Star Tribune
Minnesota nursing board considers firing its executive director after licensing, discipline delays
The Minnesota Board of Nursing set an emergency meeting Thursday to consider replacing its executive director amid complaints of delayed licensing approvals and disciplinary actions.
Kimberly Miller became director of the nursing board in August 2021 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. That crisis and the fall 2022 nursing strike flooded the board with licensure and temporary permit requests. But complaints and the board’s own budget request suggested problems beyond those events.
While Miller “took the brunt of the COVID mess” her leadership resulted in multiple complaints from workers, many of whom quit, and even clashes with board members, said David Jiang, who resigned from the board in August 2022 to attend law school in California. Jiang in his resignation letter to Gov. Tim Walz faulted the board for a lack of oversight, and allowing Miller to handle the staffing problems she helped create.
“It’s been over a year since we’ve been aware of these issues and its always been punted,” Jiang said in an interview Wednesday.
The Star Tribune in January reported that nursing school graduates weren’t getting cleared by the board to take their licensing exams, delaying their start dates at hospitals and clinics and contributing to the statewide nursing shortage.
ProPublica and KARE 11 in April reported on the board’s delayed disciplinary actions that allowed nurses accused of dangerous practices to stay on the job. The two media outlets first reported on Tuesday that the board had scheduled the emergency meeting.
Internal documents provided by former nursing board staff showed that delays started with the use of a single, tightly-controlled email account for multiple board activities. Questions and complaints to that inbox would sit for 30 to 60 days before they were assigned to appropriate board staff. In some cases, board staff would be pressing nurses with second or third requests for information that had already been filed to the inbox.
“The delay in responding to practice questions is unprofessional and reflects poorly on the Board,” said one email from a board staff member to Miller.
The board’s most recent biennial report showed that the time to resolve disciplinary complaints had increased to 250 days, and that last June there were 320 complaints that remained unresolved after more than one year.
Eric Ray quit his job as a discipline program assistant shortly after Miller took charge of the board. In a recent email to the Star Tribune, he said the delays are even worse than reflected by the statistics. The timeline doesn’t start until Miller codes complaints for investigations, Ray said, and many of those complaints sit for weeks in the board’s inbox.
Ray said it “is truly alarming from a public safety standpoint” and that a handful of disciplinary cases remain unresolved after five years.
The Minnesota Office of Management and Budget had received and reviewed multiple complaint about Miller, but spokesperson Patrick Hogan said privacy laws prevented elaboration on them. Nursing board president Laura Elseth confirmed Thursday’s meeting but said state privacy laws prevented her from discussing the “nature of complaints” against Miller.
Walz had requested funding increases to maintain the nursing board’s current level of service, including $237,000 per year to add three staff members.
“The Board is not able to meet consumer and applicant expectations for timely licensure processing,” the budget stated.
The nursing strike led to a doubling last year of “licensure by endorsement” applications by nurses in other states who were seeking to move to Minnesota or provide temporary nursing care for short-staffed hospitals and clinics. However, state officials expect that demand to continue this year, as burnout has caused a nursing shortage statewide and a continued need for contract and temporary nurses to cover shifts in Minnesota.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
Weary from the rat race nature of practicing commercial law, Danielle Miller had long dreamed of starting a new professional life as a bookstore owner. When the Lincoln, Neb., resident saw a space at St. Paul’s Union Depot, she moved to make her dream a reality. She and her husband now call the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood home.
Eye On St. Paul recently visited with Miller in her sun-drenched store, Story Line Books, to talk about what spurred her to leave the law behind and lose herself in shelves of books. This interview was edited for length.
Q: So, you’ve opened a bookstore, in Lowertown. Are you a little crazy?
A: That’s been the reaction. There’s been a lot of “Really? Lowertown?” There’s been a lot of that. It’s a little unnerving.
Q: Why decide to just up and move to St. Paul?
A: We travel a lot; we travel all over the world. And we go to bookstores. We were here visiting [my husband’s] parents in Woodbury, and we drove down Randolph because we like to eat at Due Focacceria. And we saw this building that had “For Sale” on it. It was a 900-square-foot retail spot on the bottom and an apartment above. And I was like, that is the European bookstore dream, right? I looked it up online, but it got scooped up. A week later, I was looking again and this [Union Depot space] was the first post.
I was immediately in love. The next time we were up here, we made arrangements to come and see it. And I told my husband, “You should probably get a job in St Paul.”
Q: Back up a few steps. Why this compulsion to open a bookstore when you were a working attorney?
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