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Flattened by tornado, Taopi refuses to stay down
Town Clerk Jim Kiefer says the council feared everyone would leave the community of 61 residents, but when one family decided to rebuild, the rest followed.
TAOPI, Minn. — Sometimes a community doesn’t find out what it’s made of until adversity hits… hard.
The small southern Minnesota city of Taopi received what could have been a knockout punch on April 12, 2022, when an EF2 tornado roared through under cover of darkness. Daylight revealed complete destruction, with only three buildings in the entire community spared damage.
“Half the town is gone,” City Clerk Jim Kiefer shared the day after the tornado. He told reporters of Taopi’s 22 homes, at least 10 were beyond repair with entire roofs and walls missing.
Anniversaries are a time of reflection, and twelve months after that terrible day residents see a community that refused to stay down, a place that is looking ahead rather than in the rear-view mirror.
“We’re in pretty good shape,” Kiefer reflected in a conversation with KARE 11 on the one-year anniversary of the tornado. “Come a long way in the past year.”
The comeback story started almost immediately when the city council started holding daily meetings with most of Taopi’s 61 residents for the first two weeks, keeping them in the loop on donations, rescue funds, contractor availability and just about every other topic. Decisions were made in the light, with transparency.
Kiefer says local builders dropped less pressing jobs to repair damaged homes in Taopi, and homeowners agreed that those whose structures were hardest hit and unliveable received priority.
Money can be a wedge in times of trouble, and yet Kiefer says there were no squabbles when it came to allocating $270,000 in donations Taopi received from generous Minnesotans and other benefactors. The money was split into three tiers: those whose homes were unliveable, those badly damaged but habitable, and residents whose homes and businesses were less impacted.
Twelve months after the tornado, Taopi’s city clerk figures the population is down to 45 from the 61 registered in the census, but says that’s partially due to two or three families that were displaced whose new homes are just being completed. That’s pretty good, Kiefer figured… as the council originally feared everyone would leave. That changed when one resident announced they would be rebuilding, and others followed suit.
Four or five lots in town remain empty, the homes that once stood in them a distant memory. A new Taopi Town Hall, just remodeled when the tornado flattened it, is still in the planning stages and Kiefer says council meetings are currently held in the kitchen of Mayor Mary Huntley (who just happens to be his sister).
It is also true that from times of darkness can come the unexpected light of humanity. Taopi is rising again, mainly powered by the goodwill of small-town neighbors who decided to get closer instead of letting a moment of disaster pry them apart.
“Before the tornado, everyone lived their own life,” Kiefer reflected. “After the tornado, you saw everybody every day, and now I really know them.”
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Live Nation will operate the new amphitheater that will hold around 19,000 people.
SHAKOPEE, Minn. — There is excitement in the city of Shakopee as construction crews continue working on a 19,000-seat amphitheater near Canterbury Park.
This week, the city of Shakopee and developers announced Live Nation will operate the new amphitheater and the plan is to start hosting concerts in the summer of 2025.
“This is the largest amphitheater in Minnesota,” Shakopee Director of Planning and Development Michael Kerski said. “We’ve been told the plan with Live Nation is to hold between 30 and 45 shows in a normal season.”
Kerski says 2025 will be an abbreviated season because the concert venue will likely open later in the summer. The amphitheater is one piece of a larger entertainment district that is being built next to Canterbury Park.
“This is one of the largest redevelopments in the state,” Kerski said. “The site is over 140 acres. There is 28 acres still open for development.”
Besides the amphitheater, the entertainment district will include shops, restaurants and hotels.
City leaders are hoping this new entertainment district will reaffirm Shakopee’s commitment to being a premiere entertainment hub in the Twin Cities.
“We have Valleyfair. We have Canterbury Park with live racing and they have a card room, Mystic is just down the road,” Kerski said. “We have the Renaissance Festival. We’re used to big events.”
The Twin Cities music scene already features several unique live music venues, but developers believe this new amphitheater fills a void in the market.
There are other outdoor amphitheaters in the market, including The Ledge Amphitheater in Waite Park and Vetter Stone Amphitheater in Mankato, which each hold a few thousand people.
Target Field can also host outdoor concerts with a capacity of around 40,000 people, but Kerski says this new venue will bring big-name acts to the Twin Cities who are looking for a large permanent outdoor venue to host their shows.
“There will be great seating, skyboxes, a big lawn with beer gardens, things that just don’t exist at any of those other amphitheaters or facilities,” Kerski said.
“This venue is really designed around the customer and experience and the artist experience. The back of the house is really important for artists as they travel all over the country. The developers on this project wanted to have a facility in the back of the house where artists can relax and get ready for an event.”
