Star Tribune
Moose Lake votes to disband police force, contract with county
DULUTH — Moose Lake is the latest Minnesota city to go without a police department, after a Wednesday City Council vote to contract with the county for law enforcement.
Mayor Ted Shaw was one of the two dissenting votes.
He’ll work to make a smooth transition, he said, “but I am disappointed.”
A contract with the Carlton County Sheriff’s Office is expected to include four deputies who will work out of Moose Lake. It is a cheaper option that covers more shifts, in lieu of a three-person police force. The City Council chose to reduce the size of a 5-person force last fall to be able to fund the department, opting against replacing two of the officers who had resigned. Two others resigned in January, leaving one on the force.
Moose Lake, 40 minutes southwest of Duluth, is one of many smaller cities struggling to keep up with public safety demands amid increasing costs and a shortage of officers throughout the state.
The entire police force resigned in Goodhue, Minn., in August. Thirty-five municipal police departments throughout the state have dissolved since 2016, according to records kept by the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training. About 400 remain.
Public safety would have made up a major portion of Moose Lake’s $2.8 million 2024 budget — about $900,000 for a five-person force, said Ellissa Owens, its city administrator.
Nearly 90% of property tax proceeds alone would have gone to the police department after a 28% cost increase this year due to police health insurance changes, she said, forcing a reliance on local government aid to pay for other city departments.
The city is unusual in that it’s home to the prisoners of the Minnesota Correctional Facility and residents of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program. Together, they make up about half of the city’s population. Between those facilities and others that are tax-exempt, only 30% of city land is taxable, Owens said, keeping property tax proceeds low and contributing to budget woes.
Shaw said he was struck by the number of recently closed departments.
“That tells you there is a real problem with inflation and budget and state supports,” he said. “Something isn’t right.”
“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.
