A large portion of a house teetering on the edge of the Blue Earth River near the Rapidan Dam fell into the water late Tuesday, according to authorities.

“A portion of the house on the property closest to the Rapidan Dam has been undercut enough to have fallen into the river,” the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. “Blue Earth County Public Works, Emergency Management and Sheriff’s Office are monitoring for downstream impacts.”

The dam hasn’t produced electricity in a number of years after floods in 2019 and 2020 rendered it inoperable. The June deluge led to the second-largest flood recorded at the site. The dam has held since getting swamped earlier this week, with water flowing over and around the structure and relieving some of the pressure.

“We believe it’s intact and it will hold,” Blue Earth County Emergency Management Director Eric Weller told the Star Tribune early Tuesday. “In the coming days, we’ll have to get some engineers down to look at it.”

Derek Dorr thought the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe could lose millions in federal contracts and break the law if the tribe got into the marijuana business, and said he brought his concerns to tribal leaders and the U.S. State Department last fall.

Dorr was promptly fired as CEO of tribal-owned Makwa, which handles contracts with the State Department and other government agencies, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week.

“The timing of his discharge was not a coincidence — it was a reprisal,” the suit alleges. “Cannabis remains a prohibited substance under federal law, and Makwa is a company in the business of federal government contracting.”

Dorr is seeking potentially millions of dollars in damages and lost compensation.

A lawyer for Makwa, Molly Ryan, said the company denies the claims and will “vigorously defend the allegations of the lawsuit.”

Several Minnesota tribes have started growing or selling marijuana since the state legalized recreational cannabis last year. Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures (MLCV) is building a 50,000-square-foot cannabis growing facility near Grand Casino Mille Lacs in Onamia and has plans to build more in the future.

The tribe-owned company’s executive said this spring he sees a potentially $100 million opportunity in cannabis.

Tribes have sovereignty to set their own rules around cannabis, but they are still subject to federal law — as are states that have legalized marijuana. However, a lack of federal enforcement guidelines keeps the industry in legal “limbo,” lawmakers wrote earlier this year.

Dorr, who founded Makwa in 2019, said by the time he learned of the band’s cannabis plans, he believed MLCV “had already violated federal law, impacting Makwa’s [compliance] and federal contracts in the process,” according to the lawsuit. MLCV is the parent company of Makwa.

“For the majority of Makwa’s customer base, contracting with Makwa while MLCV was engaged in the cannabis industry would be out of the question,” the lawsuit says, since many of Makwa’s customers are involved in national security.

When Dorr spoke with an official at the State Department on Oct. 11, “the deputy director’s reaction to the possibility of Makwa’s proceeds supporting the development of a cannabis business was extremely negative,” according to the lawsuit.

Dorr was fired Oct. 26, and he declined a severance agreement, according to court filings. His 10-year contract allowed Makwa to fire him with or without cause.

Dorr later filed a complaint with a federal agency and sought a $12 million settlement the company rejected.

“Makwa has not engaged or invested in cannabis-related businesses,” Nicole Truso, an attorney for the company, wrote in a letter in January regarding the proposed settlement. “Mr. Dorr’s fixation on the legality of marijuana at a federal level is misplaced and nonsensical.”

The Small Business Administration’s Office of Inspector General has taken no action on Dorr’s complaint.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, legislators and developers gathered Tuesday on the rooftop of Wakpada Apartments in south Minneapolis to celebrate a new state law exempting the comprehensive plans of metro-area cities from environmental legal challenges.

The law states that the broad plans cities create to guide growth cannot be considered conduct that could lead to pollution or environmental destruction, as plans for specific projects may be. That means a six-year lawsuit that had repeatedly interrupted Minneapolis’ pro-density 2040 Plan is “functionally” dead, said Rep. Mike Howard, chair of the House Housing Committee. The plan made Minneapolis the first city in the nation to end single-family zoning.

“Without legislative action, this lawsuit was holding up the status quo (of exclusionary zoning,)” said Howard, DFL-Richfield. “Nothing is more dangerous to addressing our housing crisis than the status quo, because it’s the status quo that has got us into this mess. We will not build the homes that we need to meet this moment without ingenuity at all levels of government.”

Wakpada Apartments, where the gathering was held, was completed in 2022 by Hall Sweeney Properties, and includes 8% of units affordable at 60% area median income; that would not have been possible without the 2040 Plan, developer Sean Sweeney said.

The liberated zoning restrictions for the property, located at Minnehaha and East 46th Street, allowed him to build six stories of 126 units instead of four stories of 60 units. That difference balanced the project financially to allow for the inclusion of affordable apartments, Sweeney said.

“Without a doubt that being a developer in Minneapolis, especially now with the 2040 Plan, is an absolute dream,” Sweeney said.

The Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds and Smart Growth Minneapolis sued the city in 2018, arguing the 2040 Plan could pollute natural resources and usher gentrification and displacement, warranting a study to identify the environmental tradeoffs of densification. Nonstop injunctions, appeals and reversals since then injected chaos and uncertainty into development in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Supreme Court decided in 2022 that citizens were entitled to challenging municipal comprehensive plans under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act. But in May, the Court of Appeals threw out a prior ruling halting the 2040 Plan pending environmental review. The appeals court allowed Minneapolis to immediately resume approving stalled projects, but city officials feared it would not last without a law change.

Six days later, the Minnesota Legislature passed Rep. Sydney Jordan’s comprehensive plan bill in the chaotic final hour of the legislative session as part of a 1,400-page Omnibus Tax Bill.

“As a Minneapolis house delegation, all 11 of us were united and made this our no. 1 priority and stood strong to ensure that it was passed,” said Jordan, DFL-Minneapolis.

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs have petitioned the Supreme Court to reinstate the injunction against the 2040 Plan in part because of how it had been incorporated into the tax bill. A provision of the state constitution, adopted in 1857, states legislators may not roll bills on unrelated topics together in the interest of transparency.

The Attorney General’s Office has filed a motion to defend the constitutionality of the new law.

Frey said the city would continue to fight the lawsuit if needed.

“When we recognized that we had a long-term issue with exclusionary zoning that segregated both people and neighborhoods, we knew that we had a lot of work to do to be more inclusive,” he said. “We are seeing right now some of the lowest rent increases in the entire country. That’s in part due to the supply increase that we’ve seen … and of course that’s due to the 2040 Plan.”