gap as much as possible.

And then it fluctuates a little bit year by year based on the current

Grant funds that we do have both for this year and then for a few years with the Forest Service.

But it generally would level out in 2028, planting roughly 1,800 trees per year.

And that would, again, be on that getting us onto that three-year cycle of removal, one-year stump grinding, and then planting.

So budget need there.

Are we investing less every year?

Yeah, so 2023 we had port funding.

that kind of allowed us to use a fair amount of our general fund to supplement our planting program.

And that was through, we really had those funds through 2025.

And then 2026, we're looking at 3,500 this year.

Just sort of a general question.

Have we ever been caught up?

That's not a flippant question.

But in general, because I think when I started on the council, we were in the midst of EAB.

And the understanding I had was that it was because of EAB that all of our resources were going there.

So they were sucking up all the time and attention from everything else.

and sort of underneath that was the implication that therefore if that went away we would be able to do everything else.

I'm just curious, has it ever been the case in time that we have been on the right tree planting cycle, pruning cycle, stumping cycle?

And if so, how was that possible?

No, I understand.

No, I don't think we have so for planting I think the best we've done is a five-year cycle so and the cycle really being that not necessarily that your tree was removed five years ago and we're going to replant it but we would we do a lot most of our work by planning district right so we just to

Efficiency wise, we're going into a district every five years.

So that's the best that I know of that we stayed on for planting.

Stump grinding, and I will hit on it a little bit, but there wasn't a stump program when I started working here.

They had stopped it probably around 2000-ish, and then

I think we started it back up in 2011 and so we started grinding all of the stumps from the previous 10 years.

And like I talked about with pruning, we really haven't had a pruning cycle before.

It largely has been complaint based.

They might have had one back when I was in college, so I don't really know the numbers.

If they did, it was over 20 years ago.

To your question of have we been on track with planting, I think where we've gotten off of track really is that the CIB budget hasn't changed from that $330,000.

What has changed is the average cost of a tree being planted.

When I was here back in 2006, as an intern, the cost of a tree planted with a one-year warranty was $175.

And now it's $450.

So where you were getting 1,900 trees maybe annually, we're now getting around 700 out of that budget.

Like I talked about a little bit, General Fund has really

has been the bulk of our planting program over the last few years, but with it going back basically to pre-EAB levels, there's not a lot in the general fund to go towards planting, and that's why that number next year goes down.

So the optimal budget again includes a $1.5 million increase in CIB, which is really what's needed to sustain

a planting program.

It's probably worth pointing out on the graph here, the chart, that if it remains at the level that we are at right now, so if we have the 4300-ish kind of vacant sites,

So for tree and stump removal,

We mark trees throughout the year.

The bulk of them are marked in the summer during our annual city-wide survey.

Our goal for tree removal is always to get them removed by the end of the year.

If they're marked in 2026, we'll get the majority of them down in 2026.

There might be a couple of stragglers that we need assistance from a crane.

Committee on but it is primarily in-house work that is done that way and I looked back at our average removal numbers over the last 10 years and it's roughly 1,800 trees per year.

For stumps like I mentioned we were able to, or maybe I didn't, we were able to

get caught up on stumps last year on the backlog that we had.

That was due to the assistance of the port funding and the Forest Service funding that we have.

So all right-of-way and park stumps that we had in the system were removed in 2025, regardless of what year they were removed.

I think we did a lot of stumps for trees that we had removed in 2025 as well, just to try to get ahead.

This year we're removing stumps from 2025 removals and we would continue to do the same.

This work is primarily accomplished through contractors.

We have multiple contracts for stump grinding just to keep up on them and to increase capacity there.

and then also it sort of overlaps with the slides you have about the budget.

I know in the past we had that partnership with the Port and St Paul Parks and Rec to do, I believe, the stump removals.

I'm not sure if pruning was a part of that, so can you clarify?

I believe with port funding it has to be a capital expense and pruning is maintenance so it's not included in that.

As far as the continuation of port funding, I might defer to our OFS.

OK, great.

Thank you.

And I just wanted to share too, I'm very supportive of the partnership I've asked or mentioned to Director Rodriguez that I would love to see us continue it.

Chair Johnson, Council Member Yang, Joe Harney, Director of the Office of Financial Services.

If the Council and the City would like to pursue further additional partnership with the Port, I think it's worth talking about two phases that we would need to go through.

The first would be understanding the debt capacity for the general obligation levy, and the second would be sort of the legislative mechanics that would need to be adopted for that

to discuss this issue.

