COVID-19 death in a state institution. KSTP’s Josh Skluzacek reports: “A patient at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) in Moose Lake died on Friday from COVID-19. … The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) said the patient’s death was the third COVID-related death at MSOP facilities. … ‘We mourn his passing and extend our deepest sympathy to those who loved him and called him friend,’ DHS Commissioner Jodi Harpstead said. ‘The toll the pandemic continues to take in human lives is tragic.’”
Usually an alibi gets you out of trouble … WCCO reports: “Alibi Drinkery, the Lakeville bar that’s repeatedly defied Gov. Tim Walz’s executive order, most recently on New Year’s Eve, was vandalized overnight, covered in graffiti. … Images taken Sunday show the bar’s windows and walls marked with spray-painted messages against the bar, President Donald Trump and fascism. Michael Padden, the attorney representing the bar’s ownership, said that there is an active police investigation.”
Bridge out. KARE’s John Croman reports: “If you’re one of the thousands of people who cross the Mississippi River everyday using the Third Avenue Bridge, get ready for two years of detours. … The historic span is being closed to traffic beginning Monday, Jan. 4, as part of MnDOT’s $130 million renovation project – an effort to make it safer and easier to use for all kinds of traffic. … ‘We know it’s an inconvenience to have that bridge closed for as long as it’s going to be closed, but we do need to take care of it,’ David Aeikens of MnDOT told KARE.”
Monika Bauerlein remembers City Pages. In Mother Jones, she writes: “The newspaper where I learned not to take no for an answer died quietly, a week before the election. The cover story was on hard times in the restaurant industry; the illustration, in classic alt-weekly fashion, was a fork bent so that it raised a middle digit. The piece included the line ‘You have to adapt or die. Sometimes you adapt and die.’ … And with that, City Pages in Minneapolis–St.Paul joined the nearly 2,000 papers that have gone dark around the nation, from the Sudan Beacon News in Texas to the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado. The last time someone ran the numbers, in 2018, one in five of America’s newspapers had been shuttered, but the true devastation is likely much greater.”
In other news…
Sellers’ market: “Real estate market keeps buzzing into slowdown season” [MPR]
Yikes: “Lawsuit: Fitness club owner in Annandale used secret camera to view woman undressing” [Star Tribune]
Have you herd? “Minnesota’s bison herd expands in Olmsted County” [Mankato Free Press]
Groovy: “The Electric Fetus Shares Top-Selling Vinyl and CDs of 2020” [Mpls.St.Paul]
Today on MinnPost
- Joe Biden was part of an administration that all but ended the possibility of mining near the Boundary Waters. Now that Biden’s coming back in power, he’s bringing back some old officials, which could be bad news for mine supporters.
- New clinic aims to ease transition for people seeking mental health and addiction treatment
- It took a thirty-year effort to create a memorial to the miners of Minnesota’s Iron Range.
- It’s an election year in Minneapolis. Here’s the first of a series of city-council candidate profiles, this one on Chris Parsons running in Ward 10.
- Eric Black: “Former defense secretaries state: There’s no military role in election disputes”
- Community Voices commentary by George Beck: “What do Minnesotans want from the 2021 Legislature?”
City Pages, during the era of Steve Perry, Monika Bauerlein and Jennifer Vogel, did some of the best investigative journalism in the Twin Cities.
Among those often excellent stories, one of the most remarkable was “Fawlty Towers,” a probe into George Sherman and Richard Brustad’s extremely questionable acquisition of the 1300 unit Riverside Plaza complex (formerly Cedar Square West) and the consequences for the residents. The City of Minneapolis and Sherman actually tried to bully City Pages into retracting the entire article–proving that the substantial piece had really hit home–but there was nothing significantly erroneous in the article, and their attempt at censorship failed because City Pages stood its ground.
Another outstanding article was ‘White Like Me,” an expose of white Minneapolis DFL politicians taking over the annual meeting of the local NAACP in order to put their own man (from the Minneapolis Fire Department) into the driver’s seat and get rid of the existing chapter president who was raising discrimination issues about the school district and had also begun to question the Holman project on the North Side that had been hypocritically presented as an anti-discrimination effort rather than the urban redevelopment it was (and in which, by the way, Brustad was also a key player).
I salute you, Monika, wherever you are–and also Steve Perry, Jennifer Vogel and the others from those days. I wish you were here.