There’s some truth to an old rumor that St. Paul-area residents of color won’t drink the tap water. St. Paul Regional Water Services surveyed regional customers and found that 62 percent of white respondents said they drank the water that flowed from their kitchen faucet, while 59 percent of non-white respondents said they did not.
Ask folks on St. Paul’s highest-minority streets about ticketing during snow emergencies, and you’re bound to get an earful about how the poorest neighborhoods are targeted the most.
City officials say that’s not exactly the case, but there’s a good reason for that impression, as well.
A recent analysis of where the most ticketing took place during a snow emergency in February 2016 shows heavy activity around multi-unit apartment buildings. And many, but not all, of those buildings are indeed in lower-income, high-minority areas.
Since August 2014, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s office has asked every city department — from city prosecutors to housing inspectors — to conduct a data-driven self-analysis. The goal is to determine whether city services achieve “equity” — a fair distribution across geographic, racial and income groups.
The work takes its cues from the city of Seattle, which began a similar process more than a decade ago. Each department has created a racial-equity work plan and convenes “change teams” aimed at concrete changes.
WHITE, NONWHITE RESIDENTS HAVE DIFFERING EXPERIENCES
Some of the findings have been eye-opening.
“White and nonwhite people experience St. Paul differently, and a lot of that is based upon the neighborhoods where they live,” said Deputy Mayor Kristin Beckmann. “We have identified where there are these different experiences in the city, and we are developing policies and resources to achieve balance.”
Beckmann, who has led St. Paul’s equity efforts, recently joined Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity director Jessica Kingston to present a department-by-department summary of procedure and policy changes to the city council.
A hard look at fire inspections, for instance, has resulted in 16 program changes, from improvements to a public website portal to a new two-year trainee position, and the hiring of the state’s first Hmong female fire inspector to help overcome language barriers.
Mai See Her, the fire inspector, began shadowing fire inspectors from the St. Paul Department of Safety and Inspections a few years ago as a high school student enrolled in the city’s “Right Track” internship program.
“I enjoyed it, because it seemed like what I was doing was actually improving the community,” she said, during her badge-pinning ceremony in November. By then, Mai See Her had already represented DSI in four online videos explaining fire safety in Hmong.
As St. Paul Parks and Recreation embarks on a study of its facilities, Beckmann is asking the department to look at whether rec center sports and programming fees serve as barriers to youth participation in the city’s low-income areas.
Another goal is to identify recreation centers that lack sufficient programming, again with attention to race and income.
City libraries, Public Works, St. Paul Regional Water and the Office of Financial Services are all engaged, Beckmann and Kingston said.
NOT WITHOUT CONTROVERSY
The equity work hasn’t been without controversy.
Some city employees have openly grumbled about daylong diversity discussions and employee trainings. The city council’s recent decision to remove police officers from the Police-Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission drew strong pushback from the police union.
A new advisory committee on poverty and another on responsible banking raised eyebrows with business advocates.
And critics say efforts to reduce minority suspensions and expulsions in the St. Paul Public Schools contributed heavily to the firing of former Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva.
In hopes of crafting a better system to determine funding for major neighborhood projects, the city council last fall agreed to hold off on the city’s traditional capital improvement budgeting process for the next two years. The new system will clearly aim for better public outreach and equity, but exactly how remains unclear.
“That’s what’s going to be debated this year,” Beckmann said. “Do you say you prioritize investments where there’s racial concentrations of poverty? Do you say you prioritize investments where there’s more kids? Or do you prioritize areas that haven’t had investments in five years?”
St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce President Matt Kramer said the city’s efforts around equity are timely, both as an employer and as a provider of taxpayer services.
By way of comparison, Kramer recalled hearing an anecdote from a worker at a transit agency about a bus company looking for overnight cleaning staff.
The requirements included an online application and a driver’s license — two potential barriers to entry for the people most likely to apply to and benefit from a janitorial job.
“It is the issue of our time,” Kramer said. “Process drives results, and many processes, at institutions both public and private, were set up not to be inequitable, but to have these little niches here and there that at the end of the day are extraordinarily inequitable.”
TARGETING RESOURCES
In some city departments, the equity efforts are unprecedented.
The Department of Planning and Economic Development, for instance, mapped single-family rental homes that, because of their age and condition, require annual housing inspections under city policy. They compared that map with another — a map of high-poverty areas that are home to large minority populations.
The “Class D” property map and “racially concentrated areas of poverty” overlapped like hand and glove.
“They are our oldest housing stock, and the fire safety office has determined they are at most risk for fires,” Beckmann said. “When they mapped the Class D’s … they see vulnerable housing in our poorest, most diverse neighborhoods.”
As a result of that effort, the St. Paul City Council last year approved a $750,000 new loan program to help owners of small rental properties complete housing improvements.
What’s unique, Beckmann said, is that the program is aimed at property owners within the mapped area.
