Star Tribune
In Carlton County, a battle over green cemeteries spirals to affect the whole state
Vern Simula wanted the story of his life to end where it began. In the earth of Carlton County.
Simula, 90, was born in Cloquet and generations of his family rest in a local cemetery. But when he tried to make his own arrangements, the cemetery turned him away.
Simula wants a green burial. No embalming. No glossy coffins with satin pillows. No makeup on his cheeks to create the illusion of life. Just a grave, a shroud and a return to the earth.
“My body is a temple, with its [30] trillion cells,” said Simula, a longtime advocate for green burials. “Those cells are valuable to creation. I don’t want them pickled with formaldehyde and I don’t want them incinerated in a waste of fossil fuels.”
Not every cemetery welcomes a green burial, but Simula thought he had found a new resting place — a new green cemetery was set to open in Carlton County. But a battle between the cemetery and its uncomfortable neighbors spiraled into a ban that will stop any new green cemeteries from opening in Minnesota for the next two years.
Individual green burials will continue — the practice is central to many faiths. But two years is a long time to ask Vern Simula to wait for the state to study humanity’s oldest burial practice.
When his hometown cemetery turned him away, Simula made arrangements to be buried instead at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, which accommodates green burials, particularly for Jewish and Muslim veterans.
Then came plans for a new green cemetery right in Carlton County, in beautiful Blackhoof Township.
A 20-acre hayfield was going to be converted into the Loving Earth Memorial Gardens. There would be trees and wildflowers and walking paths. People would be buried in plain pine boxes or biodegradable wicker coffins or simple shrouds. There would be no marble headstones and manicured lawns and no concrete grave liners to stop the earth from sagging as the coffins decayed. Families would be invited to walk the trails and pick blueberries from the bushes they planted over their loved one’s grave.
That was what Matt Connell pictured when he bought the site and filed his paperwork with the county.
“It never crossed my mind that people would be angry over it,” said Connell, who lives in Crystal and teamed up with the New Jersey-based Steelmantown Cemetery Co. to start the business. “I was naïve. I thought people would really like this.”
But where Connell saw a peaceful park, some neighbors saw a nightmare.
Strangers’ bodies in unmarked graves they could see from their kitchen windows. What if coyotes dug someone up? What if the cemetery contaminated nearby wetlands or wells? Would it spread disease? Would it crowd the roads with traffic? Would it change the character of the entire community?
As residents circulated petitions and spoke out against the plan at public meetings, county officials drafted new cemetery regulations and declined to register the cemetery plat.
And then the Minnesota Legislature got involved.
The Minnesota Senate Health and Human Services Committee held a hearing on green burials in March and a bipartisan cross-section of state lawmakers did not like what they heard. A two-year moratorium on new green cemeteries was tucked into one of the end-of-session spending bills, with with orders for the Department of Health to investigate. The study will cost taxpayers an estimated $79,000.
The idea of a green burial can seem distasteful and even disrespectful in a country accustomed to a more sanitized view of death. It’s been generations since we washed the bodies of our dead ourselves and laid them out in the parlor with pennies on their eyelids.
“It’s very different than what we’re used to,” said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, director of the Public Health Administration and Policy program at the University of Minnesota. “But it’s what was done for hundreds of thousands of years. … Certain religions feel very strongly that this is exactly the way someone should be buried.”
Dead bodies and green burials are not a threat to public health.
There are only a handful of infectious diseases that can be spread from dead bodies to the living, Wurtz said — cholera, anthrax, ebola. The rest of the 39 trillion microbes we each carry — viruses, bacteria, fungi — decay with us into the soil.
Allison Ronning, who lives in the nearby town of Kerrick, is an end-of-life doula — helping families through the process of death. A green burial would be her choice. If state lawmakers had given her a choice.
“I told my family, ‘This is the way I want to go,'” she said. A good death is a gift, she said, and we only get one shot at it.
Simula, who will be 92 by the time the study concludes, has gathered 300 signatures on a petition asking the Health Department to hurry up.
Connell says he has already turned grieving families away.
“Which kind of breaks my heart,” he said. “I hope that all of us, opponents and proponents alike, will be friends one day. And we’ll all have a laugh about it, and we’ll all be looking out at this beautiful arboretum cemetery and sharing in its beauty.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
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