While the city of Minneapolis moves forward with plans for a public works facility at the Roof Depot site in the East Phillips neighborhood, advocates who have opposed the plan say they are still fighting.
The city on June 30 approved a resolution to move forward with the development.
The proposed site would be a consolidation of city public works facilities that would include a parking garage and fuel station, which the city estimated would increase vehicle traffic, which organizers with the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute say will concentrate vehicle emissions in an already asthma-prone neighborhood. The group has been advocating for a large urban farm for the site.
During a press conference the group hosted outside Minneapolis City Hall last month, organizers expressed frustration with the city and said the city “has not negotiated in good faith.”
In a MinnPost email inquiry to the city about the status of negotiations, city spokeswoman Sarah McKenzie wrote that conversations are ongoing between the city and East Phillips Neighborhood Institute, and there was no further information to share on negotiations.
[image_credit]East Phillips Neighborhood Institute[/image_credit][image_caption]A rendering of the indoor urban farm proposed for the East Phillips neighborhood.[/image_caption]Air Pollution
The site, located at 1860 28th St. E. and 2717 Longfellow Ave. S., is in a neighborhood with high pollution levels.
From 1938 until 1963, a site on the eastern edge of the Phillips neighborhood produced and stored arsenic-based pesticides. The Environmental Protection Agency found unsafe arsenic levels in 600 area homes and, by 2011, had removed about 50,000 tons of contaminated soil.
Pollution has clear ties to the community’s health. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, rates of diseases affiliated with pollution, like asthma, are high in East Phillips.
Asthma rates among children in East Phillips are more than two times higher than the state average. In 2019, children ages 0-17 had a statewide asthma hospitalization rate of 5.9 per 10,000 people, compared to a rate of 15.6 per 10,000 people in East Phillips.
Because of these concerns, East Phillips Neighborhood Institute wants to know the specific plan for the electric vehicle fleet and the impact that trucks and traffic in the area will have on the air quality.
The state recognized the area’s air pollution in 2008 when it passed a law controlling pollution levels. The city did, too, when it included the neighborhood in the Southside Green Zone category.
But advocates feel that the neighborhood is being treated differently than other parts of the city.
“An empty warehouse over (in) Northeast becomes a microbrewery, a fancy coffeehouse or a fashionable office space. But in East Phillips, when there’s an empty warehouse, the city grabs it with eminent domain and tries to put up a parking lot that will bring diesel pollution into this already-polluted neighborhood,” Sierra Club volunteer Satish Desai said at the press conference.
He thinks it comes down to environmental racism.
“It’s not to do with what’s in the mayor’s heart or anyone else’s heart, or any other official. It’s about power, and it’s about systems because they know, if they tried to put this over in Kenwood, the residents of Kenwood are too wealthy, they’re too well connected, they know how to work the levers of power. But they thought they could put it over in East Phillips,” Desai said.
Despite purchasing the land in 2016, conversations around acquisition from Roof Depot began in 2001, according to the city. The goal of the project is to combine the Public Works Water Distribution Maintenance and Meter Shop operation from three sites to one facility, replacing the current Water Distribution facility which is not up to code, according to the city.
About 71% of East Phillips’ roughly 4,700 residents are people of color or Indigenous, and nearly one-third live below the poverty line, according to Minnesota Compass.
Around 40% of its residents are Latino, 22.5% are Black, and 10% are Indigenous.
Many of those residents are immigrants who have already faced displacement. Climate change and its health impacts can be retraumatizing, said Joe Vital, an East Phillips resident and organizer with East Phillips Neighborhood Institute.
“My own father came here from Puebla (Mexico) seeking job opportunities,” Vital said. “I can relate to that, coming from somewhere you’ve had to struggle to survive, to come here where the air is now becoming its own struggle to survive.”
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Ava Kian[/image_credit][image_caption]Joe Vital, an organizer with East Phillips Neighborhood Institute: “We want everybody to know, especially East Phillips residents, that we are not done negotiating. We are still fighting for a good plan for the future of our environment in that area.”[/image_caption]
In 2016, the city bought the Roof Depot building with hopes of demolishing it. In 2020, the institute filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging it failed to comply with state law requiring permits from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
The city then produced an environmental assessment, which found that the addition would increase pollutant emissions in the area, but not at levels that require new permits.
East Phillips Neighborhood Institute created an alternative plan for the site, which includes an urban farm, and has brought that to negotiations with the city. Council members Jason Chavez and Emily Koski have been allies to the institute during the process, Vital said.
In March, Chavez proposed pausing the demolition and construction. The Council approved, but Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed the motion. At the time, Chavez released a statement saying the pause would have centered “Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant working rights” and given the proposed urban farm a chance.
On June 3, East Phillips Neighborhood Institute and other advocates met with the city to present its proposal. They met again on June 27. Despite not coming to a clear agreement, Vital said, the city approved the resolution on June 30 to move forward with a public works hub to be constructed on 5.5 acres, an outreach and training facility on 8 acres, and 3 acres to be given to the institute for a community site.
