Star Tribune
Lawsuit asks judge to appoint special master to oversee city of Minneapolis violence prevention office
In a new civil filing, a Minneapolis attorney is asking a Hennepin County judge to appoint a special master to oversee payments from a city office to violence prevention groups in order to ensure taxpayer funds are going through proper accounting practices.
Zachary Coppola, a Minneapolis resident, filed a lawsuit last November alleging the city’s Neighborhood Safety department , formerly called the Office of Violence Prevention, used an illegal procurement process to arbitrarily select recipients for millions of dollars using substandard accounting methods.
“If they are going to spend tens of millions of dollars on these programs, they can spend a small amount more to ensure that these contracts are properly procured and properly administered according to basic accounting principles,” said Dean Thomson, an attorney representing Coppola. “We are not against alternative violence prevention programs. We’re only against their improper administration in which public funds are being spent without any accountability.”
In court documents, the city has denied the allegations of improper accounting. The city would not comment on the pending litigation, but in a statement, Minneapolis Commissioner of Community Safety Toddrick Barnette said making sure the Neighborhood Safety Department is “sustainable, accountable and expanding its capacity” has been his top priority since being sworn in last year.
“It is a critical part of the Office of Community Safety’s mission to provide coordinated, comprehensive, and equitable safety services to all residents and visitors,” said Barnette, adding that he is overseeing a restructure of the department, which includes bringing in Director of Administration “to assist with ensuring compliance and accountability.”
Minneapolis started Neighborhood Safety in 2018 to address violence through a public health lens. The office currently has a $23 million budget, up from $2.7 million in 2020, and is a key part of the city’s strategy to reduce violent crime.
The safety office oversees the Violence Prevention Fund and Gang Violence Initiative — grant programs funded in part by a pandemic stimulus package passed by Congress in 2021. Each program has paid out millions of dollars since 2019 to nonprofit organizations and private contractors aligned with the community safety-driven mission. The final grant recipients are chosen by the commissioner of the Minneapolis Office of Public Safety, the position now held by Barnette.
The lawsuit says the evaluation process is so flawed that it falls short of “the most basic competitive bidding or proposal evaluation process,” and is therefore illegal.
The motion filed Tuesday alleges the city violated federal law by making payments through the Gang Violence Initiative to contractors for “personnel wages,” though the contractors couldn’t provide invoices showing the amount paid was accurate.
In one invoice, attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit, a contractor billed the city for more than $350,000 over two months in personnel wages without listing the names of the employees or specific dates of work performed — identifying them only as “violence interrupter” and a number–and without evidence of actual payment.
“Because the City either intentionally or ineptly failed, and continues to fail, to request proper support from its contractors, and because the City continued, and continues, to pay them without proper support, the Court should appoint a special master to ensure the City properly administers payments under its violence prevention programs before payments are made to contractors,” the motion says.
Coppola said he believes in the value of community-based alternatives to traditional policing, but he doesn’t think the city has provided sufficient oversight to ensure meaningful impact. “To me this is a key piece of the future,” he said in an interview. “Citizens have demanded it, and citizens have the right to know that what they want is actually happening.”
Coppola said he became concerned about the city’s procurement practices after reading of fraud allegations against Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit facing dozens of federal charges for improperly paying out hundreds of millions of dollars. While still in law school at the University of Minnesota, Coppola filed a series of requests seeking access to public records. City officials initially denied him records that they claimed weren’t public and later “resorted to silence when called out on those misrepresentations,” according to the suit. In some cases, the city unilaterally closed his data requests after producing only some of the documentation required under law.
The motion filed this week says the city produced some of this information during the discovery process to Coppola and his lawyers under an agreement for a protective order. But when the lawyers received the documents, none were marked confidential, and the city confirmed the documents are considered public data.
“Those unnecessary actions evidence the extraordinary measures the City has taken to prevent Plaintiff and the public from obtaining public data about its violence prevention programs,” said the court motion.
Minnesota National Guard personnel in active duty status still have to report to work to maintain military operations, but part-time members and their units will not conduct previously scheduled training, drills or exercises during the shutdown.
More than 300 corrections officers at four federal prisons across Minnesota will be working without pay. Minnesota’s four federal district court offices would also operate as usual.
While most government benefits will continue, things like benefit verification letters, updates to earnings records and replacement of Medicare cards will have to wait until the government reopens.
The state’s one national park — Voyageurs in northern Minnesota — along with several national monuments and other sites could temporarily lose staff, but closures are decided on a case-by-case basis. The same applies to national forests, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, as well as other federal lands, including national wildlife refuges.
About a year ago, Congress narrowly averted a shutdown during a spending standoff in the House. The last time government spending lapsed and there was a partial shutdown was in December 2018 over disagreements about funding Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico.
That partial shutdown last 34 days, the longest on record, but it didn’t affect the entire government because Congress had already passed some spending bills.
Star Tribune
Trump’s words of opposition stop a bipartisan budget deal in its tracks with Musk’s help
“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he wrote. He also called it ‘’one of the worst bills ever written.‘’
Sometimes Musk amplified false claims, such as the idea that the legislation included $3 billion for a new football stadium in Washington. In reality, the legislation would transfer ownership of the land from the federal government to the city, paving the way for eventual development.
Musk appeared emboldened by the experience.
‘‘The voice of the people was heard,‘’ Musk wrote. ‘’This was a good day for America.”
Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said the fallout would be Republicans’ fault.
‘‘You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow,” he wrote on X.
A man arrested in Dakota County who exhibited “seizure-like symptoms” during jail intake died days later, according to court records and the Sheriff’s Office.
Kingsley Fifi Bimpong, 50, of Cottage Grove, was taken to the jail in Hastings on Nov. 19 on suspicision of drunken driving in Eagan, a search warrant affidavit made public Wednesday disclosed.
Sheriff Joe Leko said Thursday that Bimpong “was incoherent, and his condition deteriorated. … We rushed him to the hospital as soon as we could see that it wasn’t good.”
Leko suggested that Bimpong might have actually been affected more by whatever medical difficulty he was having at the time, rather than being intoxicated.
The sheriff said Bimpong died a few days later, and “we’re waiting on the medical examiner’s report” for a determination of what led to the death.
An affidavit was filed by Washington County Sheriff’s Office seeking permission to collect Bimpong’s medical records that might shed light on his death. The neighboring Sheriff’s Office is heading the investigation in order to avoid a conflict of interest, Leko said.
According to the affidavit:
At the jail, Bimpong was unable to complete the booking process and “was eventually noticed by correction officers as having seizure-like symptoms while in the intake waiting area.”
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