St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter called on community members Thursday to submit ideas about designing the city to be safer by making public spaces more visible and welcoming.
Officials allocated $1 million toward Capital Improvement Budget projects that include Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.
“I think we all know logically that when there’s people somewhere or when the sight lines are open, when boundaries are clearly defined … it limits the opportunity for people to act out in ways that can be harmful or illegal and that’s our goal,” Carter said Thursday. “What we said from the beginning is this has to be about reducing the opportunities for crime to happen in our community in the first place and that’s an area where this concept … is huge.”
It’s part of a Community-First Public Safety Plan in St. Paul.
Carter proposed in November a nearly $3 million public safety initiative, which includes a public health project for violence prevention and intervention.
The overall plan focuses on young people, including adding community ambassadors to connect with them and expanding a youth employment program. The supplemental budget proposal, which the City Council approved in December, did not add police officers.
The focus on safety comes as community members and officials have been grappling with gun violence in St. Paul. The city saw 30 homicides last year, the most in more than 25 years, though other types of crime fell.
The result was the overall lowest violent crime statistics in the city since at least 1995. Property crime was up 12 percent, however, and St. Paul ended the year with 8 percent more serious crime reports than 2018.
The Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design approach “focuses on designing buildings and public spaces to help discourage criminal activity,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
It “aims to make public spaces more visible, create natural ways to safely access outdoor spaces and buildings, create natural separation between public and private spaces, and make public spaces more welcoming and accessible for all users.”
A city website where people can submit ideas includes maps showing pedestrian and bicycle crashes, assaults, shots fired and narcotics-related police incident.
“My charge to the CIB (Capital Improvement Budget) committee is to sort of overlay in their thinking the places with the highest risks … with the most developed ideas to address those real needs,” Carter said.
The funding will likely be divided among “relatively smaller, relatively simpler” projects, some of which could be implemented by the year’s end, Carter said.
The Capital Improvement Budget funds the construction and maintenance of city streets, libraries, parks, recreation center and other public facilities. Information sessions about the CIB process will be held Wednesday at Hayden Heights Library, 1456 White Bear Ave. and Feb. 25 at Rice Street Library, 1011 Rice St.; both meetings will be 6 to 7 p.m.
People can get more information and submit their ideas at stpaul.gov/CIB through March 4. The CIB committee will review the ideas and make recommendations about funding by the end of June.
