FOR MAYOR OF SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
Why I Am Running
St. Paul is an amazing city! When I moved to Minnesota in 2000, I didn’t know that. As time passed, I realized my family spent more time in St. Paul than in Minneapolis, and my kids were practically growing up in St. Paul.
I couldn’t articulate why I liked St. Paul until I ran for the Ward 1 City Council seat in 2023. The realization occurred during a chat with a Ward 1 resident sitting on the steps in front of his house. He was from Jamaica and lived in Chicago and Minneapolis before St. Paul. He told me that he found St. Paul to be a truly diverse city that does not consist of many segregated neighborhoods but a diverse group of people that can coexist and flourish together. His observation floored me because it immediately explained why I was always drawn to St Paul. His sentiment was echoed everywhere in the Ward, which includes very affluent to disadvantaged neighborhoods. Everybody can find a supportive community in St. Paul, and they like to keep the community simple, compassionate, and authentic.
Keeping the city diverse doesn’t mean that the St. Paul government shouldn’t have a focus and can’t make our city safe and clean with a good infrastructure. I remember being shocked when I studied the city budget by comparing its budgets from different years. To budget, a city must know how to collect revenue and where to spend. On the revenue side, our city started to rely more on residents’ property tax dollars for its budget. On the spending side, we have started to neglect/underfund our core services that are essential to the vitality of our communities.
But there is great hope! We can turn this beloved city around quickly if our mayor critically examines past data and develops best practices by shifting investment from low to high-impact areas such as home ownership, infrastructure, neglected neighborhoods, downtown St. Paul, and other business districts. By examining our budget, I assure you that we neither need to increase taxes nor cut our spending but simply focus differently using RESULT-DRIVEN approaches to invest in our existing resources so that these resources can be turned into vital assets for the economic engine that is needed in every corner of the city.
I knocked on all the doors in Ward 1 in 2023 but didn’t campaign because I didn’t think I was politically experienced enough to ask people to help me get elected. I failed miserably and learned my lesson. I am doing it completely differently this time. If you get pestered by me this time, I apologize in advance. Our government needs to do things differently to turn this city around. Throwing money at the problem without understanding the problem won’t solve the problem. Together, and with some silver polish, we can make this amazing city shine again!
Yan Chen was born in Shanghai, China, and came to America on a student visa in 1989. She was granted permanent residence status via the Chinese Student Protection Act shaped by the US government in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In 2001, she became a proud US citizen. She received her BS in Chemistry from the City College of New York and her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She came to Minnesota to work at the University of Minnesota in 2000. She and her collaborators have developed ultra-sensitive and quantitative techniques to study protein-protein interactions in living cells, giving her a profound appreciation of how biological systems work together when nature designs them. She has always been fascinated with how nature works and believes in the power of government to empower people to discover and utilize their natural strengths in moving communities forward.
YAN CHEN
