St. Paul City Council Meeting on Special Assessments and Solid Waste - March 18, 2026
St. Paul City Council Meeting on Special Assessments and Solid Waste Licensing and Contracts
The St. Paul City Council met on March 18, 2026, to discuss two main topics: the methodology for calculating special assessments for street maintenance and reconstruction projects, and the licensing and contracting processes for solid waste haulers. The meeting featured presentations from city staff, a third-party appraiser, and discussions on policy amendments and transparency.
Special Assessment Methodology Discussion
- Council President noted the topic has been discussed frequently and aims to provide evergreen information for constituents.
- Bruce Engelbrecht, manager of the real estate section, presented the history and theory of special assessments, distinguishing them from taxes by the requirement of special benefit to specific properties.
- The city has faced lawsuits from churches (2011) and property owners, leading to shifts in costs to the general fund and the use of third-party appraisers to calculate special benefit.
- John Barclay of Hosh Appraisal described his firm's market-based approach to determining the maximum supportable special benefit for property classifications. The analysis uses sales data, neighborhood trends, and assessor's values, but does not typically account for negative impacts (e.g., tree removal) unless they significantly offset benefits across the entire project.
- Councilmembers asked about the impact of bike lanes, sidewalks, and tree removal. Barclay noted that negative factors are not typically included unless they result in a net zero benefit, but individual property appeals could consider such specifics.
- The city currently assesses 25% of project costs (after adjustments) for street reconstruction and mill-and-overlay projects. The special benefit cap often reduces the actual assessment to 15-20% of project costs, with the remainder funded by other sources (e.g., bonds, gas tax, general fund).
- Policy amendments proposed:
- Clarify the difference between city cost (general public benefit) and assessable cost, excluding sewer/water main replacements from the assessable base.
- Limit the corner property benefit (capping assessments at the highest of two bordering projects) to residential properties with 1-4 units, reversing a prior expansion to commercial/institutional properties.
- The net fiscal impact is expected to be near neutral, with annual assessment revenues averaging $5 million.
Solid Waste Licensing and Contracting
- Director Weesie presented an overview of solid waste licenses, which are class R (administratively approved) or class N (council-approved with public hearing). There are 38 active solid waste hauler licenses; 26% are sited in St. Paul.
- Class N licenses (e.g., gas stations, liquor stores) are subject to more oversight due to police calls and neighborhood impact. The council discussed whether solid waste haulers should be reclassified to class N for greater accountability.
- The city's $44 million, seven-year solid waste contract with FCC (one-to-four-unit garbage) was awarded via RFP in 2023 without council approval. Only lobbying and fundraising contracts require council approval per current code.
- Councilmembers expressed concern about transparency for large contracts that affect all residents, though they acknowledged the need for efficient procurement. Some members suggested formalizing council briefing or approval for such major agreements.
- The recycling contract with Eureka (five-year, $61 million) and multi-unit recycling contract with FCC (seven-year, $30 million) also do not require council approval.
Key Outcomes
- The council heard the special assessment policy proposal and will consider formal amendments in the near future (timeline flexible). Councilmember Bowie expressed interest in engaging constituents.
- For solid waste, the council will continue discussions on whether to change the licensing class for waste haulers or alter the contract approval process. A procurement code change would require legal advice.
- No formal votes were taken; the meeting was informational.
Meeting Transcript
Committee to order. Welcome, please. Councilmember Bowie. Council President Acre. Here. Councilmember Jost. Here. Councilmember Coleman. Here. Councilmember Kim. Here. Councilmember Yang. Here. Councilmember Johnson. Seeing five present, two absent. Great. Good morning, everyone. Um, we have two items on our agenda today. Looking forward to both of them. Um, the first one is a topic that has come up um many times, both recently in our council agendas, and also I will say in my tenure on the city council. This has been like a topic that we have wrestled with many times. Um, and the question relates to how we calculate um assessments when we do um infrastructure work, specifically often street maintenance work. Um, and specifically the question has come up how we calculate the special benefit um for adjacent property owners to determine how much we can charge to adjacent property owners. Um, I think this is going to be a really helpful and informative conversation for us. I'm really grateful to the department for offering to bring in the third-party consultant we use to do those assessments. Um, and my hope also is that this footage of today provides helpful evergreen information that we can share with our constituents. We can share this link to say, hey, this is how this works. This is the conversation we had about it. So this is hopefully going to be important for today, and also um going forward. So with that, there are a ton of people here to talk about this, and I'm not exactly sure all of their names. So I'm gonna invite everybody who's here for agenda item one, some people's names I know, to come on up. Including Bruce and Lynn and anybody else with you. Yes. Welcome. Mr. Engelbert. Thank you, Council President, Council members. We do have other folks, but mainly John Barclay, who is from Hosh Appraisal, who will be talking a little bit later. The rest of us, I think we'll we'll just maybe wait in the wings unless there are some specific questions of other people. So there is a PowerPoint. I think you are probably aware of it, have a camera. So I'll just walk you through that. My name is Bruce Engelbrecht. I'm the manager of the real estate section of the finance department. Finance assessments is in finance, but it used to be part of real estate, and then a couple years ago I'd shifted over into uh finance treasury. And so I had a lot to do with uh the assessments in the past and in the creation of the policies a couple of years ago, and so I'm kind of doing uh much of the conversation here. Okay, on the presentation agenda, um, we want to give you just a little bit of background on assessments. Hopefully, I can breeze through that pretty quickly. Uh the cities uh then that led up to our response to the various lawsuits and challenges that we had, and so um when we get into that part of it, that's when John will speak primarily, and then I'll kind of wrap up that part of it. Then we wanted to take this opportunity toward the end to um to tee up a couple of policy amendments that we'd like to make to the special assessment policies.
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