Star Tribune
Minneapolis public works employees authorize strike
Minneapolis Public Works employees overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike Wednesday night in hopes of a boost in pay and safety protocols following years of frontline work through the pandemic, civil unrest and the homelessness crisis.
The vast majority of the 400 Minneapolis employees represented by Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 363 — 99% — voted in support of the strike.
Employees are seeking wage increases on par with the cost of living, pay parity with workers in nearby cities, bolstered health and safety protocols and “respect and dignity,” said AJ Lange, business manager of LIUNA Local 363.
Workers regularly encounter serious health and safety hazards on the job, without adequate employee protections, Lange said.
“We’re routinely exposed to hazardous infectious agents. … and when assigned to encampment cleanups, workers have been stuck with needles and urine thrown in their face and held up at gunpoint,” Lange said.
Workers in other Minnesota cites earn between $6 and $10 more per hour than Minneapolis employees doing the same work, said Liz Xiong, communications director and political coordinator at LIUNA Minnesota and North Dakota.
“If you can cross the highway, do the same job and make a lot more money, then why would you not? That is adding to strain on the current limited workforce that they do have,” Xiong said.
While competition to maintain workers is high across industries and localities and at Public Works — where employees maintain water treatment, sewage, stormwater, trash, recycling, lighting, roads, and bridges — fewer people on schedules increases the strain on other workers, which directly affects city services.
The city of Minneapolis recognizes and appreciates the hard work staff represented by LIUNA Local 363 conduct on behalf of residents, a city spokesperson said in a statement after the vote.
“We continue to bargain in good faith and work toward a fair and equitable contract for these employees. While we are taking necessary precautions and developing contingency plans to minimize disruptions in the event of a strike, our primary focus remains reaching a swift and amicable resolution that avoids such an outcome,” the statement said.
The city has not received formal notice from LIUNA Local 363.
Sanitation workers like David McKnight spend their days cleaning up trash from rental evictions or piles of trash after the city closes a homeless encampment. They often face hostility from people who have nowhere to go and they are not trained in de-esclation, he said.
“A lot of times it’s unsanitary stuff and unhealthy stuff,” McKnight said. “We get stuck with hypodermic needles because you can’t see them when you go to pick something up.”
It is disheartening for McKnight, as a current employee and for the future of the industry, to see wages not increase, when workers can make more in other cities or across the private sector, he said.
“It takes a toll on your mental health, on your physical health, and then it affects your family,” McKnight said of long hours.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
