Kare11
Augsburg University students protest living conditions
Augsburg University students are calling for the Mortensen and Urness towers to be rebuilt with safer living conditions.
MINNEAPOLIS — Dozens of Augsburg University students, staff and alumni spent Tuesday afternoon protesting against what they call unsanitary living conditions in campus residence halls, particularly the Mortensen and Urness towers.
Students claim they have dealt with issues that include mold, pest infestations, lack of air conditioning and unclean water. Augsburg tells KARE 11 the university is addressing these concerns, but students say the towers should be replaced.
“Our tuition goes up and up every single year, but the quality of our housing goes down,” said senior social work major Madisyn Gowans.
Gowans said she spent two years dealing with multiple roach infestations while living in Mortensen Hall with no support from the university.
“I tried to tell people and it wasn’t getting solved. It didn’t get solved until January of the next year because I didn’t know I had to fill out a work order … it was never communicated to me that that was the procedure,” said Gowans.
During that time, Gowans said she began suffering from emotional and psychological distress once the roaches moved from her kitchen into her living spaces, including her bedroom.
“[Roaches] would be on my sheets and in my clothes. It’s just so horrible to feel that way. I can’t even describe how that feels. Unless you have been there, you don’t know,” said Gowans.
Gowans said it wasn’t until she threatened to call the Minnesota Department of Health that the university moved her to a new building.
“This is disgusting behavior. And the university wonders why we don’t submit more work orders or do more. It’s because they have fostered a horrible relationship between residence life and its students,” Gowans said to the gathered crowd.
Demonstration organizers Ali Olanda Oliva and Manu Kannare are both Augsburg University students, and say the university has turned a blind eye on their concerns.
“[Students] should not be doing a tug of war just to have our needs met. Augsburg is responsible for meeting our needs however best they can get there,” said Kannare.
Oliva agreed, citing a lack of communication and accountability.
“My intention with this [protest] is to not point fingers and put the blame on anyone. I just want a clean space and I want students to feel safe and to not have to worry about ‘oh there’s a roach in my dorm,” said Oliva.
The two say although they do not know what will happen next, they are still open to working with Augsburg’s administration to make changes.
“They (administrators) are so important to the students. They are the ones who can create the change we are asking for. Without their help, we can’t get anywhere,” said Kannare. “I am looking forward to hearing from them and seeing how we as a collective can join our ideas and make better solutions possible.”
In a statement to KARE11, Augsburg University officials said efforts are underway to improve the situation.
“We know that pest concerns can be upsetting to students even if only a small number of residence hall units are directly affected. Campus leaders have met with student government as well as individual students in recent weeks to discuss concerns around the residence halls and solicit feedback to improve processes going forward.
As a proactive measure, a comprehensive assessment of all units in Mortensen Hall was completed on September 7–9 by an external pest control company. Efforts have also been underway for several months to ensure that students are familiar and comfortable with the online facilities work order request system. In prior years we did not have a comprehensive approach to ensuring all students were informed about how and when to use it, so this may be a new process for some students. Residence Life has prioritized communication about facilities requests at floor meetings already this semester, and will continue to do so throughout the year. Our facilities department closely tracks all open pest complaints and prioritizes those work orders.
Going forward, we’re creating a residence life committee to continue to address and solve concerns in the residence halls. This committee will be led by student government members and will include the dean of students, residence life staff, facilities staff, and public safety staff. All interested students are welcome to join.
Augsburg is committed to providing safe and comfortable accommodations for our residential students, and where there are issues, we’ll work diligently to address them.”
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“Zara Frost” publishes a Substack newsletter that includes audio and video recordings that are not in the possession of any other news outlet — or Bock’s attorney.
MINNEAPOLIS — Editor’s note: The video above first aired on KARE 11 in September 2024.
Aimee Bock, the former executive director of Feeding our Future and the top name associated with the $250 million pandemic child meal fraud case, is set to stand trial on Feb. 3.
But her lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, does not have access to materials he believes could exonerate Bock — despite those materials being cited in a series of posts on Substack — according to a motion filed by Udoibok on Wednesday.
The Substack newsletter “Nourishing Truth – Unpacking the Feeding Our Future Scandal” is written by Zara Frost. It is unclear whether that name is a pseudonym, whether Frost is a journalist, and whether Frost has connections to any of the 70 defendants charged in the sprawling case.
The general tone of the postings points blame away from Feeding Our Future defendants and back toward the Minnesota Department of Education, which was tasked with oversight of the federal child meal program during the pandemic.
One passage states, “The implications are clear. Either 1. MDE was catastrophically incompetent at its oversight duties, or 2. The department’s current narrative about early fraud concerns is, to put it politely, revisionist history.”
What is clear is that Frost’s 10 articles sent out to 16 subscribers as of Dec. 11 include details no other news outlet has published concerning the case, including audio recordings of conversations involving Hadith Ahmed, the former Feeding Our Future employee who agreed to plead guilty and help the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office with the case.
Those recordings were not used at the first trial involving Feeding our Future defendants earlier in 2024 despite the government using Ahmed as a key witness.
Udoibok believes the government has the recordings along with evidence concerning the reimbursement claims process from phones and tablets seized during the investigation that prosecutors did use in the first trial — but have not disclosed to Udoibok for Bock’s case.
