The St. Paul City Council held a regular meeting on April 15, 2026, covering three major agenda items: a mid-session update on state legislative priorities, a report on the contracted harm report for the reparations commission, and an initial discussion on potential charter reforms. The meeting lasted approximately two hours and included presentations from city staff and councilmember questions.
Order all call, please. Councilmember Bowie. Council President Acre. Here. Um, Councilmember Joast. Councilmember Coleman. Here. Councilmember Kim. Here. Council Vice President. Yang. Here. Councilmember Johnson. Here. Seeing six present, one absent. Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. We have three items on our full agenda today. We're going to start with a mid-session legislative update. Excited to welcome General Rourke, our head of intergovernmental relations, to tell us how wildly we're succeeding at the legislature. Thank you, Council President. Hi, everybody. Jennifer A'Rourke, Director of Government Relations, here on the job two and a half months, I think. So it's a pleasure to be with you this morning. I think at this point in session, it's super timely to be conversing about what's going on up there. I prepared a slide deck starting with the state uh legislature. A lot of the focus and what I've um prepared for is on that. I ended with uh a slide on some of the federal goings on and uh welcome your discussion and uh such on all of it. So my first slide is really uh just kind of setting the table, uh, offering up the legislative landscape where we're at in the process right now. Uh full screen. Thank you. Uh this Friday is the third deadline, and what that means is um bills are supposed to be in an omnibus bill, committees, their legislative committees, um, the ones that have a budget or think that they have a budget, will have put together an omnibus bill, maybe an omnibus trans omnibus transportation bill, an omnibus public safety bill, uh tax and bonding bills. Uh for a lot of those committees, this Friday is a big deadline. And the tax bill and the bonding bill really play by their own rules and won't be out for another couple of weeks. But for a lot of uh omnibus bills, that deadline is this Friday. We are seeing those coming together, and you know, when those come out, we review those to see if our smaller requests have made it into a bill. Um, there's a whole lot of up in the air, what's going on from for folks like me who do uh lobbying or whatever, because on the House side, and jumping right into it on the Republican side, they have said they don't want to have any omnibus bills and they don't want to spend any money necessarily on the DFL Democratic side. There is a desire to do some of that. So you know, we have uh an omnibus public safety bill out this week that um because it's public safety and whatnot, that one will probably move forward. But on the transportation side of things, I know the Democrats would like to put one together, but House leadership on the Republican side with uh co-chair John Kosnick has said he doesn't intend to have an omnibus bill. So I think what we'll see is some of um some omnibus bills out there. We've been tracking them already, and I think they'll come to a head uh eventually in the next two weeks, and it'll be one of those things that leadership decides when they ultimately are trying to figure out a way how to get through the end of session. And Ms. O'Rourke, just as context for our priorities or just in general, what is the advantage or disadvantage of of having an omnibus bill or not? Great question. Uh, you know, it's sort of I think of our priorities sort of as like a tier one and a tier two in terms of what kind of attention they're getting, you know, whether it's a big deal or controversial to other people, and there's a whole lot of things I think for local governments across the board that fall into that second tier, just because you know we're operating government, whether you're cities or counties, and um our stuff isn't always so sexy, right? You know, um I'll use some of us might like to differ, but to us it is, but not to everybody else, and I'll use one as an example. And this is really getting into the weeds. There is a bill um brought forward that we testified on a number of times, and it has to do with non-fatal shootings and the program that we have in our police department. The county testified on it a number of times.