Suburbs

Bella Abzug is taking over Maplewood's government!

Filed under: Suburbs

Minnesota's most dysfunctional suburb has not disappointed this election season. The city council primary campaign featured eight candidates vying for four slots on the November ballot. Incumbent Will Rossbach and newcomer John Nephew easily outdistanced their opponents, each garnering support from roughly a third of voters. Rebecca Cave, a member-in-good-standing of the city's current ruling troika, and ally Delray "Rocky" Rokke secured the final two ballot spots. They'll battle it out for two council spots in November.

But the real fun has occurred away from the polls. On September 4, Robert Schmidt, chair of the Maplewood Voters Coalition, filed a complaint with the state's Office of Administrative Hearings charging that Cave violated election laws by distributing misleading campaign materials. Cave's lawn signs stated that she was endorsed by "Maplewood Fire"--even though the fire department doesn't actually endorse individual candidates.

On September 14, an administrative law judge ruled that probable cause existed that Cave had indeed violated campaign laws. The matter will now proceed to a three-judge panel on Monday. Cave has since altered her signs, but Schmidt argues that the damage has already been done. "The courts will decide what punishment is appropriate if any," he says. "We can't rectify what has been done."

The high point of the Maplewood election season so far, however, has to be a mailing sent to Rossbach. It features a picture of Paul Wellstone on the front, along with this warning: "A Will Rossbach role model." The back of the postcard features a rogues gallery of liberal bogeymen, including Jesse Jackson, Janet Reno, Ted Kennedy--and Bella Abzug (who it should be noted has been dead for a decade)!

It's unclear whether the mailing was sent out to other residents, but Rossbach notes that it had a bulk mailing stamp on it. "It just seems like a very desperate type of move," he says. "They apparently will say and do anything to try and keep me from getting reelected."

(Postcard cribbed from What's Left of Maplewood)

Posted by Paul Demko at September 25, 2007 1:16 PM | Comments (2)

 

Maplewood wins first round of legal battle

Filed under: Suburbs

After Sherrie Le was fired as Maplewood's human resources director last August, she filed three lawsuits against the suburb. Yesterday the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled against Le in one of the cases. The three-judge panel determined that Le was an "at will" employee and therefore could be terminated for pretty much any reason. The ruling essentially invalidates two of the lawsuits.

Le is one of at least a dozen top employees who have resigned, been fired, or had their jobs eliminated since a new ruling troika took over the city council last year. (See my CP cover story on the subject for more details.

Le's suit in Ramsey County District Court remains alive. That complaint charges that Maplewood's actions violated labor laws and state whistleblower protections. "That's our strongest case," says Gregg Corwin, Le's attorney. That case is slated for trial in October.

Posted by Paul Demko at August 15, 2007 4:23 PM | Comments (0)

 

Meth Mom, Meet the Honorable Judge Social Worker

Filed under: Suburbs

Courts aren't the place to problem-solve

Dakota County is soon to open a special court for parents with meth addictions. Unlike most child protection courts, this one would fast-track cases where the grownups need treatment in an effort to shorten the amount of time children spend in foster care. The Pioneer Press reports that a state grant will assist this new "helping court" in placing parents in treatment and ensuring that a judge rides herd on the bureaucracy that sometimes makes this difficult.

It's a laudable effort, but far from the real reform that would truly make the system "child-focused," as all of the court system's mission statements vow.

That system is expected to provide more rewards and supervision for parents than traditional child-protection cases, where hearings are held every 90 days. It also allows the courts to impose intermediate sanctions, such as electronic home monitoring, when an offender begins to slip up.

"Obviously, there's an incentive to get their kids back, but it's going to be a pretty rigorous program," said Judge Ed Lynch, who will preside over the cases. "It will be interesting to see how many (parents) are willing to make that commitment."

Unfortunately, the story goes on to suggest at some length that the meth addict's commitment to sobriety is the largest obstacle to family reunification. A City Pages investigation in December revealed that in fact Minnesota children are losing their parents in unprecedented numbers.

In 2001, Minnesota enacted a law designed to reduce the length of time that kids who land in the system have to spend in legal limbo, buffeted by the periodic and wrenching upheaval of moving from one home to another without any assurance as to when, or if, they might return home. The new rules essentially require courts to hurry up and determine—within 6 months or 12, depending mainly on the child's age—whether children should be taken from a home permanently.

The phase-in of this new, more aggressive child protection timeline has coincided with the arrival of methamphetamine in rural and suburban Minnesota, which in turn has sparked an unprecedented increase in the number of child protection cases. Court officials say fully half the cases they see in Anoka now involve meth—and add that there are no effective treatment programs in Minnesota where caseworkers can send users. Even if everyone who needed treatment got it, Askew and the other judges assigned to Anoka's child protection cases know from hard experience that six months isn't enough time to assess whether an addicted parent is getting any sort of toehold on sobriety.

To date there has been no official evaluation of the effect of the new law, but statistics provided by state court analysts show that the number of cases where parental rights are terminated is rising. In Anoka, the number of cases has tripled since the new timeline was adopted; the number of children affected has risen even higher. In the vast majority of Anoka County cases involving meth, children now lose their parents for good.

