The St. Paul City Council withdrew the police department’s request to apply for a $200,000 Department of Justice grant on Wednesday afternoon, without taking a vote. The money would have added drone docks to the three the city has run since May 30 and carried the program through 2028.

A week earlier, Deputy Chief Kurt Hallstrom had told the same council the department had no budget to expand the program on its own and no way to do it without grant money. The council heard that, laid the item over, and then pulled it.

The three Skydio X10 aircraft DroneXL identified on St. Paul rooftops in June keep flying. Nothing gets added to them.

Council President Noecker ended it before anyone could vote

Council President Rebecca Noecker announced the withdrawal at Wednesday’s meeting, saying the council does not support expanding the drone program until its questions and concerns are addressed. Two members had already committed to voting no, protesters filled the chamber again, and the item never reached a roll call.

“We will not be authorizing this grant application,” Noecker said, as FOX 9 reported. Ward 4’s Molly Coleman and Ward 5’s Hwa Jeong Kim had told the September 2 meeting they would vote against the grant whenever it came back. Coleman’s objection went past this one application: she said she did not want the city deciding surveillance tools one contract and one grant at a time.

The council did not say what information it needs before it would revisit the request, a gap FOX 9 flagged in its own coverage. Anna Madison of the Free Palestine Coalition had also criticized the department for putting the grant on the consent agenda, which limits public comment, according to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.

The department had already said the grant was its only route to more docks

Hallstrom told the council on September 2 that the docked program is expensive to operate and the department had no budget to grow it. If the grant failed, it would look for other grants. “There’s no means for us to do this without grant funding,” he said.

The three docks sit at police headquarters on Grove Street, at the Western District station on Hamline Avenue, and at Fire Station 7 on Ross Avenue on the East Side. Each aircraft flies about 20 minutes on a charge and covers a two-mile (3.2-kilometer) radius, which Hallstrom said leaves parts of the city uncovered. The department told the council the program has logged about 1,500 flights and contributed to 75 arrests since May 30, figures the Spokesman-Recorder relayed and that DroneXL has not seen in a department release. The last set of published numbers, 472 flights and 36 arrests in the first four weeks, already beat the department’s entire 2025 patrol-drone total.

Monday’s rescue was the department’s closing argument, and it did not move the room. A docked drone reached a pond behind the East Side Boys & Girls Club about two minutes before the first officers and put them on a 5-year-old boy with autism who had wandered from home and was going under, according to CBS Minnesota. Officer Adisak Sae Ma pulled him out. The child was checked at Children’s Hospital and had no injuries. St. Paul resident Wyatt Miller told MPR News it was a “disgrace” for the department to post the video the day before the vote.

Flock went first, and Minneapolis went in July

In late August the council voted unanimously to urge the city and Ramsey County to end their Flock Safety contracts, and the city said it would pull its two Flock license plate cameras. Two weeks later the drone request hit the same council. Both surveillance vendors have been turned back.

The opposition in the chamber raised the same objections that sank Minneapolis’s free 75-day Skydio trial on a 6-6 vote in July: the Free Palestine Coalition, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, and Women Against Military Madness, with signs pairing “Drones out of St. Paul” with Skydio’s sales to the Israeli military and to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. St. Paul has flown Skydio aircraft since 2023, so this fight was never about whether the city would use the company. It was about whether it would buy more.

Every public Drone as First Responder rollout in Minnesota has picked Skydio, from Minnetonka’s fire-station launch to Brooklyn Park’s $4.6 million program. The two largest cities in the state have now each turned the same vendor away inside eight weeks.

DroneXL’s Take

The grant did not die on Wednesday. It died on September 2, when Hallstrom told the council there was no other money and two members said no in the same breath. The department had a week to change minds, and it posted a rescue video instead of a contract.

I wrote yesterday that St. Paul would win or lose this on a number it has never released, and I will stand on that. Since June the city has put out flight counts, arrests, rescues, and dock locations. It has not put out what the program costs, what the Skydio agreement says, or who besides the department can pull the flight log. Cedar Larson of the Free Palestine Coalition demanded the contract in the chamber. That is a records question, not a Palestine question, and the department let it stand unanswered for three months.

The activists have a point under the vendor politics. St. Paul turned a 2023 patrol-drone contract into a dock-based DFR program without a new public hearing. Minnesota law requires a comment period to start a police drone program, not to expand one, as Governing reported in June. The department followed the statute and still handed its critics their best argument. Nashville’s police did the same thing in May, flying Skydio docks before the Metro Council signed off, and drew the same fight.

Where I part with the room is on the drones themselves. A drone over a pond two minutes before the first officer is not a surveillance program. It is the thing the technology is for, and the sergeant who flew Monday’s search says the story might not have ended well without it. Miller calling the video a disgrace tells me the coalition is not arguing about docks anymore. Skydio spent years benefiting from the argument that who builds the drone matters more than what it does. Minneapolis and now St. Paul are running that argument back at it, and the department’s remaining three docks are the only thing standing between St. Paul and the outcome Minneapolis got.

What the council wants is the open item. Noecker said the expansion is off until questions are addressed, and neither she nor any member said which questions. Hallstrom says he will hunt for other grants. Whether the department publishes its Skydio contract and an operating cost before it comes back with one is the decision that matters, because the next hearing will go the same way if it does not.

Sources: MPR News, FOX 9, CBS Minnesota, Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Governing

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.