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I read Andy Brehm's March 22 column "An unserious St. Paul City Council fiddles while downtown crumbles" and felt compelled to respond.

I'm in my third term on the St. Paul City Council and I'm proud to serve with such an experienced and thoughtful group of colleagues. Our council members are engineers, entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders with a passion for community service and a vision for our city. They are a far cry from "unserious."

Brehm is right to point out that there are critical issues facing St. Paul. We must revitalize our downtown by attracting new residents, workers and visitors. We must ensure public safety in our neighborhoods, on our streets and on public transit. We need to expand our tax base and boost our economy by attracting new companies and making it easier to develop businesses and housing. We need to provide excellent public services and make it easier for people of all income levels to call St. Paul home.

At a strategic planning retreat last month, the City Council spent 12 hours over two days discussing these challenges and developing a strategic plan in response. The plan has five priority areas — climate, housing, economic development, fiscal resilience and public safety — and we are moving them forward with urgency. My council colleagues Saura Jost and Anika Bowie are introducing an amendment to our rent-stabilization ordinance to permanently exempt new construction, while Council Member Cheniqua Johnson is authoring a package of tenant protections that will help residents in St. Paul find and keep their housing.

The council has already demonstrated its concern for fiscal resiliency, pushing back against Mayor Melvin Carter's proposed tax increase last year and successfully passing the largest reduction in the proposed levy in at least a decade. My council colleagues Nelsie Yang and Hwa Jeong Kim are chairing a year-round budget committee that will allow us to dive deeper into the details of our city budget and identify ways to be more efficient and resilient at the local level, especially in a time of threatened cuts in federal funding.

Economic development, including downtown revitalization, is a priority for all of us. We recognize that we need a strong tax base to support excellent public services and ambitious progressive policies. We are commissioning an economic development strategy to identify key industries to attract to St. Paul, and we've created a new $1.4 million Commercial Corridors Fund to support small businesses. We allocated over $1 million in our 2025 budget to a downtown office-to-residential conversion program that will incentivize developers to give new life to vacant downtown office buildings. And the City Council returned to work in the office four days a week in January 2021.

At a time of chaos and uncertainty in federal and state government, local government is more important than ever. I'm grateful to be part of a City Council that takes that responsibility seriously and that shows up every day to do the hard work.

Rebecca Noecker is St. Paul City Council president and is the council member for Ward 2.