Meet the St. Paul resident who fought City Hall and won

Not long after buying a house at the corner of Osceola Avenue and Victoria Street in St. Paul in October 2017, Simon Taghioff was taken aback by a $5,000 bill from the city for mill and overlay work. He and his wife, Christina Anderson Taghioff, started asking questions.

"'We're new here. Is this normal?' " Simon Taghioff said.

It wasn't. Especially after the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2016 threw out St. Paul's previous system of paying for street maintenance with a right-of-way fee charged to all properties. Changing its system to charge property owners 50% of mill and overlay cost also didn't pass muster. A Ramsey County judge in May tossed the city's street assessment program, leaving a $15 million hole in St. Paul's budget.

So, what did Taghioff, a London native, do after derailing the city's system of paying for street paving? Get involved in city planning, of course. Taghioff now sits on the St. Paul Planning Commission and the Summit Hill Association, reviewing land use and zoning issues.

Eye On St. Paul sat down with the founder of Fair Streets St. Paul to chat about what sparked his involvement in city issues. This interview was edited for length.

Q: Soon after moving in, you got a pretty big bill from the city and started going to City Council meetings. Tell us about that.

A: So, the way this works is you get the invoice at the end of the year, and you're given the option to pay it. Or you have it added to your property taxes, with interest. For that to happen, the City Council needs to ratify it. Those meetings were in April and May 2019. At the very first council meeting, there must have been well over 50 people telling the City Council, "This isn't fair."

Q: You asked why homeowners on arterial streets were paying half the costs when those streets were heavily used.

A: Exactly. A regular street is seal-coated for a couple of hundred bucks. Why do we have this expense on arterials? It's trucks and snow plows and people going neighborhood to neighborhood. These streets are connectors, they're supposed to link the city.

Q: Did your challenge convince the city?

A: We convinced them … to a degree. The City Council did, in fact, take [some of the fees charged to homeowners] back. In the meantime, we researched the [arguments] so we were able to build a case these [assessments] were just blatantly unfair. They were akin to asking people who live by a park to pay for the park. In the end, the council took out things they felt were particularly indefensible. They returned something like half a million dollars to people.

Q: Why not stop there?

A: As we learned more, we became more and more confident this system was exactly the same as the system the city had a Minnesota Supreme Court judgment against nearly two years earlier. So, we decided to appeal because it was also very clear to us that the city was going to keep doing this.

Q: This has created a $15 million hole in the city budget. Won't everybody's taxes go up?

A: It's really important to kind of ground this. This goes right back to the uniformity clause of the U.S. Constitution. You can tax people differently. But you have to tax them in a uniform manner. The same rules have to apply to everybody.

Q: After winning, why stay involved?

A: It was actually our Council Member, Rebecca Noecker, who asked, "Would you consider the Summit Hill Association?" I came here from London and New York, and I noticed that those cities functioned and worked a certain way. Why are certain cities set up in certain ways? What works and what doesn't?

I loved the vitality of street life in London and wanted to bring some of that here. I saw Grand Avenue was the closest thing to that that St. Paul has to offer. But I saw all the surface lots on Grand, the lack of buses and that kind of stuff. And I wanted to find out why. And it seemed like an opportunity to contribute back to my community and to make a tangible, local difference.

Q: A lot of residents opposed the Dixie's On Grand project. The Summit Hill Association's support caught some by surprise. Why were you in favor?

A: We'd been doing a lot of research about what makes a street like Grand successful and what its real challenges are. And it became very clear to us that one of the things that makes a street like Grand a premier shopping street is that it continuously evolves and adapts. We can't sit still. What people really want is that walkable, neighborhood feel. That's what we need to preserve. And that's why we need new investment.

Q: Now a Summit Avenue Regional Trail is being explored. How is that process going?

A: It's really important to understand that we are really pre-proposal. What the city is doing is conducting early engagement. Conducting public meetings and getting early feedback. I understand there are legitimate concerns. Nobody wants to compromise safety. Everyone wants Summit Avenue to be a pleasant, shared trail. Once the city is done with its early work, we can evaluate that.

Q: This seems different from the Summit Hill Association of old.

A: A subsection of the neighborhood is used to being the voice of the neighborhood and speaking for everybody. Now that's no longer true. It's our job as a District Council to certainly listen to everybody, but not necessarily agree with the vocal minority. And so, when folks come up against that process, sometimes that is a shock to them.