If Tom Goldstein had been mayor, there might not be a Palace Theatre concert venue in downtown St. Paul, at least not one owned by the city.

CHS Field, where the St. Paul Saints draw baseball fans by the thousands, would not have been built downtown, at least not with public funds. And the Major League Soccer stadium under construction in St. Paul’s Midway probably would have gone to Minneapolis.

“Poverty, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs — these are issues you’re not going to solve by building a stadium here or a theater there,” said Goldstein, one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s administration. “Where’s the money going to come from if we’re giving subsidies to wealthy developers?”

Goldstein points to the Midway area where the city recently approved $18 million in public spending for infrastructure around a 19,400-seat soccer stadium that will never pay property taxes.

“There’s a lot of other things we can be spending $18 million for. You’re going to get some development, but not really what we could have had. … It’s a terrible use of space.”

Goldstein, 60 and a former St. Paul school board member, has his sights set on becoming mayor of Minnesota’s capital city. But even he acknowledges his campaign is no easy sell. Related Articles GOP senators confront their own past comments on Supreme Court vote

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He’s asking St. Paul voters to reject established political voices on Nov. 7 and embrace a man whom many consider to be the most contrarian of the five leading mayoral candidates.

At a time when the city’s population is expanding, restaurant and luxury housing construction are gaining momentum and the city’s overall cachet appears to be on the rise, is Goldstein — a constant critic of City Hall — too negative to lead St. Paul?

He acknowledges he may sometimes come across that way, but he says somebody has to do the hard work of adding up how much taxpayer money is going to private enterprise and how little the city’s most vulnerable populations get back in return.

“It’s not about what I personally want, it’s about the greater good,” Goldstein said over breakfast at Sabrina’s coffee shop near his Hamline-Midway home. “The Saints ballpark and the soccer stadium, most people’s lives don’t revolve around these things. If you put them on the ballot, they would fail.”

He added: “I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment. I’m just one of the more vocal people.”

NO ‘RALLY-RALLY, RAH-RAH’?

Goldstein, a supporter of ranked-choice voting, points out he has plenty of progressive ideas, including expanding housing and transit subsidies for the poor, embracing public transit options that are more flexible than light rail, and funding municipal broadband infrastructure to attract technology firms throughout the city.

He believes all new affordable housing developments should provide job and mental health counseling services, a proposal that some housing advocates worry could drive up costs.

Goldstein said he opposes the “militarization of policing across the country” and wants to use salary bonuses to entice more St. Paul police officers to live in St. Paul.

“We need to hire thoughtful people,” said Goldstein, who is eager to see police go back to walking the beat. “The best cops rarely use force.”

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Despite his carefully thought-out plans, his campaign has received few public endorsements from elected officials, unions or interest groups, other than St. Paul City Council member Jane Prince and former state Rep. Andy Dawkins. Even Dawkins, however, acknowledges that Goldstein sometimes lacks a reassuring or upbeat bedside manner.

“I think he’s got the issues right. He’s talking about the right things,” said Dawkins, who has known Goldstein for at least a decade. “I wish he had the kind of personality, the charisma that would catch on with the whole city. He’s just too on task with ‘This is the issue,’ instead of rally-rally rah-rah.”

Goldstein has drawn scorn from members of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition for arguing that the city’s bicycle plan includes too many routes that may never be funded.

And he’s tangled with some neighbors after expressing skepticism that a series of traffic circles the city has planned but not yet built along Charles Avenue will save lives.

BASEBALL FANATIC OPPOSES BALLPARKS

Goldstein, who grew up outside Washington, D.C., moved to the Twin Cities to attend Carleton College and stuck around, smitten by the more laid-back pace of life.

But there was little laid-back about Goldstein.

At the age of 25, he ran a bakery in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, overseeing some 30 or more employees. In 1989, he launched the Gus Macker 3-on-3 basketball tournament on behalf of a downtown St. Paul council that no longer exists. The tournament, which he ran for four years, required temporarily closing Wabasha Street to bring hundreds of teams onto portable courts.

“We started with 300 teams, and it grew to 700 teams,” Goldstein said.

