Star Tribune
New Prague will get new post office building
Dennis Dvorak has penned six editorials in the New Prague Times about the city’s need for an improved post office over the last 15 years, citing the current building’s cramped conditions, inconvenient drop-off mailbox location and lack of parking, especially for people with disabilities.
“I’ve just taken this as my issue,” he said, adding that the building has also closed multiple times in that period to deal with asbestos. “We deserve better.”
This week, there was good news for Dvorak and others — including U.S. Rep. Angie Craig — who have been pushing for a new post office in the small city south of the Twin Cities. The United States Postal Service said it will either build a new post office on another New Prague site or look for an existing building that’s more suitable than the current facility.
USPS is proposing a new location due to “a space deficiency” at its longtime location, a USPS news release said.
Officials are seeking a building within two miles that has 5,200 square feet and parking for at least 24 people, and taking comments on the proposed relocation for 45 days ending April 14, 2024.
“I can’t tell you what a huge development this is for the city of New Prague,” said Craig, who has worked to bring attention to the building’s deficiencies since 2019.
Craig said she held a listening session in 2022 in New Prague where officials and residents told her about the post office’s problems, adding that “this location has been just saddled and riddled with issues.”
The post office has no parking lot for the public or for people with disabilities. There’s street parking, but the spots designated “handicapped” are down the street instead of in front of the building. The drop-off mailbox is in an actual parking spot – and drivers have to reach across the passenger side of their vehicle to put mail in the mailbox.
The project’s estimated completion date is spring 2026, Craig said, and local residents will receive a post card about USPS’s plans.
Craig has also advocated for the USPS to improve mail service amid “persistent mail delays” across the south metro. In January, the inspection arm of the United States Postal Service said it will investigate delivery delays and other issues across the entire Minnesota and North Dakota postal district.
“I’m just overly excited,” said New Prague Mayor Duane Jirik. “It’s been a two-and-a-half year process.”
The post office has been in its current location for more than 100 years, Jirik said. It’s leased from an out-of-state company called American Postal Infrastructure.
Jirik said it’s likely they will have to build a new facility because finding a building in town that fits the bill will be hard: “I don’t think we have something big enough for them,” he said.
Scott County Commissioner Barb Brekke Weckman said the post office announcement is a testament to the collaboration and perseverance of Craig, Jirik and residents.
“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.