“The city council paraded and congratulated itself on a job well done, and mission accomplished. We want everybody to know, especially East Phillips residents, that we are not done negotiating. We are still fighting for a good plan for the future of our environment in that area,” Vital said at the press conference. “This isn’t a final deal.”
The city’s resolution approved a list of terms for a memorandum of understanding (MOU), including giving East Phillips Neighborhood Institute three acres of land on the property after demolition. It also requests for the institute to drop all current and future lawsuits.
Resident health is the primary concern of advocates. Vital said advocates are not happy with the resolution, especially because there’s no protection from future environmental concerns, like potential arsenic exposure from the depot’s demolition.
According to the city’s resolution, the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute gets exclusive development rights to the three acre community site for a period of 24 months, which began on July 1, 2022.
As far as the expansion site, the city wrote in the resolution that the project will have certain attributes, including “remediating and/or encapsulating contamination like arsenic in the soil, improving water quality in the watershed and be built “solar-ready,” among other things.
It’s time
Southside Pride–https://southsidepride.com/2022/09/05/its-time/
September 5, 2022
BY ED FELIEN
It’s time.
“It’s time,” the people of the East Phillips neighborhood are saying.
It’s time the city started taking itself seriously and started believing some of the things it’s been saying about the environment and equity.
In 2019, Mayor Jacob Frey said, “Minneapolis is doing nation-leading work on climate change. Now we’re taking the next step by formally declaring a climate emergency. In the coming months, we’ll be moving forward with a new sustainable building policy and moving to adopt a social cost of carbon.”
Fine.
The East Phillips Neighborhood Institute says, “Fine.”
According to Council Member Jason Chavez, the city is planning to demolish the Roof Depot building sometime in October or November. EPNI, speaking for the neighborhood, wants to be assured that the arsenic-contaminated soil is removed in such a way as to not spread the dust all over the neighborhood. They are frustrated with negotiations. The number of parking places the city is planning for their diesel-polluting trucks has increased from 60-some to 80-some. If Frey and the city are serious about pollution and the environment, then stopping increased carbon pollution by city trucks in one of the city’s most carbon-impacted neighborhoods would seem to be a good place to start.
EPNI wants to be involved in planning the job training program, and they want new hiring to give some kind of preference to people living within a two-mile radius of the site.
The Southside Green Zone Council was created by the city in May of 2019. In their August 2019 letter to the City of Minneapolis, they said: “The environmental disparities we face as a community have been institutionalized through decades of planning, decision-making and investment patterns that have sacrificed the health and well-being of our community and families. We hope that the next generation of investments by government, philanthropy and private capital will work to fix this history and be done in partnership with the Southside Green Zone and other critical local groups already doing work in the area. A much higher level of government and philanthropic resources is needed to achieve the sustainability and climate vision of the Southside Green Zone, a transition that must be grounded in justice. This is articulated in the Southside Green Zone’s priorities on tangibly improving Air and Soil Quality, Healthy Food Access and Health in Energy in Housing intertwined with the social and economic priorities on Green Economy, Anti-Displacement, Self-Determination and Accountability. These all go hand in hand to ensure the people living here are benefiting and designing the investments in air, soil, food, housing and energy.”
The Native Lakota people drumming in the illustration above walked only a couple of blocks from their homes to the Roof Depot site where a rally was held to support EPNI’s negotiations with the city on Sunday, Aug. 28. The Little Earth public housing site was formerly an abandoned industrial site that probably included a coal yard.
If the city truly believes in racial and cultural equity and wants to be a leader in protecting the environment, then it will listen to the voices of EPNI and the people of East Phillips and treat those voices with the same respect they give to people from Linden Hills and Lake of the Isles.
It’s time for East Phillips to have a seat at the table.
Thank you so much for this article Ms. Kian. It’s nice to see a Minnpost article that sets anti-NIMBYism aside long enough to consider REAL equity instead of merely paying lip service to equity.
“During a press conference the group hosted outside Minneapolis City Hall last month, organizers expressed frustration with the city and said the city “has not negotiated in good faith.” Looks like the folks not negotiating in good faith are the activists! Guess we all would love to plant our vegetables in arsenic contaminated soil. You know, do the activists have the financial where with all to reimburse the city (us taxpayers) for everything we stuck into this project, clean the site up, and find the city a new site?
Dude, why in the world would you assume they intend to grow food in contaminated soil? Obvious not. In fact I think one of the plans actually involves hydroponic gardens.
“You know, do the activists have the financial where with all to reimburse the city (us taxpayers) for everything we stuck into this project, clean the site up, and find the city a new site?” Didn’t see a word about where these folks are going to come up with $10’s of Millions, i.e. if they don’t get city charity $ and force the city to walk away because of their not negotiating in good faith, they get to grow their vegetables in exactly what is there now.
2nd point: Is that a wise/economic move to turn very limited city acreage into farm land? Got another place for the water works to go? Or isn’t water important to our survivable?