The building, located at 345 Wabasha, has been a magnet for crime and drugs. An inspection on Dec. 9 found the Lowry Apartments unfit for human habitation.
ST PAUL, Minn. — A troubled St. Paul apartment building has been condemned, with city inspectors declaring it unfit for human habitation.
The Lowry Apartments are one of the Capital City’s biggest headaches, a magnet for crime and drugs. An inspection on Dec. 9 documented a lack of fire protection systems, inoperable heating facilities, active plumbing leaks, electrical systems that had been damaged or tampered with, and overall unsanitary conditions, among other things. A condemnation notice was immediately issued.
Being condemned means that all residents of the 134-unit affordable housing building must evacuate immediately. Included in the notice is a list of 25 action items/repairs that must be completed before the Lowry Apartments can reopen. Most are significant, making it unlikely residents will be able to return anytime soon.
The troubled building is owned by Madison Equities, St. Paul’s largest downtown property owner, which is in the process of trying to sell off most of its portfolio after the death of long-time owner Jim Crockarell in January. Court documents say commercial real estate group Frauneshuh partnered with the Halverson and Blaiser Group to manage the property and act on behalf of the owner with tenants and other third parties after the building was placed into receivership in late August.
“The building has been in decline, rapidly, since the owner died,” said resident Megan Thomas when KARE visited the Lowry apartments in August. “There’s a risk of violence, there’s a risk to health, I found a cockroach in an ice cube in my freezer last week because they are everywhere.”
Thomas has since moved from the building because of living conditions.
During that visit, the problems were obvious: The front door to the building was wide open, leaving the Lowry Apartments vulnerable to squatters, drug dealers, and others who were not residents. Windows were broken, plumbing leaked and the elevators were inoperable.
Residents were blindsided when a foreclosure notice appeared on the building in mid-August, leaving them wondering where they would go. The city of St. Paul stepped in to broker a receivership for the property, but it appears now that action was not enough to stem the tide of problems that plague the Lowry Apartments.
Hiding from the cold is what Jaelynn Hoggard is used to as a resident of the Lowry Apartments in Saint Paul.
“My body can’t handle the cold, like my pacemaker feels the cold and everything,” said Hoggard. “I saw them posting it on the door, like the condemned notice. And my heart just shot into my stomach.”
Jaelynn is disabled and says there are times the elevators don’t work. Because of the living conditions, she had to give back her service animal.
“That was the hardest thing to do,” she said.
“Zara Frost” publishes a Substack newsletter that includes audio and video recordings that are not in the possession of any other news outlet — or Bock’s attorney.
MINNEAPOLIS — Editor’s note: The video above first aired on KARE 11 in September 2024.
Aimee Bock, the former executive director of Feeding our Future and the top name associated with the $250 million pandemic child meal fraud case, is set to stand trial on Feb. 3.
But her lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, does not have access to materials he believes could exonerate Bock — despite those materials being cited in a series of posts on Substack — according to a motion filed by Udoibok on Wednesday.
The Substack newsletter “Nourishing Truth – Unpacking the Feeding Our Future Scandal” is written by Zara Frost. It is unclear whether that name is a pseudonym, whether Frost is a journalist, and whether Frost has connections to any of the 70 defendants charged in the sprawling case.
The general tone of the postings points blame away from Feeding Our Future defendants and back toward the Minnesota Department of Education, which was tasked with oversight of the federal child meal program during the pandemic.
One passage states, “The implications are clear. Either 1. MDE was catastrophically incompetent at its oversight duties, or 2. The department’s current narrative about early fraud concerns is, to put it politely, revisionist history.”
What is clear is that Frost’s 10 articles sent out to 16 subscribers as of Dec. 11 include details no other news outlet has published concerning the case, including audio recordings of conversations involving Hadith Ahmed, the former Feeding Our Future employee who agreed to plead guilty and help the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office with the case.
Those recordings were not used at the first trial involving Feeding our Future defendants earlier in 2024 despite the government using Ahmed as a key witness.
Udoibok believes the government has the recordings along with evidence concerning the reimbursement claims process from phones and tablets seized during the investigation that prosecutors did use in the first trial — but have not disclosed to Udoibok for Bock’s case.
“The withheld materials are crucial to Defendant’s defense as they provide insight into how Feeding Our Future’s claims were processed, which could exonerate Defendant by demonstrating that she did not oversee a fraudulent scheme. The Government’s failure to disclose these materials creates a reasonable probability that Defendant would not be able to mount an effective defense,” Udoibok wrote in his motion, claiming the prosecution is violating the Brady rule that requires disclosing all exculpatory evidence.
Bock and her co-defendants are due back in court Thursday for a status conference.
Zara Frost told KARE 11 News that the audio and video files were leaked to them, but has not yet answered a series of other questions.
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