Even before taking office, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter pledged to do things differently than his predecessors.

Carter surprised many observers by assembling hiring panels composed of civic leaders and residents to help select city department heads, though he didn’t always abide by their recommendations.

Since then, the mayor’s administration canceled library fines for overdue books and materials at the St. Paul Public Library, put the brakes on the city’s annual Fourth of July fireworks, promoted officers to bulk up a sex crimes and mental health unit and pushed a gradual step-up to a citywide $15 minimum wage.

Carter’s 2019 budget proposal, approved in early December by the St. Paul City Council, increases the city tax levy, or total amount of property taxes collected, by 10.46 percent.

The budget funds the creation of an Office of Financial Empowerment to oversee financial literacy instruction and new college savings accounts for every student, as well as a $10 million housing fund and free programming in Parks and Rec centers.

More changes are likely.

The Pioneer Press sat down with Carter recently to discuss his first year as mayor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The complete unedited audio recording is available online at TwinCities.com.

You’ve served in City Hall before as a city council member and political aide. I’m sure being mayor is different. Were there surprises this year?

I think I expected my experience on the council to transfer more. And I have found this to just be an entirely different job. I joke some that the biggest surprise was the number of surprises. This year we had a number of major occurrences from the RiverCentre parking ramp ceiling collapse and temporary closure to slope failure over Wabasha Street. Running the city, and moving forward an ambitious agenda, and being a husband and dad, and making it to choir concerts and volleyball games has been quite a learning process.

You inherited some changes like organized trash collection. Others you pursued like forgiving library fines and adding college savings accounts. If I were a longtime St. Paul resident, I might be going “this isn’t the way things were when I was a kid.” Has that push-back been intense?

You know, I spent the better part of two years running for this office, and not one person said I’m counting on you to go keep things the same as they’ve always been. What we said the whole time along is building a city that works for all of us is going to require us to rethink what City Hall is for in the first place.

I know that change is challenging for all of us, really. What’s really been exciting for me is the amount of energy and support from St. Paul residents who have been coming out to help pitch in.

As I said in my inaugural address, “don’t clap if you’re not going to help.” People have stood up to answer that call every single day. What I hope people see is what we’re executing isn’t a set of ideas that I came up with on the third floor of City Hall with the door closed. It’s the set of ideas that I hear every time we go to Target or the barbershop or do our community engagement events.

Let’s talk about the $15 minimum wage. That was a campaign cornerstone. You pushed it through in less than a year. How hard was it to get the city council on board?

It wasn’t super hard. I think we have a really good relationship with our council. We have a common vision for the direction we want to move the city in.

There was a moment where we felt like every time we thought we were done, there was another detail that we had to figure out. We did that thinking process together. We did it publicly through the Citizen’s League task force, we did it publicly through a series of public engagement events.

Every city council seat is up for election next year. The word on the street was that if the council member didn’t support the $15 minimum wage, you wouldn’t back them. You’d back their opponent.

Really, that was the word on the street? That’s pretty mafioso. (Laughs)

But that’s the role of the executive, to push the agenda forward. Do you see yourself getting involved in political races next year?

I don’t know yet. We’ll be involved in some way, certainly making sure that our city DFL party is strong, and that our caucus and convention stuff goes well is something that I want to participate in. I don’t think that we’ve really spent a whole lot of time on the politics of next year yet. We’ve had our hands full with 2018.

Businesses in general are dealing with a lot right now. Convenience stores can’t sell menthol cigarettes. They have to track employee paid leave. They’ll have to wage raises. Property taxes are a perennial expense. Is there something the city can be doing to help businesses through this?

Absolutely. One of the things that’s in our budget is a suite of “Open for Business” initiatives. One that I’m most excited about is a virtual one-shop that we’re building in the Department of Safety and Inspections to just make it easier to get a permit and do all the things that businesses need to do. So that’s important for us. We have to simultaneously look after the health, well- being and safety of our residents and of our community, and part of that is ensuring that St. Paul is a great place to do business.

Under the previous administration, they started a “Full Stack” business initiative. (A public/private sector collaboration that provides a full range of services to help businesses start up and scale up.) That’s ongoing, too?

Yes, and that’s exciting. That has gotten so much momentum, the amount of events that we’ve had here.

You mentioned trash collection. There’s some level of people that are frustrated about the policy. I’ll tell you, I’ve worked with the team up in Public Works that administered that policy. One thing I haven’t heard anybody say is that their trash hasn’t gotten collected. For that team to have implemented from scratch a big new policy like that as close to flawlessly as I think is possible is something I count as a success for the city and for our administration.

In your legislative requests for 2019, you’ve got the Kellogg Boulevard bridge, you’ve got college savings accounts for kids. You’ve got 10 pages of initiatives.

We go big. (Laughs)

In there is something the city council had asked or proposed — legalizing recreational marijuana. Are you on board with that?

