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.
Star Tribune
Former Hubbard County official, school bus driver gets six-year sentence for sex crimes against students
A former Hubbard County commissioner and school bus driver was sentenced Friday to six years in prison for sex crimes involving minors.
Daniel J. Stacey, 60, was charged in April 2023 with criminal sexual conduct and electronic solicitation of a minor, both felonies, in Beltrami County District Court. He was then charged in November with nine additional felony counts related to criminal sexual contact with a minor.
Stacey pleaded guilty in June to four felony counts as part of a plea deal that dropped the remaining charges. His attorney, Joseph Tamburino, declined to comment Friday on the sentence, and officials with the Nevis school district did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.
Stacey resigned from the Hubbard County Board in January 2023 and was placed on leave from his school bus job during an investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that began after the parent of a Nevis student filed a complaint.
In an email Friday, Hubbard County Administrator Jeffrey Cadwell said he had no comment other than that Stacey’s actions “did not occur within the course and scope of his duties with the County and the County was completely unaware of them.”
According to a criminal complaint, Stacey offered to mentor a 13-year-old male on his bus route. He brought the boy to his property, asked him to watch pornography and tried to touch him in a sexual manner, court documents state.
The boy told investigators that Stacey told him not to tell anyone, and helped him rehearse what to say about doing chores at his property. Investigators said they found footage showing times Stacey would deactivate the school bus camera when the boy was the only student left on the bus.
A second criminal complaint outlines similar allegations against Stacey with a minor who was 14 years old.
Star Tribune
Woman charged as investigation into attack on north Minneapolis homeless shelter continues
A 33-year-old woman has been charged with two felonies in connection with an attack on a north Minneapolis homeless shelter that forced 54 women and children to relocate last week.
Eureka D. Riser, 33, of Minneapolis, is charged with second-degree rioting with a dangerous weapon and first-degree damage to property, according to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. She was in custody Friday, a day after Minneapolis police confirmed her arrest.
Riser, also known as Eureka Willis, is alleged to have been in a group of at least three people who on Sept. 5 went to St. Anne’s Place, 2634 Russell Av. N., and threatened residents, smashing doors with a baseball bat.
Residents were forced to vacate the shelter, leaving it boarded with plywood and watched over by armed security. Building managers estimate that property damage amounts to more than $10,000, according to the county attorney’s office. Additional charges may be brought against others involved.
“This violent attack on some of our most vulnerable community members, unhoused women and children, in a place where they had gone to seek shelter and safety cannot be tolerated,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement.
Hoang Murphy, the CEO of People Serving People, which operates the shelter, said earlier this week that the four-hour episode was the culmination of an argument between shelter residents and neighbors over street parking that started days earlier and spilled over into violence.
According to the criminal complaint, which cites surveillance footage, Riser allegedly swung a baseball bat against the shelter’s doors, shattering glass while residents were inside. Another member of the group pointed what appears to be a gun at the front door of the building, the complaint says.
Residents have since been relocated to a hotel for safety reasons, costing People Serving People $9,000 a night — a figure that Murphy called unsustainable.
A man who was shot and wounded by sheriff’s deputies in east-central Minnesota while resisting arrest received a six-month jail term Friday.
Leo H. Hacker, 71, was sentenced in Pine County District Court in connection with his guilty plea in two cases of assault, and obstructing and fleeing law enforcement in connection with his clashes with deputies in February 2023.
Hacker’s sentences will be served concurrently and includes Judge Jason Steffen setting aside a three-year sentence sought by the County Attorney’s Office. Steffen’s terms also include five years’ probation and community work service.
According to the charges in each case and related court documents:
On Feb. 21, deputies tried to pull over Hacker’s pickup truck on a gravel road about a mile from his Pine City home. As two deputies approached his vehicle, he drove toward them. Both deputies opened fire on Hacker and wounded him.
Hacker was wanted at the time on charges of second-degree assault and obstructing law enforcement in connection with allegations that he pointed a gun at a deputy outside his home on Feb. 14 and angrily defied orders to drop the weapon.
At one point, Hacker warned the deputies that if they did not leave, he would return with “something bigger,” the charges quoted him as saying.
The deputy was there to seize Hacker’s SUV stemming from a dispute over his unpaid attorney fees, the charges read. However, law enforcement outside the home “determined that based on the totality of circumstances, it was in the interest of safety to leave the scene at that time” and instead seek a warrant for Hacker’s arrest, the criminal complaint continued.
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