The St. Paul City Council met on Wednesday, February 18, 2026, at 3:30 PM in the Council Chambers. Six members were present (Councilmember Cheniqua Johnson was absent and excused). The meeting lasted until 4:46 PM and covered consent agenda items, a contested zoning appeal, several ordinances at final adoption and first reading, and multiple public hearings. Key actions included final adoption of a law requiring law enforcement to remove masks during operations, a first reading of a geothermal energy franchise, and approval of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district for the former St. Joseph’s hospital site.
Call the meeting of the St. Paul City Council to order. Roll call, please. Coleman. Here. Johnson. Joast. Here. Kim. Here. Yang. Here. Bowie? Here. Council President Acre. Here. Six present one absent, that being Councilmember Johnson, and she is excused. Welcome everyone to our City Council meeting. Thank you for joining us today. We invite everyone to join us in standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge allegiance to the flag. Indivisible. Liberty and Justice Raw. And can we have item three right into the record, please? Yes. Item number three, AO twenty-six dash fifteen, establishing intent for one-time special funds budgeted for consulting services in OFS. I believe we just wanted um some additional information about this from Director Laura Logston, who is here. Come on up, welcome. I'm the director of the Office of Financial Services. This item is a change within OFS's budget to the intention of funds that were budgeted in this year's 2026 adopted budget. So there's 100,000 of one-time funding that was allocated for OFS for consulting services. And OFS has made a recommendation to continue to use the funds for consulting services in OFS's budget, but instead to support the city's annual comprehensive financial report or the ACFER. A number of factors occurred kind of after the proposed budget and near the end of the year impacting our ACFR timeliness. We fully expected to complete the ACFER in a more timely manner last year, and then the cyber incident impacted that timeline. So OFS kind of looking at the current factors that we're dealing with this year, we would recommend reprioritizing that funding to support the ACFAR work. Great. Thanks, Director. I'm looking to my colleagues to see if there are questions. Ms. Bowie. Thank you, Council President. Thank you so much, Director Wakvin for providing that brief report. I did have some questions, particularly because I know for the intended purposes for these dollars was to go towards our priority-based budgeting. And I know on the during our budget committee meetings, and we have Chair Ying here, particularly where you know some of our priorities was to be like on the two-year biannual budgeting, and that's something that is still a strong priority for us as a council. I'm particularly wondering with like knowing ASPR is like a mandatory annual reporting. You know, was it just the timeliness of the issue because of the cybertact? Or is are we is this like kind of like a larger question, particularly around you know what can help us with the timeliness? Um, because I gotta imagine you know, outsourcing one-time funds for something that we know we have to do every year can actually you know uh raise a question around like is this a good use of our funds, right? Um so I just I'm just trying to understand would it be the entire $100,000 that we'll be hiring it for a consultant to help solve for us to make our our deadline on time. Yeah, thank you, Council President and Councilmember.