There’s a tried-and-true path to a career in politics: major in political science, get your law degree, intern at the legislature, hustle as help on a few campaigns, and eventually file your election papers.

That’s not how it worked for Saura Jost (B.C.E. ’10). Jost was elected in 2023 to the St. Paul City Council, representing the city’s Ward 3. Before that she worked a dozen years as a structural engineer, ensuring the physical safety of buildings across Minnesota.

Jost grew up in a household where science was the first language. Her parents, both environmental scientists, encouraged her to explore her world.

“I was always interested in science and math and the STEM topics,” Jost explains. When she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, she knew she would pursue her interest there. She focused on civil engineering in part because it ensured a stable career path, but also because the field implies an aspect of public service that spoke to Jost’s desire to make the world a better place.

“I like the idea of being able to design and build things that are on a large scale. Things that people use every day and that are critical to people’s everyday lives,” she says. “When you build things like buildings and bridges and spaces, you have an impact on our community, on the built environment that we live in. You get to shape what our cities look like.”

There’s no doubt that Jost is passionate about her work, her community, and the issues that move her. But in conversation, she is measured, thoughtful, and above all, logical—qualities that serve her in City Hall as well as they do on a jobsite.

“I mean, engineers are problem solvers and project managers,” she says. “We see through projects from the design to completion. Some of that process is similar on the council. We work on legislation, on policy. Knowing how to work with other people on a team, how to get things done, and understanding the steps to get from beginning to end are really important.”

Standing tall

Every structure, from the Empire State Building to a house of cards, has at least one thing in common: Nature wants to wreck it, using gravity to collapse it, or wind to topple it. Jost’s job is to foil them both.

After college, Jost landed at Meyer Borgman Johnson (MBJ), a Minnesota-based powerhouse founded in 1955. MBJ is a sole-discipline structural engineering firm with a portfolio that includes urban high-rises, public buildings, complex historical renovations, and a few magic tricks rendered in steel. Its fingerprints are all over Minnesota: the Minnesota Zoo, MSP Airport, the Mayo Clinic, and the University of Minnesota, to name a few.

It’s telling that one of Jost’s favorite projects from her time at MBJ is also one with some of the highest stakes: a 27-story student apartment complex near the University of Minnesota campus. A building that tall faces enormous pressure from both gravity and wind, and Jost was part of the team that calculated the right building materials and methods.

Construction involved a massive foundation and complicated slip-form concrete walls, which are built in poured sections using forms jacked up to the next section when the first is dry (a method, incidentally, pioneered for Minnesota’s grain elevator bins).

“It was really cool. Wow. I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Jost raves. At the time, she also taught classes on campus, so she was able to watch the building grow. “It was a highlight because it was right there on the campus where I went to school. It’s neat to watch what you design be built right in front of you.”

Pipes and pavement

Hand-in-hand with Jost’s zeal for science and engineering is her enthusiasm for causes. At the city level, governing emphasizes infrastructure. Other policymakers might understand it; Jost actually builds it.

“A lot of municipal government is about our roads, our water, sewer systems, storm water systems, development—so many things that touch civil engineering,” she explains. “That’s what really motivated me to step into this role. I don’t know if there’s ever been an engineer on the city council before. And someone with that expertise can be a champion for that work.”

In her first term, Jost has taken on that advocacy with gusto. St. Paul’s Ward 3, where Jost has lived her whole life, encompasses the massive Highland Bridge development project. In 2011, Ford Motor Company closed its St. Paul assembly plant, vacating more than 100 acres of industrial land along the river. After years of planning, the city and private developers set out to turn it into a dense, mixed-use and mixed-income district, while also grappling with leftover contamination and economic constraints.

Jost inherited the project, along with some of its controversy. And she’s brought her background in engineering to the task. When she took office in 2024, the project had effectively stalled—in part as the developers negotiated variances to St. Paul’s rent control policy adopted in 2021, which disrupted the financial assumptions behind the development.

“Highland Bridge was on pause for several years when I got here. And one of the biggest things that my constituents really needed was figuring out a way to get that project going again,” she explains. Ultimately, city attorneys negotiated a redevelopment agreement, and Jost helped get it adopted by the council.

Jost says her firsthand experience on large-scale building projects gave her special insight into the stakes at play. Every postponement increased the cost of the project, she explains, and also delayed the city’s ability to start collecting tax revenue on what was otherwise worthless, blighted property.

“Being able to quantify those things and put them into an order of magnitude for my colleagues helped them understand how big an impact something like this will make,” she said. “It’s the way engineers think. Those are the tools we use to make our decisions.”

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