Star Tribune
Billionaire pees in Duluth’s Cheerios
Kathy Cargill leaves Duluth worse than she found it.
But maybe she’ll leave Duluth alone now.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Billionaire meets Duluth. Billionaire loves Duluth. Billionaire tries to buy Duluth. Duluth has a few questions. Billionaire withholds pickleball from Duluth.
For months, Cargill — wife of an heir to a fortune — had been buying house after house after house along the seven-mile sand bar known as Park Point. The Cargills have a fabulous vacation home Up North, but she wanted more.
Many of the properties along Park Point were pleasant, modest homes — still within the realm of middle-class affordability in a city facing a desperate housing shortage. Until a shell corporation started offering the neighbors double or even triple their homes’ value. As each sale went through, bulldozers moved in, replacing housing with vacant lots.
It was Cargill, of course. For months, she ignored questions from the neighbors and the city. Questions like: Whatcha doing? You wouldn’t happen to be planning to turn an entire neighborhood full of public parks and public beaches into some sort of weird gated community for future billionaires to ride out the coming climate crisis in “Climate-Proof Duluth,” hmm?
Finally, the billionaire spoke.
Yes, she admitted, she had been snapping up properties, claiming she wanted to build a few homes for her relatives and spruce up the neighborhood. Besides, she said, all the homes she was bulldozing were “pieces of crap” and full of garter snakes.
In return for jacking up everybody else’s property taxes with her inflated purchase prices and unleashing homeless garter snakes on the world, she swore — billionaire’s honor — that she had planned to give the neighborhood a nice new coffee shop and maybe some pickleball courts.
Think of the theoretical pickleball courts Duluth could have had. If only they had silently, reverently and unquestioningly let a passing billionaire do whatever she pleased. But Duluth’s mild curiosity seems to have soured Cargill on the idea of snapping up an entire 7-mile sandbar.
“The good plans that I have down there for beautifying, updating and fixing up Park Point park or putting up that sports court, forget it,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s another community out there with more welcoming people than that small-minded community,” she said.
And then she unleashed the world’s most revolting metaphor on an unprepared Minnesota.
Referring to newly elected Duluth Mayor Roger Reinert, who had suggested that residents hold off on selling their homes until Cargill did the polite thing and actually talked to her neighbors, Cargill said: “I think an expression that we all know — don’t pee in your Cheerios — well, he kind of peed in his Cheerios right there, and definitely I’m not going to do anything to benefit that community.”
Reinert, who was out at 3 a.m. Monday morning, riding along with city plows as they dug out between snow storms, responded Minnesota Nicely by posting a picture of his actual breakfast. It was pancakes. That other expression is not an expression we all know, Kathy Cargill.
Cargill told the Wall Street Journal she still plans to hang out in her stately vacation home in Duluth, possibly out of pure spite.
The DFL candidate for a Roseville seat in the Minnesota House is pushing back on allegations from his Republican opponent that he doesn’t live in the district he hopes to represent.
Curtis Johnson is currently a member of the Roseville Area Schools board. He has owned a home in Little Canada since 2017, according to Ramsey County property records.
In May he filed to run for the open seat in House District 40B, saying he lived in an apartment complex less than 3 miles from his Little Canada home. The district includes parts of Roseville and Shoreview and has been represented by DFLer Jamie Becker-Finn, who isn’t seeking re-election, since 2017.
In a statement, Johnson said he and his wife decided to move to Roseville last year, but they’ve struggled to find the right house. In the meantime, he’s been renting “a Roseville apartment as my primary residence while we keep searching for a forever home.”
“My wife and our youngest child still live in the house because we didn’t want to disrupt our child’s life by moving the rest of the family into my apartment and then moving them again after we found a house in Roseville,” Johnson’s statement said.
Wikstrom released an ad Oct. 15 that accused Johnson of lying about his residency, but he has not committed to making a legal challenge. A residency challenge would be decided by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
“My confidence level is high that we have a solid case he is not a resident of the district,” Wikstrom said in an interview. He noted that Johnson’s vehicle is often at the Little Canada home and a portable storage container appeared out front days after his political ad went online.
An unlicensed driver is now charged on accusations that he was speeding and under the influence of alcohol when he set off a chain-reaction pileup on an interstate exit ramp in Minneapolis, leaving one person dead and several others injured.
Talon Covie-Cardell Walker, 29, of St. Paul, was charged late Thursday afternoon in Hennepin County District Court with criminal vehicular homicide in connection with the seven-vehicle pileup about 9:15 p.m. Wednesday after exiting from eastbound Interstate 94 toward Lyndale Avenue.
Walker remains held without bail ahead of a court appearance Friday afternoon. Court records do not list an attorney for him.
A search warrant affidavit was filed in court by the State Patrol that cleared the way for Walker’s blood to be collected to measure his degree of intoxication. Results are pending. The affidavit said Walker was “pushing 100 mph when taking the ramp, [and] it appears no braking took place before the crash.”
Walker was driving without a valid license, according to the state Department of Public Safety. In late 2019, his license was suspended, then it was revoked in spring 2021, the agency said.
Court records in Minnesota show Walker has traffic convictions for careless driving and operating a motorcycle without a license. State records also show convictions for illegal weapons possession, disorderly conduct, a minor drug offense and twice for violating a court no-contact order.
Walker’s passenger, 20-year-old Taniyah Randle-Smith, was taken by ambulance to HCMC with life-threatening injuries, according to the patrol. A hospital spokeswoman said Thursday afternoon that she was in critical condition.
Killed in the crash was Natalie Gubbay, a 26-year-old SUV driver from Minneapolis, whose vehicle was struck by Walker’s. Her passenger, Molly Elizabeth Brenton, 28, of Virginia, Minn., was taken to HCMC with noncritical injuries.
A juvenile has died while in detention at the Red Wing correctional facility in southeastern Minnesota.
Officials with the Minnesota Department of Corrections said staff on Saturday found an inmate who was unresponsive. Authorities attempted life-saving measures, which were unsuccessful. Paramedics arrived and the resident was pronounced dead at the scene, said spokeswoman Shannon Loehrke.
An investigation is underway to determine how the inmate died, she added.
No information about the identify of the deceased was released.
The Red Wing facility has a capacity of 88 inmates.
