Star Tribune
Hennepin board approves 20% pay raise for the county administrator
Hennepin County Administrator David Hough is getting a 20% pay raise that’s retroactive to the start of 2024.
The Hennepin County Board moved quickly to unanimously approve Hough’s pay hike at their regular meeting Tuesday. His new salary is $353,284 a year, up from $294,784.
Board Chair Irene Fernando said she was reviewing pay ranges for several county positions when she learned Hough’s contract had expired at the end of 2023. County leaders are finalizing a new contract, but Fernando said she felt it was important to bring the salary change to the board quickly.
“Given the expired contract, I prioritized this timing,” Fernando said of her request on Tuesday that the board immediately approve the increase. Typically, commissioners have at least a week to review board actions before a final vote.
The County Board controls the administrator’s salary; pay for most other positions is set by county officials. The change makes Hough the county’s highest paid employee, just ahead of Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, who earns $340,894.
The board didn’t just give Hough a raise, they increased the pay range for his position. The last time the pay range was updated was in 2018.
The pay increase puts Hough on par with other administrators with similar responsibilities in jurisdictions of similar size, Fernando said. For instance, a salary study she provided shows the pay range for the Minneapolis city operations officer tops out at $345,331.
Hough oversees a county workforce of nearly 10,000 and an annual budget of almost $2.7 billion.
He has one of the state’s best paying government jobs. The governor’s salary is set at $149,550, but Gov. Tim Walz takes a smaller one; state commissioners’ salaries top out at $187,314.
Hennepin County is Minnesota’s second largest government after the state bureaucracy. It is the 33rd largest county in the U.S. in terms of population with nearly 1.5 million residents.
Hough has worked for Hennepin County a long time. Hough was appointed administrator in 2013 and his career with the county began in 1982 when he was a law clerk.
Commissioners made it clear they want him to stick around.
“We are so lucky to have him,” said Commissioner Marion Greene . “I’m thrilled to approve this.”
Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde said Hough led the county through the pandemic and helped leaders obtain and wisely spend state and federal relief funds.
Commissioner Kevin Anderson added: “I cannot imagine doing this job without administrator Hough.”
The Minnesota Orchestra’s president and CEO is leaving for the same job in Texas.
Michelle Miller Burns, who has led Minnesota’s largest performing arts organization since 2018, will take charge of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where she had held several leadership roles before coming to Minnesota. She starts with Dallas in September.
Popular with board members and musicians, Burns kept the orchestra playing — outdoors, on TV and radio and via livestream — during a pandemic that silenced most performing arts organizations across the country. She oversaw the orchestra during difficult financial times, posting several record-breaking deficits before finally pulling its budget into the black over the most recent fiscal year.
And she led the orchestra’s search for a new music director, bringing Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård to Minneapolis.
“My husband Gary and I have always considered Dallas a second home, so this new role was a deeply enticing opportunity,” Burns said in a statement Friday. “Even as this transition is announced, though, my heart is full of gratitude for the outstanding musicians and music-making of the Minnesota Orchestra and for the many board members, colleagues and friends who have made my six years in the Twin Cities so joyful and meaningful.”
Burns, who was born in Iowa and grew up in the Chicago area, will succeed Kim Noltemy, Dallas’ president and CEO since 2018, who is headed to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
During her time in Dallas, Burns’ roles included interim president and CEO, chief operating officer and vice president of development.
The Minnesota Orchestra board will soon start a search for her successor, according to a news release.
A Burnsville man defrauded a California electronics business out of more than $1.2 million by posing as someone who could broker big deals with high-profile companies, according to federal charges.
Thomas Thanh Pham, 52, was charged this week in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis with three counts of wire fraud in connection with a scheme that targeted the San Jose business starting in 2019 and lasted into the following year.
Pham appeared in court Thursday and remains free on a personal recognizance bond ahead of another hearing on Tuesday. Court records do not list an attorney for Pham, and he declined Friday to speak with the Star Tribune about the allegations.
According to court documents:
Pham, as CEO of Enterprise Products, purported to provide consulting and financial services to commercial clients involved in engineering and manufacturing.
Pham presented himself as a broker with supposed business relationships with large well-known companies and claimed he could arrange service agreements between an electronic manufacturing services company based in San Jose — not identified in public court records — and business affiliates in the electronics and technology sectors.
In June 2019, Pham proposed that Enterprise Products could facilitate multimillion-dollar contracts with large companies such as RetailNext, Siemens and Texas Instruments.