Thank you.

And then just the last question from me.

I'm wondering if you can explain the role that Tree Trust played in any of the work here around pruning or tree, the stump removals.

At one point, they were here and presented to us.

And so I really love their work.

I was a part of Tree Trust when I was younger, too.

Sure, so the project that they're working on for us, and this is a continuation of what was done during the Port Authority funding, is that they are planting trees.

So the primary project is planting trees, and then there's just general tree maintenance included in that, such as, and it's really going back to those trees that they've planted

if there's any needs as far as staking the tree goes, watering, mulching, those types of things.

They aren't doing any pruning for us.

They are not doing stump grinding.

Thank you.

So stump removal basically it's including the optimal budget is including roughly point or a half a million dollars annually to support

the Stump Grinding Program.

If there weren't additional funds, stump grinding numbers would drop in 2029 based on the funding available and the exhaustion of the Forest Service funds.

And we would start having a backlog of stumps.

Sorry, I was on the wrong side because I went back one.

So, what does this all mean, I think, to wrap it up for pruning?

You know, I went through that we could have a better pruning program, both in terms of cycle, hitting parks, reducing that first cycle going through the city, and

better resources for our young trees to get those pruned structurally in the first 10 years and I think a continuation of complaints would be expected if we stay on the cycle that we're on.

I know there's thousands of very low trees throughout the city right now and I know that you all get a lot of those complaints and I just know we're doing the best we can with it to get on track

For planting, I think we could really achieve the three-year cycle if funding was available.

So I would love to get on that.

I think that a lot of people that we hear from expect that if a tree was removed one day, that the stump would either come out that same day or the next, and that a tree be planted the next season.

And that's not going to be accomplished.

I don't feel that it's a realistic expectation for a city of our size to be on that type of a program, but I think that a three-year replacement program would be beneficial.

And for stump removal, we could do the same.

We stay on that program and get everything done within that three years.

Really quickly, just to understand that it is not realistic for our city of size to do tree removal one day, stump grinding the next day, new tree on the third day.

Are there reasons other than budgetary that we wouldn't do that?

I don't know.

I would have to think about that one and how you would do that.

It's entirely different equipment.

It does take time on our end after a removal is done.

We do measure all of the stumps that are out there, because that is how the contractors bill us.

And we're not relying on them to tell us

the size of the stump that they're grinding.

So there is work involved in that.

And you can only do stump removal from May to November.

So you're never really going to be able to do it all in that same time frame because you have six months out of the year where you can't grind stumps.

Same with planting.

Thank you, Chair Johnson.

Thank you so much.

I get a lot of flagging of complaints that's been sent to Forestry where people have shared that they've been told that there's a backlog of nearly a decade.

Their tree stump in their boulevard has been years and just hasn't been...

escalated but it has not been confirmed in terms of like removal so I'm just curious to know just like what is the volume of complaints that comes in versus the volume of like work orders that go out if we could have like some type of like you know like tracking of that just because I think you know as we're talking about just like the budget I really would want to know just in terms of like staff capacity

I'll have to look at the numbers but I do know because we did meet with the mayor's office or constituent services group I think earlier this year so we did put some numbers together for volume of calls that we receive I think in the summer months which is you know we do get more calls in the summer

It was definitely in the hundreds per month.

It tails off during the dead of winter.

I think in terms of our capacity, a lot of the complaints that you're likely getting are from the folks who have been told, you know, your tree was removed last year and we're going to be removing the stump next year.

the ones who might want it removed, expect that it would be removed within a month of the tree removal, for instance.

Or the planting cycle at this time is that we aren't going to be with the funding that we'll have in 2027.

We won't have much of a planting cycle.

At best, it's going to be maybe a five-year rotation partially planting districts.

So I think those are the types of continued complaints as well as the pruning cycle that you would continue to get.

I just got a follow-up question.

I appreciate that context.

I wanted to just focus more on trees that are actually nuisance type of trees, like very dangerous trees.

We have limbs that's falling on.

Houses are a tree that just, you know, dudes with a storm, it has fell over.

And I'm just curious to know, is there a policy?

Because our ordinance requires us to attend to those trees within a

a time frame because those are some of the complaints that I've been receiving.

I'm not to treat this as an award-winning complaint, constituent service, but I'm just really curious because that's some of the feedback that I get is that, ooh, it has to go into the inventory.