“The withheld materials are crucial to Defendant’s defense as they provide insight into how Feeding Our Future’s claims were processed, which could exonerate Defendant by demonstrating that she did not oversee a fraudulent scheme. The Government’s failure to disclose these materials creates a reasonable probability that Defendant would not be able to mount an effective defense,” Udoibok wrote in his motion, claiming the prosecution is violating the Brady rule that requires disclosing all exculpatory evidence.
Bock and her co-defendants are due back in court Thursday for a status conference.
Zara Frost told KARE 11 News that the audio and video files were leaked to them, but has not yet answered a series of other questions.
St. Joseph’s Hospital’s doors closed this past spring, but a new group is looking at opening it back up to serve what it described as an urgent health need.
CHIPPEWA FALLS, Wis. — Months after a hospital in western Wisconsin shut its doors, a cooperative is looking at opening it back up as a “bridge” as the group works to build a new hospital in the community.
St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chippewa Falls closed along with Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire and Prevea clinics in the region this past spring. Both hospitals were owned and operated by the Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS).
In light of these closures, the Chippewa Valley Health Cooperative formed, and is now planning to build a new hospital, which they say is slated to open in 2027. Before then, the group says they want to reopen St. Joseph’s so that patients can be taken “care of as fast as possible.”
“Since we started the Cooperative, we’ve been singularly focused on making high-quality healthcare accessible and affordable for Chippewa Valley residents as fast as possible,” said Robert Krause, Chair of the Chippewa Valley Health Cooperative, in a press release. “The new facility we’ve planned in Lake Hallie is fundamental to the long-term sustainability of the hospital. At the same time, if we can, reopening the St. Joseph’s facility in 2025 will help us serve patients faster and doesn’t impede our plans or ability to open the new hospital.”
A press release from the co-op states a letter of intent has been signed with HSHS to purchase and reopen the Chippewa Falls facility “to provide urgently needed healthcare services.” The co-op has until April to find out if reopening the hospital would be financially responsible. According to the co-op, St. Joseph’s “has significant deferred maintenance that may need to be addressed before the hospital can be reopened.”
“Once we understand whether reopening St. Joseph’s is possible, we will be in high gear to start caring for patients as fast as possible,” said Krause. “Then we will turn our attention to exploring other healthcare uses for the building once we’ve opened the new full-service hospital in Lake Hallie.”
RELATED: Laid off healthcare workers get community send-off ahead of hospital closures in western WI
When the hospitals and clinics closed in the region, more than 1,000 people lost their jobs, including 244 at St. Joseph’s.
The new hospital being planned by the co-op is anticipated to be a new 144,000-square-foot space with 48 hospital beds, 12 ICU beds, and Emergency Department, Medical-Surgical services, Labor & Delivery, critical care units, a comprehensive Cancer Center, and comprehensive diagnostic services, including laboratory, radiology, and cardiology services. The plan is to open the hospital in Lake Hallie, between Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire.
The mayor called some of the appropriations approved by the council “ward-specific pet projects.”
MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey approved the property tax levy for the city but vetoed the city council’s budget appropriations, calling some of what the council approved “ward-specific pet projects.”
Frey approved a property tax levy of 6.9%, down 1% from what the council approved Tuesday night and also down from the 8.3% he initially proposed, the highest increase in property taxes since 2010.
The city council took the mayor’s proposed budget and reduced raises for the 160 highest-paid city staff members, deferred the implementation of technology projects and delayed the purchase of an internal computer software package.
Council members had to vote on a record 74 amendments during a meeting that stretched on late into the night, passing 71 of them. Many of those amendments focused on public safety efforts in the city. Members voted to expand the city’s Behavioral Crisis Response and to fund five civilian investigators to be added to the police force to look into non-violent cases.
But on Wednesday, Mayor Frey said in a press release he was concerned with what he described as “fiscal irresponsibility,” saying the council’s proposed budget would add $6.53 million in new cash spending, “undermining the City’s financial health.”
“The Council’s budget increases property taxes for years to come,” said Mayor Frey in a press release. “It cuts essentials like unsheltered homelessness response and recruitment of police, then turns around and uses the money to fund pet projects. Fiscally, times are tight—federal funding will likely be withheld and state dollars are in short supply. We need to be responsible with our tax dollars.”
The mayor’s veto will go before the full council on Thursday, his office said in the press release. If the council sustains the veto, officials said negotiations on the budget will continue and steps will need to be taken to keep the city operating during that process.
Council President Elliott Payne responded to the mayor’s veto announcement:
“The fact that the Mayor is willing to veto the entire 2025 City budget because his co-equal branch of government made amendments that accounted for less than 2% of the total $1.88 billion City budget is absurd. Council Members learned of Mayor Frey’s intention to veto through a press release, before he even received the formal budget packet from the Clerk’s office at the time of his announcement. This is unfortunately part of a larger pattern of an unwillingness to work with the Legislative branch of the City. The fact that the Mayor is willing to risk the jobs of over 4,000 City employees and the reduction of basic City services in order to try and score political points is absolutely disheartening. The final budget was passed with 10 votes last night and 62 amendments passed with at least supermajority support. I will do everything in my power to work with my colleagues to overturn this reckless veto.”
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