Star Tribune
Golden Valley mayor-elect aims for dialogue after police racism report
Golden Valley’s first Black mayor hopes her background in restorative justice will help her dial down acrimony over policing in the city when she takes office in January — a year after an explosive investigation found a culture of casual racism in the department.
But Mayor-elect Roslyn Harmon said she sees significant progress since the police investigation was released, and hopes to continue moving the city forward by creating opportunities for everyone to talk about the city’s issues.
“We want to get to a place where everyone feels like they have a voice, like they matter,” Harmon said.
During her campaign, Harmon said, her race was a non-issue for the white voters she met in the city, which is 85% white.
“As I was talking with residents of the white community, it’s like, ‘It’s not about color. We believe you’re qualified,’ ” Harmon recalled.
The response from Black Golden Valley residents and other people of color was enthusiastic, Harmon said.
“For people of color, it’s like, ‘This is huge.'”
Harmon’s historic election came almost a year after the release of a report detailing racist attitudes in the police department.
The investigation ended with an officer’s firing for a slew of racist remarks and other department policy violations. A dozen other officers resigned over the course of the investigation, which also found officers resistant to training on issues like structural racism.
In the year since the report, Harmon said she sees major change in the department, which is rebuilding after a resignation wave winnowed the staff to about a third of its budgeted size in 2022 and early 2023.
The department has seen a thin but steady flow of applications to become police officers, and more applicants for the entry-level community service officer positions that Chief Virgil Green gave more responsibility at the department’s staffing nadir.
Now, just over 30% of the Golden Valley Police Department is made up of women, including the second-in-command, Assistant Chief Alice White. The department has never been more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, Harmon said, with the chief and both assistant chiefs all people of color.
“We’re breaking all these barriers,” Harmon said.
Harmon said she was confident the police would have enough officers to end a contract for policing services with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office in 2024.
As vice chair of the city’s Police Employment, Accountability and Community Engagement Commission, Harmon has been part of police candidate interviews and Green’s work to change the department’s culture. She said she is happy with the progress.
“We didn’t go too fast, and we haven’t been going too slow,” she said.
A different approach
Harmon said she hopes to continue the work her predecessors started in Golden Valley. But she brings a different style, with a professional background in restorative justice and ministry.
She believes in the power of open discussion, she said, and wants to create more venues for Golden Valley residents to get together and talk about big issues.
For example, the police commission is planning a community listening session next month, which Harmon hopes will bring in more voices.
With her campaign, Harmon has already created common ground for two Golden Valley politicians who have spent years butting heads: current Mayor Shep Harris and former Council Member Joanie Clausen.
The two have clashed over policing and public safety as the city’s force dwindled, and after the investigation was released last year and an officer was fired for allegedly violating state data privacy laws. But both supported Harmon’s campaign for mayor.
Harmon has straddled a divide on the policing issue in Golden Valley, acknowledging both the harm of racism, and the jolt some longtime residents felt when police officers they knew left the city.
Clausen said she supported Harmon because of her willingness to acknowledge that the city has problems, and she believes in Harmon’s ability to bring people together to address those issues.
Harris said Harmon “brings people together. … The issues, the priorities, the themes of her campaign were attractive to a spectrum of residents.”
Many residents in the apartments next to the proposed nightclub are visiting workers such as travel nurses or farm laborers, he said. “It makes no sense to have a nightclub that has concerts next to a place where people need to rest to work in the community,” Zuleger said.
He has said that the company also partners with addiction centers and women’s shelters to house Willmar’s most vulnerable residents, and some of these tenants would be too close for comfort to the new nightclub.
Instead of a nightclub, the site should be used for a Somali community center where children from the nearby apartments can play, Zuleger said. Willmar, a city of about 21,000 people, is about 24% Hispanic and 11% Black, with 16% of the city born overseas, double the average rate in the rest of Minnesota. About 43% of the company’s tenants are Somali, and Zuleger called them his “best-paying renters.”
But Doug Fenstra, the real estate agent helping sell the property at 951 High Av., said he had never heard about the possibility of a Somali community center before Zuleger brought up the idea at an October planning commission meeting.
On Wednesday, the planning commission deliberated whether a nightclub would fit the character of the neighborhood. They noted that there was already a brewery in the area.
They passed a motion granting the conditional-use permit.
“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.
