St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter has chosen two directors to lead Emergency Management and the new Office of Financial Empowerment.

The mayor’s office announced Friday that Rick Schute, a combat veteran and former Chief of Staff for the Minnesota National Guard, will lead the city’s Emergency Management Department, which prepares for natural and man-made disasters, from flooding to terrorism.

The position has been filled on an interim basis since the departure of Rick Larkin in early 2018.

Muneer Karcher-Ramos, the former director of the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood in Frogtown and Summit-University, will lead the new Office of Financial Empowerment. The office will coordinate financial literacy and anti-poverty initiatives, including college savings accounts for every young student in the city.

Schute, who was raised in St. Paul and lives in North St. Paul, spent 23 years in the U.S. Army and is a combat veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq.

As director of operations for the Minnesota National Guard from 2012 to 2018, he planned, trained and directed support operations for federal, state and community response missions.

Karcher-Ramos, who was ran the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood initiative for more than five years, is a community faculty member in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota.

He received the Public Sociology Award from the University of Minnesota in 2016 and last year participated in the Young American Leaders Program at Harvard Business School.

He will work with Fair Housing Coordinator Kirstin Burch and Ikram Koliso, the new College Savings Account Program Manager, who had been a policy associate in the mayor’s office.