Star Tribune
Two new Community OutPosts to open in St. Cloud
ST. CLOUD — Seven years ago, a crime-ridden house on the city’s south side was torn down and replaced by a new Community OutPost, bringing with it a public safety presence, after-school youth services and adult educational programs.
That outpost, nicknamed the COP House, has made the neighborhood safer and healthier, according to a survey of residents and crime data. And now it’s poised to become the model for two new outposts on the city’s east side.
This summer, the city is renovating a park building on the southeast side using federal grants. And the Greater St. Cloud Public Safety Foundation, which owns the first outpost, is planning to open an outpost in a church on E. St. Germain Street by early next year.
“The first one we had was so successful,” said St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis. “We’ve talked about replicating it in all neighborhoods.”
St. Cloud’s southside Community OutPost is the first of its kind in the state. The foundation purchased the former house at the site because it was the epicenter of crime in the neighborhood, with nearly 100 police calls in the five years before it was torn down.
The outpost is modeled after a program in Racine, Wis., which opened its first COP House in 1993 to deter violent crime. A federal grant paid for police officers to staff St. Cloud’s outpost until 2018, when the city added three officer positions to the budget to continue programming.
“It’s not all focused on the police part, although the police are part of the engagement in those neighborhoods,” Kleis said. “But it goes beyond that to education, to health and all kinds of other things.”
On any given afternoon, officers and volunteers can be seen playing basketball or soccer with neighborhood kids, or firing up a grill. Inside, county human services providers and public health nurses meet with residents, and community groups host sewing classes and adult English lessons.
The programming is tailored to the neighborhood, which has a number of low-income residents and immigrants, said Sonja Gidlow, former executive director of the foundation who now serves on its board.
“So instead of expecting people to find those resources, it really brings the resources to them,” she said.
Momentum for additional outposts started two years ago when the city received a $475,000 federal grant to bring a second COP House to the east side.
The city is renovating a building at Reach-Up Park that houses Promise Neighborhood, a nonprofit providing academic programs for youth and resources for adults. Promise Neighborhood will remain in the building, and new service providers will rent space, too, Kleis said.
The public safety foundation outpost will occupy rented space at Salem Lutheran Church, just east of the Mississippi River.
“Some of that area is low-income. It’s a food desert. And lots of folks in that neighborhood use the emergency room for their medical care, so there are some medical concerns that are not being addressed appropriately or efficiently,” Gidlow said.
Plans call for that outpost to house a medical clinic with the help of the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, which have been struggling to find space for nursing students to complete their clinical requirements, Gidlow said.
Also planning to join the outpost will be St. Cloud police’s co-responder team, which is a police officer and mental health professional who respond to behavioral health-related calls.
“The possibilities are absolutely endless,” said Gidlow, who praised the business leaders, community organizations, education institutions and other other community members who have worked together to make the outposts possible.
“What I think is so remarkable about the greater St. Cloud area is our community is large enough to have some really fabulous resources,” she said. “But we’re small enough to get the decisionmakers in one room. That’s how we can make things happen.”
Star Tribune
A clever wolf repeatedly snuck into a Minnesota ranch. Biologists with the Voyageurs Wolf Project figured out its MO.
Johnson’s ranch sits in the densest part of the state’s wolf territory, and is surrounded on all sides by five active packs south of Voyageurs National Park. At 1,600 acres with 750 head of cattle, it’s not just the biggest ranch in wolf territory, but one of the trickiest terrains. It’s hilly, and has marshy land on one of its borders. Ninemile Creek and the Black Duck River run through it.
If a fence can keep wolves out here, Gable said, it can keep them out pretty much anywhere.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been trying out similar fences over the last four years. The fences built have been much smaller — enclosing 40 acres or less. They work more as pens, where cows can give birth in peace and then the calves can rotate out when they’re older and less vulnerable. The state reports no wolves have made it inside the six fences that have been installed.
Fences are no small investment, however. Johnson’s 7.5-mile fence cost roughly $70,000 in materials, plus hundreds of man-hours provided by Gable, his research partner, Austin Homkes, Johnson and the USDA to install it. If they had to contract out the installation work, the fence would have cost several hundred thousand, Gable said.
Rancher Wes Johnson drives his truck past some of his red angus cattle. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
But shooting problem wolves is expensive, too.
Every spring Johnson would lose a handful of calves to wolves soon after they were born. The public has to pay to reimburse ranchers for any wolf-killed livestock, and it pays federal trappers to hunt problem wolves. In Johnson’s case, the trappers were called in after each incident to kill up to a dozen wolves in the area.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.” Police have not confirmed that assertion.
Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he works as a host, the statement said.
The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. The person who sent the memo to the transition team did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017 encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.
The detailed, four-page memo about the incident has set off debate among senior Trump transition officials, but so far Trump has stood behind Hegseth. Spokesman Steven Cheung earlier this week said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
The documents from Hegseth’s attorney and the memo to the transition team from someone who said she is a friend of the woman and was “present and involved” in the case tell drastically different stories about what happened seven years ago at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa – although both sides agree that Hegseth had a sexual encounter with a woman there.
Hegseth, whose second wife had filed for divorce the previous month, had traveled to Monterey to speak to a California Federation of Republican Women conference. Afterward, according to his lawyer, he went to the hotel bar with a group of attendees.
The Gophers women’s hockey team contained longtime WCHA rival Minnesota Duluth, winning 3-2 Saturday afternoon to sweep a series at Amsoil Arena. The No. 3 Gophers haven’t lost to the No. 4 Bulldogs since the NCAA regional final in mid-March 2022.
Peyton Hemp, Gracie Graham and Emma Connor scored for the Gophers (10-3-1, 6-3-1 WCHA), with Abbey Murphy getting two assists. UMD’s Kamdyn Davis and Nina Jobst-Smith scored for the Bulldogs (6-55-1, 5-4-1 WCHA).
Gophers freshman goalie Hannah Clark had 31 saves; UMD’s Eve Gascon had 35.
UMD freshman defender Davis scored her first career goal off a backhanded pass from sophomore winger Grace Sadura. Davis skated in from Clark’s left side and lofted it to the right corner in the first five minutes of the opening period. Freshman defender Graham whipped the puck past Gascon midway through the period to tie the game. Peyton Hemp scored a power-play goal in the final two minutes of the first period, poking the puck in low on a rebound of a shot by Nelli Laitinen. The Gophers closed the period with a 2-1 advantage.
UMD’s Sadura left the game near the end of the second period after taking a major misconduct penalty for making contact with an opponent’s head. The Bulldogs were able to kill the penalty to close the period.
Gophers junior winger Connor scored midway through the final period, putting a rebound past Gascon. The Bulldogs had a 5-3 power-play advantage when Jobst-Smith sent the puck sailing high past Clark in the final five minutes of play. UMD pulled Gascon in the final minute but wasn’t able to tie the game.
The Gophers eased past the Bulldogs 4-1 in Friday’s opener, helped by two goals by Ella Huber, one shorthanded, the other an empty-netter, and two assists by Natalie Mlynkova. UMD’s Gascon had 48 saves, tying a personal best.
The Gophers host No. 8 St. Cloud State for a home-and-home series next weekend. The Bulldogs host unranked Bemidji State.
Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings
How do you make a portrait of a child who isn’t there? Photographer Lou Bopp found a way, but it wasn’t easy.
A clever wolf repeatedly snuck into a Minnesota ranch. Biologists with the Voyageurs Wolf Project figured out its MO.
Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings
How do you make a portrait of a child who isn’t there? Photographer Lou Bopp found a way, but it wasn’t easy.