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.
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
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?
