St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman (Pioneer Press file photo: John Doman)
The Highland District Council is poised to get a 12 percent raise of sorts. The Frogtown Neighborhood Association would take a 23 percent funding cut. And the Ramsey Hill Association, like five other block clubs, would lose city backing entirely.
In St. Paul, the 17 neighborhood-based district councils that perform community outreach on quality-of-life issues such as crime, traffic, playgrounds, bars and restaurants would experience sizable changes under a new funding strategy being proposed by the mayor's office.
The adjusted approach, based in large part on population figures from the 2010 Census and revised poverty rates, would alter how $1.2 million in St. Paul citizen participation dollars and crime prevention grants are distributed.
The result would immediately boost funding next year to district councils in the Payne-Phalen and Highland Park neighborhoods, among others, while gradually slashing $18,000 from the coffers of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association over the course of three years. That's nearly a fourth of the association's budget.
Either way, that doesn't sit right with residents worried about the neighborhood's many vacant and foreclosed houses, the needs of new immigrants such as Frogtown's sizable Southeast Asian community, and concerns related to construction of the new light rail line.
"It seems to me the question is not only one of population, but of need," said Frogtown resident Tony Schmitz. "Obviously, neighborhoods full of attorneys, architects, city planners and doctors are going to have more built-in resources for dealing with issues than poorer neighborhoods where people in those professions aren't necessarily available as volunteers.
"Allocating money purely by population seems logical until you stop to think about it for a minute," Schmitz said. "Then the premise falls apart."
The Summit-University and North End-South Como councils, also situated in City Council Ward 1, would see their annual allotments from the city decline, though not as drastically. City funding makes up the lion's share of each district council's budget, though the 17 councils also have become adept at applying for outside grants to fund special projects.
Likely as a result of the recession and the foreclosure crisis, Ward 1 lost more than 3,700 residents between the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Censuses, prompting the city's charter commission two years ago to redraw the ward boundaries. The city's population as a whole stayed relatively flat at 285,068 overall.
In addition, the city's six neighborhood block clubs would lose city funding entirely under the mayor's proposal. The block clubs would be invited instead to apply for competitive grants from a new $100,000 citywide Innovation Fund, details of which still are being crafted. District councils would also be able to compete for that money.
Districts poised to benefit from the changes say they're serving growing populations with diverse needs. The city's largest district, Payne-Phalen, has a population of 30,700 residents, or about twice as many as Frogtown, according to the 2010 census. Under the revised formula, the district council would receive $109,906 from the city instead of its current allotment of $101,504.
Members of the Payne-Phalen council say the funding increase will help with outreach to the growing numbers of non-English speakers in the community and other neighborhood activities in a low-income area that could really use a boost.
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman joined members of his administration in informing the district councils of the proposed funding changes last week. A final decision over whether to adopt the new approach would sit with the St. Paul City Council.
Nancy Homans, the mayor's senior policy director, said the district councils receive two general forms of city funding, and the funding formulas behind them haven't been adjusted in years. Under a strategy adopted in 2004, citizen partnership grants are weighted toward population but also take into account poverty rates, job numbers and the number of English-language learners in a community.
"The 2010 census came out and everyone's numbers changed," Homans said. "Districts 7 and 8 (Frogtown and Summit-University) lost population. Their percentage of the city's poor population went down. So their numbers, in terms of what they would get from the formula, went down a little bit."
Last year, to the chagrin of some district councils that would have gained money from the updated census figures, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman decided not to apply the 2010 census numbers immediately. The goal was "to give us time to look at it and see if there was a different formula that should be applied," Homans said.
Homans tried adding housing vacancy rates and other numbers into the formulas, but the results didn't change much. "I met with the district councils, and nobody had a real appetite to come up with an entirely new formula, particularly since any formula based on population was going to come up with a similar outcome," she said.
Through a secondary process, the councils split $300,000 in crime prevention money each year, with stable allotments that have not changed in size in well over a decade, Homans said. At the high end, Frogtown and Union Park each receive $30,000 annually for crime prevention. The West Seventh district receives $4,000.
Homans has recommended combining the crime prevention money with the citizen outreach money and distributing both pots of funds under the same formula, which is heavily weighted by population size. "The district councils themselves are frustrated with doing two different contracts -- one for citizen participation and one for crime prevention -- seeing as the activities are so similar," Homans said.
As a result of the changes, the Frogtown Neighborhood Association's total city funding would drop 23 percent from $80,386 to $61,735. Homans said that the three district councils experiencing funding cuts would be impacted gradually over the course of three years instead of all at once. Frogtown's funding would be cut by $6,000 per year.
"What happened to (Frogtown) is in part a change in their population," Homans said. "But a big part of what they would be facing is that they got so much crime prevention money in the past."
Caty Royce, executive director of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, said the cuts "would mean less support and less opportunity for the residents of Frogtown, a neighborhood that deserves and needs it more than many others. ... That population-based formula is not taking into account what created those vacancies," Royce said.
Under the new formula, the Highland District Council, which covers a relatively affluent area with a population of 24,078 residents, would receive $74,188 from the city, instead of $65,030, largely because of population increase.
Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172. Follow him at twitter.com/FrederickMelo.
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