Star Tribune
Lawsuits between Minneapolis, environmental activists heat up as Roof Depot demolition nears
The city of Minneapolis plans to tear down the former Roof Depot warehouse in the East Phillips neighborhood next month to make way for a new water infrastructure maintenance yard. Neighborhood environmental activists, who have been fighting the plans for nearly a decade, hope a judge will grant them a temporary restraining order before the bulldozers come.
Should that happen, the city wants the neighborhood activists to pay for it. In a district court hearing on Thursday morning, city attorneys asked Judge Edward Wahl to impose a bond of $4.5 million to offset the costs of delaying the city’s project.
Barbara O’Brien, the city’s director of Property Services, estimated escalating construction costs of $175,000 to $250,000 per month of delay.
“Those are real costs and those costs are borne by the city, the city residents’ tax dollars. They have to pay for those costs. ” said Assistant City Attorney Mark Enslin during the hearing.
Under state law, the party asking for a temporary injunction must post a bond for the payment of potential damages if the opposing party ultimately prevails on the merits of the underlying lawsuit. But East Phillips activists argue that $4.5 million is an unreasonably high sum that they will not be able to afford. For comparison, in the lawsuit temporarily suspending Minneapolis’ 2040 Comprehensive Plan, the district court asked a separate coalition of environmental groups to post a bond of $10,000.
Rallying in the falling snow outside City Hall after the hearing, they blamed the city for racking up excessive development costs on a contentious project.
The city of Minneapolis already has a Public Works facility at 1911 E. 26th St., which it has long planned to expand with more offices, a storage yard for water maintenance crews’ vehicles and equipment, a diesel fueling station and employee parking ramp. In 2016, it spent nearly $7 million to buy the adjacent property to the south – the Roof Depot warehouse – over the objections of a coalition of neighborhood residents with competing plans to purchase the same building for an urban farm.
The residents are organized as the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), and they accuse the city of trying to push an unwanted development that would increase traffic and carbon emissions onto a low-income, minority neighborhood already overburdened by heavy industry and air pollution. They are also concerned that demolition of the Roof Depot warehouse would displace arsenic contamination beneath the building.
“We’re talking about a Superfund site that was cleaned up to a certain level in the past with an expectation that that part of the parcel where the building is located would never be dug up,” said EPNI lawyer Jessica Blome during Thursday’s hearing. “The demolition and construction of a new building there will cause that soil to be dug up.”
Enslin pushed back, saying a demolition plan by geotechnical consulting firm Braun Intertec has been approved by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and would safely remediate the property.
Efforts to reconcile their divergent visions have been unsuccessful so far.
This summer Mayor Jacob Frey and City Council members proposed that the city and neighborhood activists share the 8.5-acre Roof Depot site in a development plan including the new Public Works water yard, an urban farm and a job training center prioritizing neighborhood residents. EPNI hasn’t accepted, holding fast to two lawsuits – in district and appellate court – that claim the city hasn’t reviewed the potential environmental harm of its project within the context of all the other pollution sources already located in East Phillips.
“This community can’t bear any more pollution. It already has the worst health consequences as a result of the traffic, of the asphalt plant, of a foundry, of everything that is already there, not to mention the poisoning from the arsenic at the Superfund site that is still present,” said EPNI lawyer Miles Ringsred during oral arguments before the Court of Appeals in late November.
The Court of Appeals has 90 days from Nov. 30 to issue an opinion about whether the city’s environmental review of its own project was sufficient.
The District Court trial is scheduled for April 2024.
The Minneapolis City Council still needs to approve demolition bids before the teardown can begin.
DULUTH – The Minnesota and Wisconsin transportation departments will make upgrades to the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge in the summer of 2025, in preparation for the structure to become the premiere route between this city and Superior during reconstruction of the Blatnik Bridge.
Built in 1961, the Blatnik Bridge carries 33,000 vehicles per day along Interstate 535 and Hwy. 53. It will be entirely rebuilt, starting in 2027, with the help of $1 billion in federal funding announced earlier this year. MnDOT and WisDOT are splitting the remaining costs of the project, about $4 million each.
According to MnDOT, projects on the Bong Bridge will include spot painting, concrete surface repairs to the bridge abutments, concrete sealer on the deck, replacing rubber strip seal membranes on the main span’s joints and replacing light poles on the bridge and its points of entry. It’s expected to take two months, transportation officials said during a recent meeting at the Superior Public Library.
During this time there will be occasional lane closures, detours at the off-ramps, and for about three weeks the sidewalk path alongside the bridge will be closed.
The Bong Bridge, which crosses the St. Louis River, opened to traffic in 1985 and is the lesser-used of the two bridges. Officials said they want to keep maintenance to a minimum on the span during the Blatnik project, which is expected to take four years.
Red Wing will celebrate the grand opening of its first permanent set of pickleball courts next week with an “inaugural play” on the six courts at Colvill Park on the banks of the Mississippi, between a couple of marinas and next to the aquatic center.
Among the first to get to play on the new courts will be David Anderson, who brought pickleball to the local YMCA in 2008, before the nationwide pickleball craze took hold, and Denny Yecke, at 92 the oldest pickleball player in Red Wing.
The inaugural play begins at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a rain date of the next day. Afterward will be food and celebration at the Colvill Park Courtyard building.
Tim Sletten, the city’s former police chief, discovered America’s fastest-growing sport a decade ago after he retired. With fellow members of the Red Wing Pickleball Group, he’d play indoors at the local YMCA or outdoors at a local school, on courts made for other sports. But they didn’t have a permanent place, so they approached the city about building one.
When a city feasibility study came up with a high cost, about $350,000, Sletten’s group got together to raise money.
The courts are even opening ahead of schedule, originally set for 2025.
REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. – A truck crashing into a school bus left nine with minor injuries Wednesday morning in rural Redwood County, a statement from the Redwood County Sheriff’s office said.
The bus driver, serving the Wabasso Public School District, failed to yield when entering the intersection of County Road 7 and 280th Street, the statement said.
Deputies received word of the crash around 8:15 a.m. and identified the bus driver as Edward Aslesen, 72, of Milroy.
The nine injured passengers on the bus were transported to local hospitals, the statement said.
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