Yes. That’s something I’ve been on board with for years. It’s part of our smart on crime approach. We have seen people, particularly people of color, over-criminalized and marginalized from our community for non-violent drug-related offenses, which a different person in a different community with a different substance would receive medical treatment for.

There’s a housing initiative in there. You’re seeking state matching funds. Do you have a sense of what that money would do, specifically?

We know we have a housing crisis here. We need new units at all levels of the income spectrum. We need new market-rate units so that people who can afford the market-rate units can be in those, so we can clear some of our more affordable units.

Another goal is preservation of our existing units. That’s going to be critical. Because as subsidies expire we see people converting affordable units into market-rate and higher level units, and that’s something that will continue to challenge us if that continues.

And then the final piece is working with the city council on a suite of fair-housing protections to prevent discrimination and displacement as our city grows and prospers.

Let’s talk about police and public safety. You came in during fun times with the police union in particular.

Indeed.

There was a pretty explosive mailer (during the campaign) that went out that certainly had their imprint all over it.

I don’t remember. (Laughs).

What is that relationship with the police like now?

I’ve never had a difficult relationship with the police department, with rank-and-file officers in our community. I high-five an officer every single day. We’ve done ride-alongs and hung out with officers in their rolls calls. Our St. Paul police officers provide an incredible service every single step along the way.

Within that department we have people who really desire a great relationship with community and we have officers who do an amazing job of connecting with community. We went viral last month playing video games with community members.

The problem with trust is, the trust it takes a hundred years to build can be destroyed in a moment. I think our officers know that. And they know how important that trust is.

We’re going to continue to support our officers in every way that we can.

You hired Jason Sole in March for this Community First policing initiative. Do we have the results of that? Or is that underway?

That’s something that we very intentionally needed to spend a lot of time building the foundation for. We’re really thinking of this as a shift from the tough on crime policies that have failed our country for so long, to a smart on crime focus. That’s going to be one of our focuses in 2019 is continuing to build that out.

For me, the public safety philosophy needs to be a comprehensive one. As I think about my vision on public safety and “smart on crime,” it’s about people, and connecting people to opportunities.

That means identifying the people in our community who live with the most stability challenges and finding new creative ways to connect them to resources and opportunities.

That’s why we’re investing in mental health, that’s why we raised the minimum wage, that’s why we’re investing in housing, that’s why we tripled the rec center programming.

The second piece is place. That just reflects an understanding of this concept called CPTED, “crime prevention through environmental design.” That asserts that the aesthetic design of a place has a really strong influence on the types of activities, behaviors and outcomes that occur within that space.

And the third is policing. Research shows that people who are confident that they’ll be treated fairly by police are more likely to obey the law, they’re more likely to call 911, and they’re more likely to provide the type of witness information that our department needs to follow-up.

You chose in this budget to back-fill nine police officers and promote nine police officers. Some folks wanted more cops on the streets. Some folks didn’t want any back-filling at all. Why the compromise?

When I proposed my budget, my expectation was we’d work with the council to refine it, to revise it. That’s what happens every year.

It was important to me and to our city and certainly to the council to provide better investigative follow-up, particularly in the wake of the articles and news that we’ve seen about victims and survivors of sex crimes who haven’t had access to the type of investigation and the type of follow-up resources that we all know that we owe them.

To continue to enhance our ability to connect people who have experienced mental health trauma to resources was really important to me as well. And so we ended up landing on making some of those investments with regard to investigators, and we ended up landing on adding full-time dedicated mental health officers. Which are two things that I’m really excited about.

And to prevent losing feet on the streets, in the community, we ended up figuring out a way to back-fill officers who are moving into investigative roles. It’s something I’m proud of, it’s something I support and I stand behind.

What else should we expect in 2019?

You haven’t asked about the Office of Financial Empowerment.

Is that something we can expect in 2019?

That’s definitely something that we can expect in 2019. The positions are posted already. We’ve got our college savings accounts task force that has been out this past year, working to revise a plan. We’ll be crafting the next chapter of how we build those forward in the next coming months.

We’ve discussed the fact that our lowest income families in St. Paul lose somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million a year just by not filing their taxes and claiming the federal and state returns that they’re entitled to. We’re going to be working with our nonprofits in the first quarter of the year to make sure people know that those resources are there.

We’re going to do it the way we’ve done it, the way we’ve done everything. I’ve been in office almost a year now, less than a year, and and we’re in the process right now of setting up our fourth set of citywide events. The first being during the inauguration, the second being during the state of our city summit, and the third being the budget events. We’re setting up our fourth go-around of talking to folks and community members throughout our city. That’s going to be something we do in the first quarter of the year.

We’re going to be doing the State of our City Summit again, which I’m sure is going to come as a surprise to probably no one, and bring people together again saying how do we build this vision forward?

And another thing I think is going to be a focus is when we announced “Serve St. Paul,” which is our initiative to invite people to build sweat equity through service in our community. People have shown us that they’re ready to step up to the plate, and we’re going to continue to take them up on it.