Just to hear that there is a one-year survey of those trees, is there a different type of response when there are more emergency-based trees, particularly around

So for storm-related work, you know, I don't think that there's a good way of anticipating what tree will have storm damage, right?

If there's 80-mile

to 90 mile to 100 mile an hour winds, we don't know which trees are going to fail.

A lot of them don't have any exterior signs of decay.

It's just the wind hit it and it got taken down.

I think for complaints related to hazardous trees,

Evaluation of a tree to deem it hazardous is really something that I think I would leave up to our professional forestry staff who do have training in risk assessment with with trees and evaluating a tree for risk versus you know we get we do get calls all the time from people saying well this tree is a hazard because it did drop a limb in a storm

that doesn't necessarily make the tree a hazard.

A large storm may have gone through and broken hundreds of branches off of healthy trees, and that's something that does happen during storm events.

So we do evaluate trees.

If someone does call in for an inspection of a given tree or trees, that is part of the urban forester's jobs is to go out and evaluate a tree.

I think oftentimes,

property owners may just not like our resulting inspection details, which is that it's not necessarily that the tree is a hazard.

It may need pruning.

But again, I think we understand as much as anyone else, every tree in the city does need to be pruned.

And that's what we're trying to be more proactive about is to

I appreciate that too, and I think just really as we think about the work that the forestry team does, I just want to share that we have talked on the council for a few years since I've been here, tree canopy and tree planting, the pruning piece, just overall.

The volume of our tree canopy has continued to be a priority on the Council and so that's one of the reasons why we asked you to to be here today and I think it's been really helpful.

That is a good question.

I'm not sure how the department would want that routed.

Yeah, we'll send it to the both of you.

Thank you for having us both here.

We'll try to move as quickly as possible.

I know we are short on time.

So as you all know, Right Track to the City of St Paul's Youth Employment and Training Program really targeted at creating career exposure opportunities for St Paul youth with barriers to employment.

The program is designed around four key outcomes.

So first is to develop workplace readiness skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem solving.

Second is to expose youth to careers in industries that may not otherwise be accessible.

Third, to build relationships with caring adults and to develop that network.

And the fourth, to earn income while developing their financial capabilities.

Really quick, I'm going to show you all the Right Track team.

So this is a team that carries forward all of the work, ranging from the youth recruitment, employer engagement, trainings, and program management.

We're especially proud of the five team members with asterisks in their names, because they are all program alumni.

And their presence reflects the long-term impact of the program and demonstrates how investing in young people today can lead to future leaders in our community.

With that foundation, I'll just quickly give an overview of our two programs.

So one of Right Track's strengths is we know it's not a one-size-fits-all experience in youth force readiness, workforce readiness experiences.

So we ensure that we have different levels of experiences and different opportunities for a young person to engage.

The first being our YJ1 program, which really focuses on foundational skills for youth who are often entering the workforce for the first time through subsidized positions with libraries, parks, small businesses, and nonprofits.

The second program being our YJ2 program, which expands on those foundational skills for young folks slightly older, so 16 to 21.

And in this program, we partner with partners across the industries, so public, private, nonprofit.

support young folks do a deeper dive into specific career paths they may be interested in.

And then next we have our public pathways push.

So as you all know, the public sector is the largest employer in St. Paul, but often that workforce doesn't reflect the residents it serves.

So we put a really intentional push behind this work in the last few years.

So we have YJ2 internships in St. Paul.

Most city departments, some of you in this room, also host interns, which we are greatly appreciative for.

And we also have our Right Track Scholars Program, which is in its second year.

That's a college internship program.

And our scholar is here today, Kong.

He is supporting our team with some data support evaluation and some of our training facilitation this summer, which we're really excited about.

He's studying education at the U of M.

Together these opportunities create a progression of experiences from first jobs to career exploration to credential attainment and ultimately a career pathway allowing us to support young people throughout their workforce journey.

Great, yeah, before we kind of continue into 2026 and what that's bringing, we wanted to share just a little bit about some of our results from this past year.

So during 2025, we had the opportunity to serve 1,024 young people throughout the City of St Paul.

in 1138 different internship experiences with 144 employers throughout our city.

Our city and then a few internships that existed in like Maplewood or kind of those surrounding suburbs.

so every young person that's a part of our program has what the state would consider a barrier to employment majority of them coming from a cost-burdened household so meeting some level of income requirement although many other young people meet the program eligibility by having a disability being behind in grade level speaking English as a second language being justice impacted in foster care and several other opportunities that qualify them for being a part of the right track program

One of the things that I just really want to highlight on here is we of course provide a zip code kind of breakdown of where young people are are working or where they're coming from and I think one of the things that we are really intentional about is really making sure that we're Reaching out and making sure young people have access for primarily young people from most marginalized backgrounds and in in our city in one other piece that I just really want to highlight before we move to the next slide is at 2.3

We're scrolling.

