Star Tribune
Minneapolis will end its partnership with the group that puts on Open Streets
The future of Open Streets in Minneapolis is in question, after the city ended its partnership with the nonprofit that has orchestrated the pop-up festivals.
Open Streets has been running since 2011, closing streets to cars to create small festivals in Minneapolis neighborhoods. Sunday saw an Open Streets event draw thousands of people to the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood for food, music, vendors, a dunk tank and a play structure in the middle of Cedar Avenue.
“I love things like this — you walk around, do whatever you want,” said University of Minnesota graduate student MaryKate Wolker, who is from Kansas City. “It’s stuff like this where I could envision a future here, instead of returning home.”
Jose Zayas Caban, executive director of the advocacy group Our Streets, which has planned the festivals with the city since 2018, said the future of Open Streets events is in doubt without the city’s help.
The Department of Public Works has helped with the infrastructure of the program — closing streets, working with police and emergency medical responders to staff the festivals, working on food permits with vendors and facilitating trash pick-up.
Without the city as a partner, he said, it’s hard to see how Open Streets could go on.
In a statement, city spokesperson Sarah McKenzie said public works would be ending its partnership with Our Streets after two more events scheduled for 2023.
“By mutual agreement, the city and Our Streets will not be extending the current contract for Open Streets events for 2024,” McKenzie’s statement read.
“That’s 1,000% not true. We haven’t even met with them,” Zayas Caban said. “We have not yet had a single discussion about 2024.”
McKenzie reiterated the statement when the Star Tribune told her Zayas Caban had not known the partnership would end.
Our Streets did request a budget from the city to make the festivals happen, Zayas Caban said. He asked Public Works to consider $841,000 to cover his group’s expenses for five events — primarily the time it takes his staff to reach out to neighborhood businesses and community leaders to draw local vendors and people to events.
“Imagine having a wedding, and asking the caterers to do the food for free,” Zayas Caban said. “We need a different kind of partnership with the city to make [Open Streets] more sustainable.”
Zayas Caban noted the city has seemed more open to proposals to spend on activating Nicollet Mall. One city task force recommended spending $750,000 in 2024 on events to make the downtown street livelier.
“We specifically go into communities that are marginalized,” he said of Open Streets events, in contrast to the city’s central business district.
Zayas Caban said he had yet to hear back from city officials about his request for funds when he learned the city would end its partnership with Our Streets. He said he first learned the partnership was in question from a newsletter sent by Ward 2 City Council Member Robin Wonsley on Friday.
City officials hope Open Streets will continue, McKenzie’s statement read.
But she said Public Works plans to shift its focus to events with a more explicit emphasis on walking, biking and public transit.
“I honestly think he used to understand how tariffs work,” Cuban said. “Back in the 90s and early 2000s, he was a little bit coherent when he talked about trade policy and he actually made a little bit of sense. But I don’t know what happened to him.”
Speaking in Pittsburgh on Thursday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, pushed back against the Harris campaign’s claims that tariffs would hurt the economy. Vance described the tariffs as a way of discouraging imports and boosting American manufacturing.
“If you are a business, and you rely on foreign slave labor at $3 a day, the only way to rebuild American manufacturing is to say, if you want to bring that product made by slave labor back into the United States of America, you’re going to pay a big fat tariff before you get it back into our country,” Vance said.
Back in Wisconsin, Amara Marshell, freshman at UW-La Crosse, said she showed up to support Harris because she is concerned about what a second Trump presidency could mean for reproductive rights. Like her friend, sophomore Avery Black, Marshell is also excited about the possibility of electing the nation’s first female president.
“Women deserve to have power over their own bodies,” Marshell said. “We shouldn’t have to not be able to get an abortion just because of a president.”
Mary Holman, an 80-year-old retiree from Fort Atkinson, Wis., said she hasn’t been to a rally since former President Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008. But Holman said she decided to get off the sidelines this cycle because she views the election as a fight to preserve democracy.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources will auction off state lands in popular northern counties next month.
The public land — in Aitkin, Cook, Itasca, and St. Louis counties — will go up for sale during the Department of Natural Resource’s annual online public land sale from Nov. 7 to 21.
“These rural and lakeshore properties may appeal to adjacent landowners or offer recreational opportunities such as space for a small cabin or camping,” the DNR said in a statement.
Properties will be available for bidding Nov. 7 through Nov. 21.
This all can trim for print: The properties include:
40 acres in Aitkin County, with a minimum bid of $85,000
44 acres in Cook County, minimum bid $138,000
1.9 acres in Itasca County, minimum bid $114,000
Minneapolis city officials say razor wire, concrete barriers and fencing will be removed from around the former Third Precinct police station – which was set ablaze by protesters after George Floyd’s police killing – in the next three weeks. The burned-out vestibule will be removed within three months with construction fencing to be erected closer to the building.
This week, Minneapolis City Council members have expressed frustration that four years after the protests culminated in a fire at the police station, the charred building still stands and has become a “prop” some conservatives use to rail against city leadership. Most recently, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance made a stop outside the building and criticized Gov. Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 riots.
On Thursday, the council voted 8-3 to approve a resolution calling for “immediate cleanup, remediation, and beautification of the 3000 Minnehaha site including but not limited to the removal of fencing, jersey barriers, barbed wire, and all other exterior blight.”
Council Member Robin Wonsley said the city needs to acknowledge that many police officers stationed in the Third Precinct “waged racist and violent actions” against residents for decades.
Council Member Aurin Chowdhury said the council wants the building cleaned up and beautified “immediately.”
“We cannot allow for this corner to be a backdrop for those who wish to manipulate the trauma of our city for political gain,” Chowdhury said.
Council Member Katie Cashman said the council shouldn’t be divided by “right-wing figures posing in front of the Third Precinct and pandering to conservative interests.”
“It’s really important for us to stay united in our goal, to achieve rehabilitation of this site in a way that advances racial healing and acknowledgement of the past trauma in this community, and to not let those figures divide us here,” she said.
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