The 2024 Ward 7 City Council seat became an official horse race in late December, when East Isles resident Paula Chesley announced her candidacy in an email to local residents. First-term incumbent Katie Cashman had announced her reelection bid two weeks earlier, and with Chesley’s entrance, the race became an actual contest.
So who is Paula Chesley?
Chesley is familiar to many in East Isles and around the lake because of her neighborhood volunteer activities and activism, but to many in the larger ward, she’s a new face.
To start with, she’s a woman of many dimensions. In the neighborhood, she’s known for her leadership in starting the East Isles Safety Walking Group, serving as a block captain, and recently serving on the board of the East Isles Neighborhood Organization, among other roles. Professionally, she’s worked as a yoga instructor at various studios in the Twin Cities since 2017, and currently works at the Emily Program, where she teaches yoga and meditation to individuals in recovery from eating disorders. She became an East Isles homeowner in 2020, and is a proud, self-described “childless cat lady.”
But that’s hardly the full picture. Among other things, she was part of a contemporary dance troupe in Berlin from 2013-17. Her beloved late cat, Billie Jean, achieved a moderate level of Internet fame, with her renown stretching as far as the Star Tribune and Washington Post. That’s a fun fact to be sure, but what many people may not know is that Chesley has serious academic credentials as well: she’s not “just” Paula Chesley, but Dr. Paula Chesley, holding a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Minnesota, with a minor in statistics.
After growing up in Mankato, West St. Paul and St. Cloud, Chesley double-majored in English and French at the U of M. Following her graduation in 2001, she traveled to France on a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship and, in her free time, used the opportunity to obtain a master’s degree in computational linguistics from the Universitè de Paris 7, before getting her doctorate from Minnesota in 2011. Along the way she obtained fellowship support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education and the Fyssen Foundation in France.
As a newly minted Ph.D., Chesley spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, then served as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tubingen, in Germany, from 2012-13. But, as Chesley examined her anticipated career path from her German perch, she decided to make a change. Chesley says she saw her work as requiring increasing amounts of computer time, less interaction with people, and in pursuit of results that were abstract and intangible. Chesley concluded she wanted to work with people directly and help improve lives.
Chesley planned to chart her new course during an expat month in Berlin, but that turned into a two-year dance intensive after she successfully auditioned with Tanzfabrik Dance Studios, also in Berlin. Dance morphed into yoga; after her return to the United States, she reinvented herself as a yoga instructor, which ticked all the boxes of working directly with people, improving lives, and —as she puts it — bringing them joy.
Chesley’s political life has been as varied as the rest of it. She has volunteered for campaigns of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Dean Phillips and Erin Murphy, among others. Her experience with direct political activism arguably began in 2020, when she received a citation for toplessness from the Minneapolis Park Board Police, and advocated successfully for the ordinance to be repealed [Nota bene: No need for pearl-clutching; Chesley says she was in a barely populated area, lying on her stomach, and reading a book at the time….]
Why is Chesley running for City Council?
Asked what prompted her to run for the Ward 7 seat, Chesley says it was a combination of disillusionment with incumbent Katie Cashman and the priorities of the current Council, which she argues have not been supportive of Ward 7 or the city as a whole. Chesley is particularly bothered by the raft of non-binding resolutions passed by the Council that tell other units of government what to do, starting with the Council’s Gaza ceasefire resolution, and including its resolutions regarding Hennepin County’s HERC facility and MNDOT’s I-94 re-do, both of which Cashman championed. Chesley says she’s more interested in actions that are within the Council’s purview and get results for local residents.
Top priorities if elected include promoting public safety (particularly new officer recruitment), revitalizing Uptown and Downtown (by reexamining tax rates, public-private partnerships, business incubators, grants and improvement districts), and affordable housing (building more, addressing encampments).
Asked to describe her politics, she says she started as a farther left progressive who has become more of a centrist — a shift driven in part by the city’s public safety issues these past few years. Her role models accordingly run the gamut, from John Fetterman to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Gretchen Whitmer on the national level, and from Andrew Johnson to Andrea Jenkins to Lisa Goodman on the local level. She says she has also been following the career of newly-minted San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie, whom she believes will bring a results-oriented approach to a city roiled by political turbulence since the pandemic.