Great.

So just some additional highlights.

And I'm not going to read through these, but I just want to be clear that our program collects

We collect data on youth experience

and continue to be and as you can see here these are numbers that I would say we certainly compare to other local workforce programs and take pride in knowing that our young people are leaving with skills that they are leaving feeling a part of a team that they were a part of for the summer and they are learning and they're feeling as if things are useful in their kind of forward progression within these programs.

Thank you.

All right, so next we'll do, we'll jump into our budget overview.

So when we look at how Right Track invests in its resources, the overwhelming majority of funding goes directly towards creating opportunities for young people.

59% of all program expenses support youth wages.

I definitely skipped the slide, backtracking a little bit.

So our total budget is comprised of city, foundation, and other government supports.

So Right Track operates with a total budget of approximately $2.9 million supported through a combination of funding sources.

One key takeaway from this slide is while Right Track is a city program, the majority of our funding does not come directly from the city.

Just over 12% of the budget comes from

the city through direct general fund allocations and a transfer from Parks General Fund.

Approximately 7% comes from foundation and partnership support including investments from St Paul Minnesota Foundation, the NBA Foundation, and St Paul Public Schools.

The remaining 80% comes from other government sources including ARPA funding, state grants, CDBG and HRA resources as well as Ramsey County Workforce Solutions.

This diversified funding approach has allowed us to grow and serve more young people but also creates challenges.

Much of the funding is time-limitive, competitive, or tied to specific grant opportunities.

So as we think about the future of youth employment in St Paul, this slide highlights the importance of developing sustainable funding strategies to reduce reliance on temporary sources and having consistent opportunities for young people.

This is what I was talking about before, the breakdown of how we spend our funding.

So again, the majority does get allocated directly to young people with 59% of all program expenses supporting youth wages.

Ensuring participants are compensated for all of their work, whether it's an internship or a training experience.

All experiences are paid through Right Track.

Nearly 30% supports full-time staff who recruit youth, develop employer partnership, provide training, and manage program operations year-long.

9% supports seasonal job coaches.

Our largest program component does take place during the summer.

So this summer with 500 interns we have about 10 job coaches joining us.

And just over 2% is allocated to other services and materials.

So the most important takeaway for this is the majority of our funding is invested directly into youth through earned income and work-based learning experiences.

So already in 2026, $320,000 in wages have been earned by St Paul U through Right Track Experiences.

And this is our spring experiences and our school year experiences.

Most of our summer experiences are launching next week.

A couple have already started.

and through our employer partnerships we anticipate leveraging about $500,000 in employer paid experiences this year.

And so it really demonstrates the opportunities, well it demonstrates that city investment not only creates opportunities directly but also attracts additional private and public investments for young people.

Next we'll discuss some of our challenges and budget risks that we're currently facing.

So this slide highlights some of the difficult decisions we've made this year and are making moving forward due to declining funding.

So there are several key factors that have contributed to some of these challenges or some of these changes.

We're currently navigating about $100,000 less in DEET network funding.

DEET is our largest funder at this point for state fiscal year 2026 and 2027.

I think that rising minimum wage requirements continue to be challenging to offer the same amount of experiences.

And ARPA funding is ending, leaving about 6.3 full-time positions unfunded after 2026.

So these positions support critical functions, including youth services, program administration, employer engagement, and more.

So at the same time, the demand for our opportunities continues to rise.

So the funding challenges that we've already had to make decisions on this year included ending our school year programming a month earlier.

We reduced weekly hours for young people throughout this past school year.

And we've also made the decision to eliminate the 2026-27 school year program.

So these experiences also include internships with parks and libraries.

and these experiences help young people build connections with trusted adults, develop a sense of belonging and strengthen public trust.

Youth employment is not only a workforce strategy, it's often a public safety strategy that provides positive opportunities and earned income to young people in St Paul.

Additional decisions that have been made as we will not be offering a 2026 EMS program overall between the summer and school year.

It will be 300 fewer experiences for St Paul youth.

Now we'll briefly discuss the importance of the training wage.

So Right Track internships are intentionally designed as a training experience, not traditional employment.

