A week after a riveting and graphic city council meeting about the state of downtown St. Paul’s skyways, city officials spoke publicly about their efforts to fix the problem.

“It is very clear we need to take some action,” Mayor Chris Coleman said Wednesday.

The action outlined at the press event, however, was not in reaction to the lively council meeting. Rather, city officials said these are things that have been in the works for weeks.

In particular, officials pointed to a couple of proposed ordinances, one of which will reinforce — and in some cases augment — how much building owners must pitch in to keep their own properties safe.

While St. Paul police can’t isolate statistics specific to the skyways, the most recent crime data show a spike downtown.

Reports of serious crime jumped 40 percent between Jan. 1 and April 30, compared with the same period last year.

The rise has mostly been driven by an 89 percent increase in robberies (17 cases vs. nine), a 55 percent increase in thefts (153 cases vs. 99) and a 22 percent increase in aggravated assaults (11 cases vs. nine), according to police.

There have been more than 5,500 calls for police service downtown this year, a 28 percent increase.

At the same time, Police Chief Todd Axtell says they’ve increased proactive foot patrols by 170 percent this year.

DEVELOPMENT BOOSTS DEMAND

Walking through the skyways on Tuesday, Axtell — who commanded the downtown patrol unit in 2002 — reflected on the changes there in recent years.

“There’s been a lot of development — the Saints stadium, a lot more residents, all the restaurants; and the Green Line has brought more activity, more people downtown,” he said. “The demand for police resources goes up, as well.”

Axtell noted that the police have already ramped up staff downtown from 12 to 19 officers in recent years. And over the winter months — when homeless people seeking shelter tend to crowd the skyways — the police department had officers from other units helping downtown. They are used as needed now, a police spokesman said.

The city is also overseeing a skyway work group, which includes members of the local building owners association.

‘THEY POOP, THEY PEE’

Last week, downtown building manager Jaunae Brooks took chunks of soiled carpet and jars of urine to a city council meeting. She wanted to show how her skyway was being used in the evening.

“They poop, they pee, there’s hypodermic needles, used condoms,” Brooks said in an interview. “It was a crazy show going on in my building.”

For months, Brooks has been closing the skyway entrances to the Railroader Printing House at 8 p.m. — six hours earlier than the time mandated by the city.

Ricardo Cervantes, director of the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections, said his department is drafting two proposals to address the skyway situation.

The first would “clarify” existing ordinances concerning what’s permissible in the skyways. Following the meeting, they sent out a list of what’s not allowed.

Ready? Fighting, smoking, urinating, defecating, racing, lying on the floor, obstructing passage, littering, graffiti, riding something with wheels, property damage and playing instruments louder than “conversational speech” without a permit.

City officials noted that none of these prohibitions were new — and acknowledged that some should be obvious — but said laying them out in a new ordinance would give security officers and police “greater transparency in how they enforce impermissible conduct.”

What is new is that police will no longer have to give a verbal warning before citing or arresting someone.

POLICE UNION QUESTION SUPPORT

Dave Titus, St. Paul Police Federation president, said officers are concerned they don’t have support from the mayor or city attorney for enforcing minor offenses, even when they are correctly cited.

“Our officers need to be backed by the city attorney’s office when they write citations and prosecutions need to move forward,” Titus said. “We’ve been told for years, ‘Is the juice worth the squeeze? Do we need to deal with minor offenses or will they self-correct?’ And the answer is we do need to address minor infractions because minor infractions lead to bigger infractions.”

City Attorney Samuel Clark said in an email Wednesday that his office works closely with downtown police and Metro Transit officers, including “regular roll call trainings so that beat officers are up to speed on the law as well as what we need to see in citations in order to move forward with a case.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the city attorney’s office is full of a lot of dedicated prosecutors who have put a lot of work into supporting downtown officers and holding offenders accountable,” Clark said.

MAYOR: OWNERS MUST ‘STEP UP’

Cervantes said a second ordinance, also in the works, would have more specifics about what building owners need to do to keep their buildings safe.

“This is a public-private partnership,” Coleman said Wednesday. “It is absolutely, 100 percent essential that business owners, building owners step up. … Some are not meeting that expectation.”

Among some proposed specifics: securing “hiding places” in the skyways by blocking them off or monitoring them, locking skyway doors at night, and mandating more responsibilities for private security officers hired by building owners.

That includes patrolling skyways every hour, watching surveillance cameras at all operating hours and training officers to observe and make written reports, rather than just advise pedestrians.

The city plans to introduce a final draft of the proposals in July.

Brooks said city officials appeared to be passing the buck to building owners, rather than investing in security themselves.

“I guarantee we have well-paid security for our skyways by now … and so we’re responsible for even more? We’re going to fight back,” Brooks said.

Brooks said that before she began closing her building’s doors early, she installed six additional security cameras, which are monitored, and has security personnel confront people in her skyway. She said her personnel are often just ignored and police don’t respond to calls — something the police department disputes.

HOW BUSY ARE SKYWAYS AT NIGHT?

A late-night pedestrian traffic count conducted on Wednesday, April 26, by the security staff of Jim Crockarell — whose company, Madison Equities, owns Park Square Court, the U.S. Bank Building and downtown buildings — showed that for the six hours after 8 p.m., only a few dozen people used the skyways. Totals ranged from three to eight people an hour, according to Crockarell’s count.

Cervantes said the city will be conducting its own counts — as well as polling late-night businesses to see how closing the skyways early would affect them.

City officials are considering closing the skyways at midnight, two hours earlier.

When asked about Brooks’ claims about her building, Cervantes said, “I think we’re still doing some fact-finding.”

Coleman also used the news conference to make a plea to the Legislature to fund a second phase of the Dorothy Day Center, the downtown area’s largest homeless shelter. Funding is in a state bonding bill that had yet to be passed Wednesday afternoon.