Dennis, I wrote this reply earlier but it didn’t get posted for some reason… If you read the article you will references to other compromises, the “activists” have not proposed a “giveaway” of this land, there is some re-imbursement. And I remind you that these “activists” are taxpayers themselves who live in the neighborhood, and have lived with the contamination and other issues for decades.
As or the water plant, there are alternatives, again there have been a number of different plans and alternative plans and compromises that were rejected. This is the plan they choose, but it’s not the ONLY possible plan or site.
“The city approved the resolution on June 30 to move forward with a public works hub to be constructed on 5.5 acres, an outreach and training facility on 8 acres, and 3 acres to be given to the institute for a community site.”
The project has three components. The 5.5 acres for a public works hub and the 3 acres for an urban garden are well explained. The most space for an “outreach and training facility” on 8 acres, nearly half the site, is not. Outreach and training for who? If it is unrelated to the other uses, it doesn’t need to be there, does it? A case of two is company and three is a crowd? Hard to say, because no details are provided. If not included in the project and most of the land were given over for community uses, would tripling the footprint be a workable compromise?
Funny how all these guys who spend so much time declaring what a catastrophe the liberal MPLS government is are suddenly all-in on the government when low income people of color challenge a big govern plan in their neighborhood. I guess as long as we’re not talking about crime, schools, density, and traffic, we can assume that city hall is pretty much perfect eh? The process always works right? Just step aside and trust the liberals, they know what they’re doing.
Paul, “trust liberals”, we’ve been doing that for 50 years in Mpls. How do think we got here in the first place?
So why do you trust them to handle THIS situation all of the sudden?
Funny how you did not propose another spot! Suppose better to just let that existing spot sit for another 10-20 years and forget about water for the city, and some of the suburbs. Yes there is just a plethora of large areas like this waiting for the city to purchase and set up the water works facility. Please call them out and the geographical centrality etc. etc. etc.
Dennis, it’s funny you expect a guy who lives in St. Louis Park to find THAT location for you.
Well maybe you kind of get the picture then, There isn’t another spot, or if there is, its extremely expensive. The city has been trying to get a location in place for the water works for ~ 10+ years, need look no further than the yearly CLIC reports. Seems some folks could care less about critical infrastructure, but then will be the loudest to complain when it isn’t there, or fails.
The picture I get is a guy who thinks someone living in St. Louis Park is the best guy to solve MPLS critical infrastructure problems. Meanwhile you’re assuming that they people you blame for those problems in the first place have selected the only and best possible solution, without even considering the alternatives. Have you even looked at the alternate proposals? Do you understand that the entire site is NOT dedicated to water treatment? Why is it absolutely impossible to dedicate more than 3 acres to urban farming?
Ken, please follow along with rest of the class… the city has to clean up the site regardless, leaving it as-is isn’t an option in any proposal. And the city doesn’t recover any more of its expenses by using the land one way or another.
“That just isn’t true. The city isn’t going to spend that money if it can’t use the site.”
The city already owns the property, they took it. They can’t just sit on even if they want to, so YES… they have to clean it up, or sell it… do YOU think they can sell THAT property? Why do you think it sat there for decades abandoned? And since they’re not paying themselves to use their own property, they don’t get a better “return” on the investment (they used eminent domain) if they use it to park their vehicles. As a general rule, whenever someone accuses someone of not know anything about economics around here… it’s never economists making that accusation.
YES, I was a member of the CLIC for about 6 or so years while the city was looking at this site and considering others. (you might say 30 some odd other private citizens had the inside tract to publicly shared city information) and we voted and prioritized it, so you should blame the citizens that volunteered their time and energy for that committee year after year, not the city acquisition folks. Fair enough? PS: Yes the Phillips folks ward had representatives on that committee.
“so you should blame the citizens that volunteered their time and energy for that committee year after year, not the city acquisition folks. ”
Well OK then… we’ll blame the volunteers like yourself for choosing an unpopular plan for the Phillips neighborhood. Just because you choose it doesn’t make the best choice right?
As before, you seem quick to trash others that did the work, but propose no alternative other than criticism! You all are wrong, and I am right because! Because you have no viable alternative other than criticism the way it sounds. And of course seems you conveniently forgot that there were members of the Phillips neighborhood on that committee! Yes, they had a voice, and evidently a last minute voice from SLP should outweigh all the folks (that actually live in the city) that were actively involved in this process for years!
“The City only needs to clean it up if they use the site. If they tear down the Roof Depot building. The city can simply absorb its sunk costs and do nothing with the property. Its a bad return on investment, but a far better return on investment than spending tens of millions of dollars and giving away to an urban farm.”
Ken, if you’re going to play with economics you should study the difference between non-profit public entities and for profit private companies. Neither MPLS or the urban farmers here are for profit private entities so your ROI modeling doesn’t apply. The suggestion that the city of MPLS would use eminent domain to take this property, and then just sit on it forever without tearing down the old plant and cleaning up the soil is simply daft. One way or another that plant will be demolished and the land will be cleaned up. We get it… you don’t like urban farms for some reason… that doesn’t make them fantasies… you do realize we already HAVE urban farms all over the city right? This one would just be bigger and situated in a less affluent neighborhood.