It's important to note when we talk about the youth wages, Right Track does not use the 30-day youth wage.

We exclusively use the training wage, similar to many programs around the country that operate in

So the YJ1 program serves young people 14 to 19 and utilizes this training wage.

These are entry-level learning experiences.

Unlike traditional jobs, they include significant training and support.

Youth receive workforce readiness and financial empowerment training and ongoing mentorship from job coaches.

And it's important to note that these roles are not meant to replace staff, supplement operations, or pay youth less for doing the same work.

They are intentionally structured as learning opportunities.

If we were using the summer as an example and we were to lose our training wage, it would be $250,000 in expenses or 92 fewer experiences.

So the bottom line is that Youth Wages makes it possible to create supported high quality experiences that would not otherwise exist.

Preserving them expands access and ensures young people can participate in structured workforce learning opportunities.

Great.

So we have the opportunity to partner with a national cohort through the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund that operates summer jobs programs across the U.S. Really looking to integrate banking access, but also kind of best practices for youth employment programming.

I currently serve on a kind of a sub work group right now with Little Rock, Arkansas, Miami, Virginia Beach, and Detroit.

And of this kind of small sample, each of them have a dedicated, predictable revenue source that has been funding their program for years and years and years.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, for an example, since 1980, they have been receiving funding from their violence reduction or violence prevention work through the state legislature and through their city.

But on comparable programs here,

What you can see is that we've talked about our program, so St Paul is serving over 1,100 youth with a budget of about $3 million.

Within that we also have relied heavily on one-time limited funding sources, as Nardos mentioned, including ARPA and competitive grants.

What you can see here additionally is the city of Minneapolis, right?

We know there are about a hundred thousand population greater than St. Paul that they're served about 659 youth in traditional internship opportunities and they also provide about 700 additional paid training opportunities so they participate in some

Online Professional Development for a stipend at the end of that program.

So Boston, we know that it is a larger city than St Paul or Minneapolis, but what we see there is that they're serving over 10,000 young people per year with a over $33 million investment.

What we also know is that almost $24 million of that comes from their city's general fund.

And then they have another $10 million or so that is leveraged from

and the City Council.

We've had several conversations with Boston about their model, but the way that they're executing on that additional $10 million is by public figures or elected officials that are leveraging those relationships to tell the need about how the summer jobs program is that critical for

our city.

And so I guess what I just want to emphasize as related to this program and some of the other examples I've provided about Little Rock or Miami or whatever is that, again, just emphasizing that these programs, for the most part, are operating off of predictable, sustainable revenue sources that they can predict year over year and don't necessarily shift.

and just I think underscores a demonstrated need for continuing working together as a city to really find out how we can dedicate additional dollars to youth workforce programming in the near future.

So how can we do this and why should we consider this?

This is truly about investing in St Paul's future.

Our young people are currently part of our workforce but they are going to be the ones to take care of all of us when we are no longer able to continue doing this work and they're working in partnership with us as we work today.

There's kind of three key priorities or three key items that we want to call attention to.

One being just workforce development.

So Right Track is really building the direct pipeline of young people, building those foundational work experiences.

They're building their own individual skills.

And we're providing a level of career exposure to young folks in our city that they may have never accessed independently.

and so this really is how we're going to continue to build and prepare the workforce and making sure that our young people are competitive as they're seeking out these type of opportunities and really kind of bridging those workforce gaps now as young folks.

So the other item here is economic mobility.

So what we know about our program, and I say our program, but this is actually more so commonly understood in regards to youth workforce programming in general.

But this is really giving and putting money in young people's hands today, right?

$2.3 million earned last year.

That is money that's going back into our young people's pockets.

And truthfully, it's kind of a catalyst into kind of growing our local economy because our families are then expending those dollars in our city at local businesses that are accessible to them in their neighborhood.

But this is also, again,

a proven strategy of increasing their long-term earning potential.

And so kind of setting themselves up on a career path that will continue to expand as we move forward.

And lastly, this is in cities across the country a strong public safety strategy.

What we see is that young people participating with strong mentorship, that they're engaged and busy during the summer.

They're earning money in paid employment opportunities.

What we see traditionally is about a 40% reduction in crime that studies would tell us nationally when there are strong workforce programs in the ecosystem.

And then lastly, really briefly, the opportunity exists.

We have a strong interest from young people in St Paul.

We have more than 3,000 youth applications that have applied for

about 700 opportunities that we have this summer.

And there's continued interest since our application closed.

