The Budget Committee, chaired by Councilmember Cheniqua Johnson, met on July 22, 2026, to receive updates on two major public works topics: the ongoing street light repair and wire theft crisis, and the city's mill and overlay pavement program. Both items were received and filed after extensive discussion. Presentations were led by Public Works Director Barber, City Engineer Nick Peterson, and other staff, with questions from council members.
Oh, we can't do that. Roll call, please. Chair Johnson. Here. Vice Chair Gain. Counselor Bully. Council Member. Counselor Kim. Here. Castle Member Joe's. Council President Acre. Here. Seven present and absent. All right. Well, um, I feel like our attendance is always kind of a fun thing to do. It's to make people make a lighter day. Um, we have a couple of the presentations today. Um, the oh so important street light repair um and replacement update that's coming in from our new director. Director Barber, I believe this is might be your first time giving a presentation. So exciting, exciting. Um, and then we'll go on to Millen Overlay, which will also be a Director Barber and several other folks that'll be joining her as well. So first and foremost, uh, Director Barber, welcome. Uh welcome. I'm really excited to be a part of your first presentation uh in front of the body, but also just like welcome to the city. I hope you're getting settled in well. It's been great to connect with you offline and overall. Just excited for you to be here. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. And yes, this is my first time uh presenting, but very excited to do so. Um and uh we've got two important topics, and I've got a number of experts in the audience here, so uh I will kick things off for both of the presentations, but then we'll call on them. But we also have some if you have other questions, we'll make sure that we get answers to you. All right, so first we're talking about St. Paul's street lights and wire theft. Um, what we know is we know that street lights is a significant um public safety issue. We know it's a big problem. I want to share right out of the gate that one of we were talking about how to prepare this presentation. One of the key things we wanted to talk about is what a frustrating thing it is. Like we do a lot of work, we work very hard, we're doing repairs constantly, and sometimes as soon as we repair a light, something else happens and it's down again, and the fat the wire is stolen again. And this is turning into sort of this repeated cycle. And so we're gonna talk about how we want to ground ourselves into how we're gonna approach this going forward because we're really in a situation where we'll continue to have dark lights throughout the city, but we want to be responsive. We are doing a lot of work, and we want to make sure that people understand the kind of work we are doing. Um our team is very committed to doing this, and you know, it gets very hard for them too when this is happening on a uh cycle over and over and over again. Uh there's a variety of lighting styles here in the city, as you well know. And I think that you know, there are different issues with different types of lighting. Some are for residential streets, some are for bigger thoroughfares, all of that, and there's a lot of historic lighting as well. Um we do know that some of the lighting fixtures are affected more than others by copper wire theft, and we've noticed specifically some of the decorative the cast iron or aluminum ones are the ones that are often uh the ones that are targeted most quickly. Here's a slide we won't spend a lot of time here, but you can kind of see the percentage of the different lights throughout the city. I think the key number that I want to mention is that we have almost 40,000 lights in the city of St. Paul.