Pham supplied his client with bogus documents, including fabricated contracts, correspondence and business proposals. Pham required that his client pay a “deposit bond” of $1.278 million on a pledge that the company would gain millions of dollars in repair service business including $38 million in a deal with RetailNext, a global provider of analytics to brick-and-mortar retailers.
“Pham also arranged for an associate of his to pretend to be a RetailNext executive in negotiation meetings with [his client’s] CEO and Pham,” the federal indictment read.
In support of the scheme, Pham arranged the delivery to his client of about 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly required repairs. However, Pham covered up that the samples had been stolen.
Pham had nothing more than excuses whenever his client inquired about its money or demanded a refund.
Months before Dillon Bakke’s mother filed a federal lawsuit alleging that negligent treatment of her son in the Ramsey County jail led to his death, a jail nurse raised concerns about his care, documents obtained by the Star Tribune show.
The nurse said Bakke had “obvious signs of trauma and injury” while in the jail and “did not receive proper care,” according to an internal state Department of Corrections (DOC) email. The nurse asked the DOC to review documents and video of Bakke’s time in custody, according to the email obtained through a public records request.
Bakke’s mother, Teresa Schnell of St. Paul, sued Ramsey County and four correctional officers for wrongful death in August 2023, seeking monetary damages for alleged violations of Bakke’s constitutional rights. An amended complaint filed last month added alleged violations of federal disability law.
According to the lawsuit, Bakke, 37, was arrested on suspicion of drug possession on Aug. 7, 2022, after St. Paul police found him on the back porch of his mom’s house. A neighbor had reported him as a suspicious person.
When he was booked, the lawsuit says, Bakke had a visible forehead injury.
That night, he complained of pain and continued to yell in pain after a nurse checked his vitals, the lawsuit alleges. As his yelling continued, officers handcuffed and carried Bakke to a segregation cell after he told them he could not stand or walk, the lawsuit states. It said Bakke’s inmate file documented that he had hemophilia, a condition in which blood doesn’t clot normally, and included instructions on his prescribed medication for the condition.
The lawsuit says Bakke’s condition deteriorated and that he was taken to Regions Hospital after he was found unresponsive in his cell Aug. 9. At the hospital, medical professionals found cerebral hemorrhaging and brain injuries, it says.
The lawsuit alleges Bakke died due to his injuries Aug. 27.
The DOC email describes the nurse’s call in March 2023. The nurse — whose name was redacted and who said she no longer worked at the jail — said Ramsey County jail staff did not notify county medical staff of Bakke’s condition until he was found unresponsive in his cell.
“She believes that because the correctional staff did not notify medical, his care was delayed, and his health deteriorated,” the employee who took the call wrote in an email to colleagues, acknowledging a pending lawsuit.
The Inspections and Enforcement Unit reviewed the case and found two substantiated rule violations, according to DOC spokesperson Shannon Loehrke. One violation involved inmate well-being checks and another, clinical judgments made in the jail, according to a DOC complaint report. The report said the DOC reviewed the rule violations with the jail.
In a filing last week, attorneys for the county and the corrections officers involved denied that Bakke’s injuries were a result of their treatment of him and wrote that Bakke’s rights had not been violated. They said corrections officers were acting in the scope of their jobs.
The filing said Bakke answered “no” when asked upon booking whether he suffered from medical conditions or needed care, and that when jail staff moved him out of his cell because he was disturbing other inmates, he refused to stand or walk. On the night of Aug. 8, the filing said, Bakke was awake and alert and refused to speak to the jail nurse or staff.
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, whose office operates the jail, said Tuesday that the Sheriff’s Office did its own investigation after Bakke’s death and found he was examined by a nurse in his cell after booking.
“This allegation that the staff itself didn’t bring [this] to the attention of the nursing staff really is not founded in the facts,” Fletcher said. He said matters of who did what and when will be resolved through litigation.
Attorneys for both Bakke’s family and the defendants declined to comment for this story. Ramsey County did not respond to a request for comment.
The Ramsey County jail recently drew the DOC’s attention for potentially unsafe conditions.
Early last year, the DOC ordered the jail to reduce its population immediately from 492 beds to 324 after finding the jail had failed to comply with safety standards, finding “imminent risk of life-threatening harm” to those in jail.
The jail was allowed to return to full operations at a new capacity of 414 beds in November after it submitted an action plan to address the DOC’s concerns.
Last year, the county paid $3 million to settle a lawsuit from Miri Mozuch-Stafford, who alleged corrections officers assaulted her in the jail. Ramsey County denied liability in the settlement.