We've had about 700 additional young people attempt to create an account in our application system.

But again, not accepting additional applications at this time.

And then lastly, I just want to highlight on here, we've done some data digging around and kind of comparing that to our

income eligibility criteria.

And what we know is that there's an estimated about 9,100 young people in our city that are income eligible for this program.

What we also know, and that's of about 16,000 high school age young people in our city,

What we also know is that based on barriers to employment and other program qualifiers, we would have about 11,000 young people out of 16,000 in our city that would be eligible for the program.

All right, we will close us out real quick with our four strategies for sustainability.

The first is increased public sector engagement.

This means all city departments are hosting interns and budgeting to host those interns.

This looks like increased dedicated city funding, prioritizing our college internship program, the scholars program for existing internship pipelines that exist across the city.

The second being a private sector partnership.

We need to leverage existing city relationships to bring in more employers.

So this includes setting clear expectations for city affiliated businesses to engage and expanding partnerships with major institutions.

For example, sports and entertainment venues downtown.

Thirdly, a sponsorship model.

Often we do run into instances where we see buy-in and interest, but they aren't able to actually host interns due to other policies or whatever it may be.

So we'd love to develop a sponsorship model in which

Employers, local businesses, can invest in internship experiences, can invest in training experiences and still be tied to that work without hosting interns.

And then of course a sustainable funding strategy which diversifies our funding sources.

So the program is more stable long-term and less reliant on changing funding and bringing more public and private funders to elevate youth workforce development.

So we will wrap it up there.

Additional opportunities to engage and

actually before they wrap up I just have a few more things to say.

Erica Prosser, Deputy Director of Parks and Recreation.

I just wanted to quickly say these two are, they're extremely humble about the work that they do and the work that our teams do but I wanted to point out that in many cases we have been nationally recognized for the work that our

program does.

For example, Carlo mentioned the cohort that he's working on for financial empowerment.

We are extremely honored to have Carlo serve in that capacity, but also to be asked to participate

with the City Council.

The public health model for addressing youth violence relies heavily on that intervention work and reintegration work.

If you're talking to your constituents about what can we do about these kids in our neighborhood,

We can get them jobs, that's a big piece of it.

And it's not just a job, it is a meaningful work experience.

You have small businesses in all of your wards that are willing to host intern, to have youth work at their businesses, but they may not have the infrastructure to host

to host those interns, we can do payroll, we can...

We can onboard them and then we also provide this very important professional development that comes along with it.

How do you fill out that paperwork?

What does that mean?

The financial empowerment strategies that go along with it.

What do you do with your savings account?

How do you set up a bank?

All those things.

So that is such a key strategy for violence prevention in our community and the more we can invest in it, the better.

I also want to say, you guys play such an important role in how we can expand this program.

We will always have limited resources in the city and you have to make very difficult decisions about where you're investing those.

But we have employers that can pay the wages and you can be recruiters.

We will provide you with the information that you need to hand, you know, every community meeting that you go to, every business that you're meeting with,

We think that you should have right track information, be able to talk about our program just like you're part of our team and we would be grateful for that support.

Well, thank you, Deputy Director.

I appreciate you.

And also to Carlo and Nardos, thank you for working with the time that you were given and just kind of going through the slides.

This has been a constant topic.

Folks are really interested.

Throughout the presentation, there actually were several hands that we're not going to get through today.

So I expect to actually have several follow-ups.

I, too, will have follow-up questions for you all, just really around the amounts.

I think one of the things that we are interested in is getting them

getting a clear view picture of the financial impacts of the program so when you share like these are the changes you know that we have made it's really understanding the dollar amounts affiliated with them the breakdowns of the funding you know the funding is great by percentage but numbers are better and I think just being able to get a clear view picture of the program especially when it comes to the tough decisions that we all have to make and

I think it's going to be really important to understand that clearly and dollar amounts and what funding you have, what funding you don't have, what funding we would need to sustain the numbers that we have, who makes decisions on what is not continued, what has changed.

Just those pieces I think those will be really helpful I think in the coming weeks ahead for those conversations as well because quite a few

Thank you.

So we wanted to make time for that, but it's not to signify that this isn't just as important.

For a reminder, both items received pretty much unanimous support for the council.

And so we're featured in the budget memo, so it's something that we are just starting to have.

You'll see budget topics that have related to our budget retreat that received five or more council members and support.

So that's kind of what the next few

with the next couple of Budget Committee presentations will be.

With that, I apologize for going over a little bit.

I try not to do that.