Dakota County's initiative is a good baby step, but those problem-solving judges are going to find that there is a greater chance they'll find gold under the Mall of America than an appropriate treatment placement for each parent appearing before them. Minnesota lacks meth-specific programs, money to send users to the overextended not-quite-right programs that do exist, and the political will to do anything about it. The child protection system can't move much faster if addicts can't get treatment beds and if their health insurance providers aren't willing to pay for it.

What if we took this state money funding this well-intentioned effort and instead put it toward creating treatment centers where entire families could live, together, for the duration of Mom and Dad's treatment? That would be a child-focused system.

Posted by Beth Hawkins at April 13, 2006 4:14 PM | Comments (2)

 

Whites only in Edina

Filed under: Suburbs

Next month The New Press will publish James W. Loewen's book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. It's an eye-opening account of how hundreds of towns across the country systematically removed blacks and other minorities--often through violent means--during the first half of the 20th century.

What's particularly striking is that the overwhelming majority of these cleansed municipalities were not in the Jim Crow South, but rather spread across the northern half of the country. "While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North (although there were gestures in that direction), they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen writes in the introduction.

One of the municipalities singled out for particular attention by Loewen is Edina, Minnesota. He points out that prior to the establishment of Edina just after World War I there were quite a few blacks living in what was then known as Richfield Township. This was largely owing to the fact that there was a Quaker village in the area that openly embraced minorities.

Loewen relies primarily on a history of the town written by Deborah Morse-Kahn. Here's the chief passage dealing with Edina:

Then, just after World War I, Samuel Thorpe developed "the elegant Edina Country Club residential district," as Morse-Kahn correctly describes it, "with restrictive deed covenants in place." Now Edina's African American community "would feel estranged. Thorpe Brothers' building restrictions guaranteed to any buyer, in an era when municipal zoning was nonexistent, that their property would be 'safe' from devaluating circumstances, stating that blacks were explicitly ineligible to buy in the district." According to Joyce Repya, associate planner for Edina, deeds carried various restrictions such as "No fuel storage tanks above ground," "No shedding poplars, box elders, or other objectionable trees," and most important, the racial exclusionary clause. ... And unlike all other restrictions, which phased out in 1964, the restriction to "the white or Caucasian race" continued in force forever. "By the late 1930s," in Morse-Kahn's words, "virtually all of Edina's black families had moved into Minneapolis and an historic era had ended for the village." At that point Morse-Kahn goes on, anti-Semitism, which had been virtually unheard-of in Edina before the First World War became a haunting hallmark of Edina life. As late as the end of the 1950s, potential buyers known to be Jewish were often openly turned away by realtors and requested to look for residential property elsewhere."

Loewen does note later in the book, however, that Edina no longer remains all white, as do many of the sundown towns that he chronicles. According to the 2000 census, there were 546 African Americans living in the wealthy suburb, out of a total population of 47,425.

Posted by Paul Demko at August 31, 2005 3:53 PM | Comments (2)

 

Bloomington to smokers: No dice

Filed under: Suburbs

But trickle-down effects of ban emerging

Last night, the Bloomington city council voted 6-1 to uphold the first municipal smoking ban in the metro. The vote was somewhat surprising, given the full-court press bar owners have put on the council and the Hennepin County board in recent weeks. More to the point, the vote signaled to bar owners that there likely won't be any relief soon from the significant downturn in business.

The thought that was that Bloomington would be a weathervane for what Hennepin County might do, now that the comissioners recently voted to study the economic impact of the ban. And it's even more unclear whether Minneapolis will reconsider its ban.

But apparently the Bloomington council, as reported in today's Star Tribune, found the results of its own study less than compelling. Liquor sales are most certainly down across the board (some 24 percent in some venues), but food and lodging revenues are up, apparently.

Council member Steve Elkin, noting that "liquor, smoking and gambling" were on the decline, didn't see that as a public policy issue, according to the Strib.

Then again, one could argue that whether a private business allows its customers to smoke might not be a public policy issue either.

At any rate, some of the trickle-down economics of the ban are becoming evident. Many proponents of the various bans in Bloomington, Minneapolis, and Hennepin and Ramsey counties keep insisting that a decline in revenues is temporary, and that businesses will recover in time. Most bar owners disagree, saying that any uptick will come too late.

One area that's hard hit since the ban is charitable gaming, or pulltab business. Most of the booths in local bars earmark revenue for local community use, such as putting money toward parks or youth athletic programs. According to the state's Gambling Control Board, charitable gaming receipts in Ramsey County, where most traditional bars are exempted from the ban, are down in April and May this year (the first two months of the ban) from last by 7.3 percent. Last spring, revenues were $23.7 million, compared to $21.9 million this year.

Hennepin County, which has a total ban in all bars and restaurants (and, more significantly, "private clubs" like the American Legion and VFW outposts), notched a decline of $6.7 million, from $33.8 million to $27 million--a loss of more than 20 percent. In Minneapolis, the decline is closer to 24 percent, and Hennepin County stands to lose some $1.6 million in annual tax revenue due to the gambling losses.

And, word has it around town that any number of businesses--from carbonated beverage dealers to video game operators to ventilation system peddlers--have seen dips in business that likely won't ever come back up. But when Hennepin County gets around to releasing the results from its study later this fall, those losses won't be reflected.

Posted by G.R. Anderson Jr. at August 16, 2005 7:25 PM | Comments (3)