St. Paul Park Police Chief Jessica Danberg sent a letter to city officials last week announcing she would resign on May 31, citing lack of support from the city council, gender inequity and a move to disband the city’s nine-member force.

The resignation of Danberg, who has been with the city since 2016, is the fourth of a city department head since January. Mayor Keith Franke said Monday that he did not believe the resignations were related.As for Danberg’s assertion that city officials undervalue leadership by women, Franke said St. Paul Park was one of the first cities in the area to hire a female police chief.

The other St. Paul Park officials who’ve announced resignations are:

• Melody Santana-Marty, St. Paul Park’s finance director, who earlier this month announced she would resign on April 21.

• City Administrator Kevin Walsh, who has held the city’s top post since May 2008 and will resign on July 31.

• Public Works Director Jeff Dionisopoulos, who’d been with the city for eight years and resigned Jan. 9.

“I think they’re all separate situations,” Franke said. “It’s just poor timing for us. … It’s going to be a challenge that I think we’ll be able to overcome.”

Chief questions city council support

Danberg’s resignation came after the St. Paul Park City Council on April 21 voted 3-1 to increase her pay rate to $63.50 an hour, a 6 percent increase. Council member Char Whitbred-Hemmingson pulled the pay increase from the consent agenda and voted against it; council member Tim Conrad was not in attendance.

“To be effective in a role as critical as the Chief of Police, one must have the support of both the City Council and the Mayor,” Danberg wrote in her resignation letter. “It has become increasingly clear that such support has not been extended to me. The council meeting … made that particularly evident.”

During the meeting, Whitbred-Hemmingson asked if the council had ever done a performance review of Danberg. “We have done one?” she asked. “Is there any way that we can see the performance review?”

City Administrator Walsh told Whitbred-Hemmingson and the other council members that the council “typically doesn’t supervise the department heads.”

“You only supervise my position, the city administrator’s position, so typically the council wouldn’t do performance reviews for anybody else besides myself,” Walsh said. “That’s common practice.”

Danberg did not receive a 6 percent cost-of-living increase on Jan. 1, when other city employees did, but she did not request reimbursement for back pay to that time, Mayor Franke said.

“There’s three or four months of unpaid increase, so if we were to stretch that back out over the course of the year, it would technically be a significant percentage reduction, but either way, the approximate amount was budgeted last year,” Franke said during the meeting.

In her letter, Danberg wrote that she requested in August that the city conduct her first formal compensation review — a request that was neither acknowledged nor followed up on. “While I received a raise, the adjustment falls significantly below what is commensurate with my experience, responsibilities, and comparable roles in the region,” she wrote.

The city hired a consultant to review the salaries of police chiefs in comparable cities and the city administrator received information at the end of January. The 50th percentile market range was found to be $120,250 to $160,330, according to the consultant’s letter.

With the pay increase, Danberg’s salary would have been $132,080, according to the city council packet.

Danberg wrote in her letter that another police chief in Washington County was paid $2.40 more per hour despite Danberg “having a master’s degree, more years of leadership experience, and managing a department with higher call volume and complexity.”

“This, unfortunately, is not an isolated experience,” Danberg wrote. “It is one of several instances during my time with the City that speak to a larger issue of gender inequity and undervaluation of leadership by women.”

Keep police department or outsource to sheriff’s office?

Council member Conrad, who could not attend the meeting, said Monday that he has asked city officials to explore the possibility of having the Washington County Sheriff’s Office provide public safety services for the city. He said he has talked with officials from the sheriff’s office and believes the city could save $400,000 annually if they were to make that move.

“I have asked questions to find out what it would take to do that,” Conrad said. “The City of Newport has done that, and it does seem to be working for them.”

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office began policing Newport, population 5,300, in 2016, and the city’s five-officer police force was disbanded.

The police department in St. Paul Park, which also has a population of 5,300, has nine full-time officers, according to the city’s website.

The mayor said he does not support giving up the city’s police department and questioned whether the city would save $400,000.

“I think having a local department gives you that sense of continuity and gives us that identity,” Franke said. “That’s not to dispel any of the great work that the sheriff’s office does, but I believe St. Paul Park is a small community with a small-town feel, and having our own officers gives us that autonomy, and it gives us that identity, just like any other city.”

He said he does not believe that there is an “appetite” on the part of a majority of council members to make a switch. He also said that discussing a move like disbanding the department “honestly makes it hard to give our employees the security and the support that I think they deserve.”

Chief has long career in policing

Danberg grew up in Newport and graduated from Woodbury High School in 1993. When she was 3, her father, Wesley Danberg, who was the fire chief in Newport, died in an explosion at the Ashland Oil Refinery in St. Paul Park.

She began her police career in July 1998 as a patrol officer with the Inver Grove Heights Police Department. She worked in the investigations unit from 2001 to 2004 and was promoted to sergeant of the patrol division in 2011.

During a phone interview on Tuesday, Danberg, 49, said she hoped to retire from St. Paul Park.

“It is tough. From Day 1, I’ve always tried to do what is best for the city,” she said. “But maybe my resignation can be a wake-up call to the council about what (they) should be doing with city staff. You should be showing them support and talking about them positively, and if you have any critiques or questions or concerns, those should be addressed with that person behind closed doors, out of public hearing.”

Suggesting that the department should be disbanded hurts morale and is done “with malice, rather than concern for the citizens,” she said. “… We are a busy police department for the population that we have.”

In her letter, Danberg recommended that the council promote Sgt. Craig Elgin to interim police chief after she leaves “to ensure continuity and stability during the transition,” she said.

Danberg said Tuesday that she does not yet have another job lined up. “I am looking forward to decompressing and taking some much-needed and overdue time off,” she said.