Star Tribune
Residents confront officials over longtime health concerns linked to Minneapolis foundry
A standing-room-only crowd confronted state and federal environmental officials on Monday night, sharing years of health concerns and freshly stoked anger over the oversight of a Minneapolis metal foundry.
Residents of the East Phillips neighborhood and the nearby Little Earth community told stories about their children and grandchildren struggling with breathing problems and cardiac conditions. Nearby, Smith Foundry has operated for a century, making iron castings on E. 28th Street.
One mother cried as she talked about worrying if her child’s day care had put them too close to pollution and led to an asthma diagnosis; a man who identified himself as a foundry worker said that people in his industry are known to die young; and many people shared stories of developing asthma cases or finding dust in their homes.
“I don’t want to see nobody else bury a child,” said Cassandra Holmes, a former Little Earth resident who said her son had been diagnosed with a heart condition at 14 and died at 16. “It’s the worst feeling in the world.”
Anger has roiled the neighborhood since it was revealed earlier this month, first by a report in Sahan Journal, that federal inspectors had found evidence of several potential violations of the Clean Air Act at Smith.
EPA inspectors paid a surprise visit to the foundry in late May and found a broken air filter and ductwork, and visible particulates building up on surfaces and escaping through doors and windows. In a draft list of violations written up in August, the agency claimed the foundry had been polluting its neighborhood’s air and breaking air quality limits for five years.
The pollution singled out in EPA’s report was fine particulate matter — a dangerous form of air pollution that can cause heart attacks, asthma and chronic health conditions. Smith is also Hennepin County’s biggest source of lead emissions, though no agency has claimed the foundry is breaking a limit for that pollutant.
Before this visit, the last time MPCA inspectors had been inside the building was in 2018. The agency subsequently paid a visit on Nov. 6 and saw no evidence of problems.
Adolfo Quiroga, president of Smith Foundry, spoke only briefly at the end of the Monday meeting.
“We are committed, and I mean it, we are committed to be a good neighbor,” he said. “Forty-five percent of union employees live in the area, and we are committed to meet all the standards, or exceed them, as imposed to us.”
In response, the crowd barraged him with repeated entreaties for the foundry to close. One woman who said her father has worked at the foundry told Quiroga that children and the elderly were suffering from their work.
The MPCA has pushed back on parts of the EPA’s conclusions, telling the Star Tribune last week that it has no evidence Smith has broken air pollution limits, and that the EPA could have misinterpreted data. EPA stood by its calculations.
Brian Dickens, a representative of the EPA’s Chicago office, said during the meeting that it is not unusual for the EPA to do inspections across the country.
“It’s not that the state agency is not doing its job. It might be that we have the expertise. We have advanced monitoring equipment,” he said. “Relative to other states, Minnesota’s environmental regulations are strong”
Dickens also said there would be a test of the air coming out of the smokestack at Smith on Dec. 12. He did not, however, comment in specifics on the EPA’s investigation of the facility.
MPCA’s assertion that it didn’t have evidence of Smith breaking air quality standards proved a controversial one at the meeting, where many attendees said the claim effectively ignored years of complaints from the community.
“I am sorry that is how it feels,” MPCA Commissioner Katrina Kessler said. “That is not my intent.”
Kessler’s words did little to keep the crowd from calling for her resignation.
People in the room insisted that many years of attempts to abate poor smells and pollution from Smith and its next-door neighbor, asphalt plant Bituminous Roadways, had fallen on deaf ears.
“It’s been decades that this [foundry] has been polluting our community,” said Joan Vanhala, a 40-year resident of the neighborhood. She said that as long ago as 1995, the neighborhood had tried to strike a “good neighbor” agreement with Smith, but nothing came of it.
Other questions focused on the facility’s permit, which dates to 1992. Since then, Minnesota passed a law that requires regulators to apply stricter air standards to a large swath of south Minneapolis that has historically faced pollution, including East Phillips.
Cassandra Meyer, the MPCA permit engineer who has been working to update the foundry’s permit since 2016, told the room that the agency aimed to finish the permit by the end of 2024, with many more public meetings in the process.
Meanwhile, MPCA has previously said it struck an agreement with Bituminous Roadways to close by the end of 2025.
But overwhelmingly, people in the room called for the foundry to be shut down entirely. Some said they were not even comfortable with the two-year timeline for Bituminous to close.
Faced with a barrage of questions about whether MPCA could pressure the facility to close, Assistant Commissioner Frank Kohlasch demurred.
“The best I can promise you tonight is that we will continue to have transparent [discussions],” he said.
Evan Mulholland, an attorney with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, called issues with the permit a distraction and said that the goal of shutting down the foundry would not happen through MPCA.
“The permit is permission to pollute,” he said.
The MPCA will hold another meeting via Zoom at 1 p.m. Friday.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
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.”
