Brooks: Will the Trump campaign pay St. Cloud? City asks for $200,000 to cover July rally expenses

It’s an honor when a presidential candidate comes to town.

But a big political rally doesn’t come cheap, and when former President Donald Trump came to St. Cloud in July, the cost to the city and taxpayers topped $209,000.

Earlier this week, the city sent the Trump campaign an invoice. Now they’re waiting to see whether the candidate will honor his debts.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate came to St. Cloud, Mayor Dave Kleis did the neighborly thing and picked him up at the airport.

Sen. John McCain and then-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty piled into a one-mayor motorcade and headed north to make their case for McCain’s 2008 campaign to the voters of St. Cloud. The only security Kleis remembered was the governor’s State Patrol escort who followed along. Not much in the way of expenses beyond enough gas to get to the airport and back.

Four presidential elections have come and gone since then and the next time Kleis stood on the tarmac to welcome a GOP hopeful to town, the world was a very different place.

On July 27, Trump came to Minnesota for his first public rally since an assassination attempt two weeks earlier. Kleis caught a brief glimpse of the candidate as he was hustled from the plane at the St. Cloud airport to an armored motorcade for the drive to St. Cloud State University.

Hosting a Trump rally meant cordoning off roads all over town and suspending a major road project to keep that street accessible for the Secret Service. By the time the city finished tallying all the Saturday overtime pay for police, fire and public works, the taxpayers of St. Cloud were out more than $200,000.

“For any community, to have the potential leader of the free world campaign here, it’s really something,” said Kleis, who is retiring at the end of this term after 20 years as mayor of St. Cloud. “How many cities our size can say they’ve had both candidates running for president [visit] within a year and a half of each other?”

Last year, Kleis welcomed Vice President Kamala Harris to town on an official tour of the New Flyer bus factory, long before anyone realized she would be the other candidate in the 2024 presidential race. The city doesn’t bill the White House for official visits. But campaign stops are another matter.

“Even if it was my own campaign event – if I was running again, which I’m not – and it cost $200,000, there’d be a bill to me and I’d be reimbursing” St. Cloud, Kleis said.

The Trump campaign’s senior adviser for Minnesota, Tayler Rahm, did not respond to a message left on his cellphone about when and whether Trump would be picking up the tab in St. Cloud.

The money came out of the city’s general fund. Fortunately, St. Cloud budgets for rainy days and rally days so it had money available. It helped that last winter was mild and the city hadn’t needed to dip into the reserves for much snow plow driver overtime. But it would be nice to get that money back before the first snow flies.

This is a familiar cycle for communities that host Trump rallies. Many have tried, but not all have been compensated for the cost of hosting a MAGA rally. Minneapolis spent years trying to wring $530,000 in overtime and expenses after a 2019 campaign rally at Target Center. The city eventually received about $100,000 in compensation, after a yearslong battle of words as the then-president tried to take the “free” in free speech literally.

“Someone please tell the Radical Left Mayor of Minneapolis that he can’t price out Free Speech,” Trump tweeted at the time. “Probably illegal!”

What did $209,000 buy the taxpayers of St. Cloud? About 8,000 Trump supporters crowded into the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center at St. Cloud State University — even if not all of them stayed for the 90-minute event. More than a thousand others watched on screens set up outside the venue.

But the day was safe and reasonably orderly and it gave Minnesota a good long look at one of their presidential hopefuls, which is all you can really ask for when a candidate comes to town. Well, you can also ask him not to stiff you on the bill.