Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Shear Nonsense!
About 1,400 homes in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis lost power for about a half hour this morning, and that area’s most dogged hyperlocal reporter has determined that this was probably not an accident. Around the same time as the outage, Trevor Born of Longfellow Whatever reports, police were alerted to “a suspicious young man in an orange shirt carrying large shears and climbing utility poles.” Coincidence? Unlikely, especially since a padlock had been cut to gain access to the damaged wires. It’s unclear what was this guy up to—LW speculates that he was possibly searching for copper wire or just committing some routine vandalism. Anyway, not a day you want to be without electricity!
Yes, Undocumented Immigrants Are Taxpayers
Undocumented immigrants in Minnesota paid $222 million in state and local taxes in 2022, Max Nesternak reports at Minnesota Reformer, drawing his figures from a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. According to the report, giving those immigrants work authorization would increase that amount to $294 million, because wages and compliance would increase. Overall, undocumented immigrants paid $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes—that includes money that goes into programs they’re not eligible for, like Medicare and Social Security.
Point being, whatever your issues with unauthorized border crossings, undocumented immigrants are hardly a drag on the U.S. economy. (And no, they aren’t an increased threat to your safety either.) If you’re the kind of freak who worries about falling birthrates in the U.S., increased immigration is a simple solution. Of course, those same extreme natalists tend to support authoritarian mass deportation policies that would tear families apart, almost certainly trample on the rights of documented immigrants and even citizens, and waste billions of dollars.
Bye Lake Phalen, Hi Lake Sunisa?
When U.S. gymnast Sunisa Lee won a gold medal with the U.S. gymnastics team yesterday at the Summer Games in Paris, Jeffrey Bissoy declared on Twitter that St. Paul should consider renaming one of its most prominent lakes for the city’s greatest Olympian. Is it a little soon for Lake Phalen to be rechristened as Lake Sunisa? Well, ask yourself two questions. First, did Edward Phalen ever win an Olympic gold medal? Absolutely not! Second, has Suni Lee ever beaten a business partner’s face in and left him for dead in the Mississippi River? Highly unlikely! In 1839, Phalen, the lake’s current namesake, was the first person in St. Paul to be arrested for murder, according to this MNopedia entry. Though there’s no record of what happened next, we know that Phalen was never convicted. He was, however, later indicted for perjury, and then skipped town, only to be killed by his traveling companions before he reached California. Hardly a lake-worthy individual.
Pour One Out for the Pourhouse
The Pourhouse, located in the historic Lumber Exchange in downtown Minneapolis, closed suddenly over the weekend. Caitlin Anderson and J.D. Duggan at the Business Journal report that the building’s owner, Hempel Real Estate, has redevelopment plans, including a possible residential conversion. The bar/club simply doesn’t fit in with ownership’s new vision, Pourhouse co-owner Deepak Nath told the Biz Journal. “The end was nothing that we did or we could have done differently. It was purely a new direction from the building,” he said. This is the third of three Pourhouses to close. The first, in Dinkytown, closed in less than a year. The Uptown Pourhouse (which, you may recall, barred Racket's Jay Boller from entering because he was wearing Tevas) closed in 2022. The downtown Pourhouse was known for a number of regular dance nights, including the Sunday night techno party Communion and the Reventón reggaeton party, as well hosting touring DJs and rappers.
