The St. Paul City Council Finance and Budget Committee held a meeting to review three departmental presentations focusing on the modernization of telecast services, the city's debt portfolio for 2026, and the Human Rights, Equity, and Recruitment Operations (HERO) department's annual performance and hiring plans. The committee received reports on the convergence of franchise negotiations, a proposed partnership between OTC and SPNN for broadcast services, a recommendation to increase the property tax debt levy, and HERO's strategy to maintain fiscal stewardship while expanding equity initiatives.
St. Paul City Council Finance and Budget Committee to Order. Good morning, everyone. We are have three presentations today. I am open to the order. We were gonna maybe do shortest. Start with the shortest ones first. Is that all right with you? We'll have a 15-minute presentation for SBNN and then we'll go second. Yeah. So we're gonna change the order up just a little bit for order of operations, just for time meetings of staff. Thank you again for your flexibility. Um I would like to then welcome up who are our presenters. We have for us PNN. Oh, we've got Chase Maxwell, Bonnie Schumacher, the executive director from St. Paul Neighborhood Network, and Chase Maxwell, Communications and Digital Media Manager from OTC. Hello, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. So we're budgeting about 15 minutes. We've got three presentations today, so if you can kind of keep it within that time, that would be wonderful. And I will kick it off to you. Thank you so much for being here. Um great to be here. Um Chair, Council members. Uh Chase Maxwell Communications and Digital Media Manager in OTC. Uh my team uh is the folks who are in the control room who actually do the broadcast of our telecast services. Um I'm excited to be joined by Bonnie Schumacher, uh, the executive director of St. Paul Neighborhood Network. I'll just let you briefly introduce yourself. Hi, as Chase said, my name is Bonnie Schumacher. I'm the executive director at SPN, St. Paul Neighborhood Network. I've been with SPNN for um almost twenty three years. Um the executive vector for the last year and a half, and um we're a community media center that um works within the city limits. Great. That's fun. So uh today we'll just give you uh a broad understanding of what our telecast services. Uh, what are the services that my team provides? Uh we'll talk about the current telecast service model in the city. Uh we'll talk about why uh we're entering into some important milestones in 2026 related to telecast services that we want to make sure the council is is fully aware of. Um Bonnie will speak to some specific national trends impacting community media. Um I'll talk briefly about meeting resident expectations for information, all the different ways that my team and folks throughout the city uh try to get information in front of residents in addition to what we do through telecast services. Um and then we'll briefly talk about um some potential options uh that we're considering as we look at modernization of telecast services uh into 2026. So first, uh, how does public access work? Uh what are telecast services? Uh throughout today's presentation, we'll use an acronym known as PEG. PEG stands for Public Educational and Government Access. This concept was really kind of inaugurated through the Cable Act in the 1980s. Really, it's the way that through cable franchising, our franchising authorities provide resources to communities to allow them to do telecast broadcast of public meetings and providing information through cable to residents. What you may not know is that as part of the telecast model and as part of our Comcast franchise agreement, we have a relationship with St.