“This is new for us,” she said. “To target resources based on population of people of color, and poverty, is new for us.”
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN OUTREACH
Similar data-driven efforts have literally rolled out in connection with the city’s 10-year comprehensive plan, which is being updated for approval by the Metropolitan Council next year.
In June, the city found a wide gap between the participation of people of color at public discussions concerning the plan and the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhoods, with some areas reporting no minority involvement at all.
For instance, the area represented by the West Side Community Organization (District Council 3) is nearly 60 percent minority.
Targeted outreach through “pop-up meetings” in the city’s roving Ford Transit Connect boosted engagement, and nearly 80 percent of the participants tallied in District 3 comp plan discussions in August were people of color, Beckmann said.
Krysten Ryba-Tures, president of the WSCO Board, said her organization invited the city’s planning department to discuss the comp plan at its annual meeting in November, which drew 250 guests and “was a very racially and ethnically diverse audience.”
WHO WON’T DRINK THE WATER?
Among the most unexpected findings came from St. Paul Regional Water Services.
In customer surveys across its east-metro service area, residents of color were somewhat less likely than whites to say their water bill was clear and understandable.
The disparities were far more striking, however, when it came to the question “Do you use tap water for drinking?”
More than 60 percent of white customers said “yes.” Nearly 60 percent of non-white customers said “no” — they pay for bottled water.
Looking at the data by race revealed a chasm in usage that had previously only been rumored.
“It’s a big deal. People don’t do that in the utility world,” Beckmann said. “That’s a household cost that doesn’t need to happen.”
City officials believe many immigrants may distrust tap water because of negative experiences in their home countries.
City council member Dan Bostrom noted that city water is fluoridated, and low-income families that avoid city taps aren’t doing any favors to their children’s dental health.
St. Paul Regional Water Services maintains that its water is as safe to drink, if not safer, than many bottled waters.
It tests its water regularly, and managers say even homes that still have lead piping routinely test low for lead exposure. The surveyed area includes St. Paul and surrounding east-metro suburbs, and 18 percent of the 400 survey respondents were non-white.
“Right now, we have asked the company that did the survey, EMC Research, to provide us with further breakdowns by ethnicity/race,” said Jodi Wallin, a spokeswoman for St. Paul Regional Water, in an email. “We don’t have a report on that breakdown for the question of who drinks tap water beyond white/non-white.”
The Board of Water Commissioners will discuss the survey findings Feb. 14.
TICKETING HAPPENS WHERE?
Residents of the city’s low-income areas sometimes complain they are heavily targeted for tickets during snow emergencies.
To get at the truth, the city mapped tickets issued from Feb. 2 to Feb. 3, 2016, during 24 hours of a snow emergency, and compared the data with home-ownership trends.
Areas with many rental properties, such as multifamily apartment buildings, were heavily ticketed. Streets with owner-occupied homes were not.
Beckmann said the data revealed that the city needs to do a better job of getting notice about snow emergencies to renters, who often struggle to find places to park in densely populated neighborhoods.
In response, Public Works community engagement worker Jeannette Rebar jumped in the city’s pop-up truck armed with mint-lemonade Popsicles and drove out on a hot day last fall to forge relationships with tenants of an apartment complex off Western Avenue in the city’s North End. It’s home to a large immigrant population from Nepal.
“We were able to help them download the (snow emergency) app, which is very visual,” Rebar said.
She’s done similar outreach in apartment buildings such as Sibley Manor on West Seventh Street, knocking on doors to get residents to move their cars, and explaining to them where they might park nearby.
Written visuals in English, Spanish and Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, have helped, and the city’s online snow emergency videos have been translated into eight languages.
“You’ve got to reach people before it actually starts,” said Rebar, who began her work before the first snow fell.
BOND THRESHOLDS
The city’s equity work has resulted in technical changes for vendors who bid on completing small city contracts such as minor street work, roof repair, landscaping or the installation of parks amenities like tennis courts.
The city’s purchasing office, which is housed in the Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity Department, studied its own bonding requirements and found they were more restrictive than the state’s expectations.
As a result, the city no longer requires bid bonds, or payment and performance bonds, on projects valued under $100,000. The previous threshold had been $50,000.
“Our analysis found that we were too low, so we aligned it with the state, which has been well received by the community,” said Kingston, the HREEO director.
The goal is to open up the bidding process to small, local contractors, which are more likely to be minority-run than large shops.
Kingston said that over the past two years, more than 2,000 city employees have completed a one-day “Foundations of Racial Equity” training, aimed at how to understand bias and talk about race.
More than 500 managers have completed a separate “Beyond Diversity” training, and 600 sworn officers have completed “Police Racial Equity” training tailored to public-safety issues.
As a result of targeted recruitment outreach and other efforts, 22.6 percent of the city’s full-time employees are now people of color, up more than 6 percentage points from 2012.
