Star Tribune
Third Precinct debate could run well past Election Day, as Frey faces resistance on his site choice
A Minneapolis City Council decision on how to proceed with a new Third Precinct police station might not happen until after the November elections, and perhaps not until a new council is seated next year.
That’s the potential timeline emerging from the protracted back-and-forth between Mayor Jacob Frey and the council over how to replace the abandoned station at Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue, torched in May 2020 after George Floyd’s murder.
The latest twist: As the City Council approaches a potential up-or-down vote next week on Frey’s preferred location at E. 26th Street and Minnehaha Avenue, a group of key council members is pushing back.
While Frey wants a swift vote from the council to approve the site, the pushback could further slow a process that is already tying the city in knots.
Frey expressed frustration with the process in an interview Wednesday.
“From the very beginning, I’ve been trying to get to seven [of the council’s 13] votes,” he said. “Our administration has tried to do everything possible to give council both the information and the political cover to make a decision.”
The pushback comes from three council members whose wards are served by Third Precinct police officers. It takes the form not of a counterproposal, but a demand for details from Frey’s administration. Some of those details don’t appear to exist yet.
Council members were expected Wednesday to receive Frey’s formal request for approval of a vacant city-owned lot at 2600 Minnehaha Av. as the site for a new station.
That’s not good enough, according to Council Member Emily Koski, who is co-sponsoring the pushback with colleagues Jason Chavez and Andrew Johnson.
“We need more than just an address,” Koski said in an interview. “Just as a person building a new home, we need a plan. We need critical information.”
The trio’s formal demand for details — an item that would need to be approved by the council to be binding — includes the following, according to drafts shared with the Star Tribune. Here’s what they want to know more about:
- Frey’s proposal for a so-called “Community Safety Center” at 2600 Minnehaha Av. It’s unclear if any such proposal exists. While Frey and others on multiple sides of the debate over policing have endorsed the concept of a comprehensive community safety center — a facility that would house not only police but other public services as well — no one has offered details.
- The cost of the new station. A city analysis estimated it would cost $22 million to $26 million to build on the Minnehaha site. That figure doesn’t appear to be detailed enough to satisfy the request, which calls for a fiscal analysis and cost breakdowns for site preparation and construction. Renovating the vacant building at Lake and Minnehaha would cost an estimated $15 million to $18 million, though that location has been rejected by the council.
- Analyses of every site that city officials have considered for the precinct headquarters, which number more than two dozen. Officials have released information on previous sites in various reports and statements, but they’ve never presented a packaged proposal to the council.
- A projected timeline, and a plan for “any anticipated public engagement” — a sticky subject. A Frey-led process earlier this year included public meetings, but some critics assailed it as flawed because it offered only two options — 2600 Minnehaha and the former station at Lake and Minnehaha. Frey backed away from them before recently pressing for 2600 Minnehaha.
Lack of consensus
The demand for information by the three council members carries a deadline for Frey’s administration to produce the information: Dec. 7. If it takes that long, it would be well past the Nov. 7 election, when all 13 council seats are on the ballot.
It would also give the current council just one meeting to deal with the issue before its next regular meeting on Jan. 25 — after the newly-elected council is seated.
That doesn’t sit well with Council Vice President Linea Palmisano, who said she believes the council has received enough information to choose a location now.
“We’ll have a lot of opportunities to weigh in on details later, but for now we need to choose a site,” Palmisano said. “We’ve eliminated all the other options.”
She said she plans to press for a yes-or-no vote on 2600 Minnehaha, Frey’s site choice, on Tuesday. That’s when the council is scheduled to meet as a committee and take up both the mayor’s request and the directive put forward by Koski, Chavez and Johnson.
Those three council members, however, are saying they need a full proposal and vision before moving ahead with any of it. While they make up a minority of the council’s 13 members, their apparent allegiance on this issue makes it difficult to see how Frey can amass the needed seven votes to move ahead.
The lack of consensus on the council on what to do about the Third Precinct station is striking.
Council Member Robin Wonsley, the council’s most outspoken critic of the police and Frey, rejected the mayor’s site choice outright, claiming it “has already been conclusively rejected by hundreds of residents and the City Council.” That’s not correct; though there was a push by some members to reject 2600 Minnehaha, the council has not done so.
Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw, generally an ally of Frey, penned an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Star Tribune in which she called for re-establishing the station at the charred Lake and Minnehaha building that was overrun by protesters and remains cordoned off by razor wire. That was a reversal for Vetaw, who in July joined the majority in a 12-1 vote calling for police never to return there. Vetaw now says she “made a mistake” and regrets that vote.
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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