For almost 15 years, beginning when he was a student at William Mitchell College of Law in the 1980s, Goldstein ran the Sports Collection retail store at Grand and Hamline avenues.

The collectibles shop was successful enough that he opened a second location for a few years in Edina. In 1999, then-Mayor Norm Coleman asked voters to raise the city’s sales tax by 1/2 of one percent to help fund a possible Minnesota Twins stadium in downtown St. Paul.

Tom Goldstein: "Too many times, force is the first thing that gets used. We don't have a diverse enough police department." Offering application points to people who live in city could help. pic.twitter.com/lwszEUsTDq — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) October 11, 2017

Rather than celebrate, Goldstein was outraged. Goldstein, a baseball fanatic, former Midway Little League coach and publisher of the “Elysian Fields Quarterly” baseball journal, suddenly found himself campaigning against baseball.

Together with future Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, he co-authored a report on how corporate funding could cover the public’s share in full. Coleman’s effort failed at the ballot box, and the $555 million, world-class stadium went to Minneapolis, thanks to heavy public investment.

“I was pushing for something like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, which is a much more compact design,” Goldstein recalled. “The costs would have been lower, it would have been much more intimate, and it would have been privately funded.”

Goldstein switched gears from baseball to nonprofits.

He served as a union representative for SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, an affordable housing advocate with the Minnesota Housing Partnership and a coordinator of the University of Minnesota Law School’s pro bono programs, which represent low-income clients.

As president of the parent-teacher organization at the J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School on Selby Avenue, he opposed a series of budget cuts proposed by the St. Paul School Board. “To our surprise, they actually rescinded the cuts,” he said.

Two years later, he won a seat on the school board and served a single term from 2005 to 2009. He failed to win re-election. It was a raucous time, marked by school closings, changing the use of buildings, and a new superintendent coming in and quickly leaving.

“The issues I worked on, and which were important to me, were transparency and not being closed to the public,” he said. “I pushed to have meetings in the community. And trying to get military recruiters out of Central High School. They were hanging out with kids at lunch.”

GOLDSTEIN VS. HAMLINE

In 2007, he served as a committee administrator for state Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville.

Since then, he’s focused on his legal work and founded the “Historic Hamline Village” neighborhood group, which has rallied homeowners against housing demolitions around Hamline University. The effort put Goldstein in the spotlight opposite university leadership, including the time he pointedly challenged incoming Hamline University President Dr. Fayneese Miller on her honesty during her first public meeting in 2015.

Tom Goldstein, city council candidate, just challenged incoming president of Hamline U. on truthiness pic.twitter.com/DjDXwe5mU7 — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) October 15, 2015

Facing opposition from the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce, the city of St. Paul backed away from an effort to pursue municipal broadband infrastructure in 2012, so Goldstein launched a campaign to get City Hall to reconsider.

His “Connect St. Paul” platform seeks to have the city provide high-speed internet for all residents using an underground fiber network. A tech corridor could revive commerce along University Avenue in ways the city’s current strategy has not, he points out.

In 2015, with his criticisms of CHS Field and other city partnerships still fresh, Goldstein ran for the Ward 4 seat on the St. Paul City Council against Russ Stark. His loss was lopsided. He earned 38 percent of the vote to Stark’s 61 percent.

Goldstein worries that adding future light-rail lines will require cannibalizing bus routes through poor neighborhoods.

“The city washed its hands (of Green Line construction oversight) and let Metro Transit handle it,” he said. “Is it the best system, on University Avenue, where it can’t go faster than traffic?”

When the city of St. Paul negotiated state and local funding for the $64 million ballpark with the Saints, he was one of few critics who had taken a hard look at how public bonds would finance the stadium and possibly leave taxpayers at risk to foot the bill if the team closed up shop and the stadium failed. Even some state Capitol insiders who publicly supported CHS Field now quietly say the city made too many concessions to the team.

As a counterpoint, fans of CHS Field point to the bevy of restaurants, small brewers and luxury housing structures springing up in the ballpark’s shadow.

Goldstein waves those examples away.

“I’m not very impressed with it,” he said. “Artists and others have been forced out (of the Lowertown neighborhood). Heartland Restaurant closed. Golden’s Deli is closing.”