Fart of the Deal: Company Offered MN Prison for $75M; ICE Paid $495M a Year Later

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Concentration Camp Costs John Q. Taxpayer

You could take a principled stand against Trump's ICE army on the basis of its deadly, city-by-city campaigns of ethnic cleansing. You wouldn't be wrong. But if the left-brain crowd needs a compelling reason to deplore the federal law enforcement agency, KARE 11's investigative team just found a doozy: The company that owned the 1,660-bed shuttered prison in Appleton, Minnesota, that ICE recently purchased for $495.6 million had offered it to the state of Minnesota for $75 million a year earlier.

As a quintet of KARE reporters notes, that massively inflated figure represents more lost taxpayer money than the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, which continues to color every election race in the state. The half-billion dollar sale price Tennessee-based CoreCivic Inc. managed to fleece the Department of Homeland Security with? It's being "described as the most expensive property purchase in Minnesota history," per KARE.

“It's unexplainable!” Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell tells the TV news station. “Obviously, I was stunned given the reality of the offer that had been made to us just a little over a year prior to that. I still can't figure it out.”

This news is perhaps unsurprising now that we're two years into the second Trump administration's public-private loot-a-thon of the country. The CEO of CoreCivic anticipated lucrative deals ahead, telling investors after Trump's second inauguration that "we're anticipating significant growth opportunities, perhaps the most significant growth in our company's history over the next several years." The company even donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee—solid investment, given what we know now. This year alone, CoreCivic has unloaded four prisons to the government to the tune of $2.2 billion.

The kicker? CoreCivic didn't even need to hustle the fiscal geniuses running DHS for the Minnesota property. “The federal government ultimately determined the sale price following its assessment process," company reps tell KARE.

Slam Academy Shuts Down

Earlier this week, Slam Academy, the internationally recognized electronic music school in northeast Minneapolis, announced that it would be shutting down at the end of the fall semester. 

In a statement posted to social media, the school stated that “reports concerning inappropriate behavior by a member of management were brought to our attention” in 2025. Though the school took steps to correct this problem, the statement says, “recently, new light was shed on those reports and concerns about the conduct within our organization was amplified.”

To anyone who’d been following the back-and-forth online, this comes as no surprise. The “reports and concerns” the statement mentions circulated widely on social media, and were addressed by Slam Academy Founder James Patrick in a post earlier this month.

Save the Date! Lake & Nicollet Reunification Announced.

Since 1977—that’s 49 freakin’ years, folks—the Great Wall of Kmart and its mind-boggling 76-year lease has stopped Nicollet Avenue from being the mighty Minneapolis thoroughfare it was meant to be. The big-box shop closed in 2020, but the structure remained as an empty husk frequented by urban explorers and unhoused individuals until a fire expedited its demolition in 2023 (the suburban-sized parking lot also frequently housed a pretty decent taco truck). 

But now city engineers have a date for the reconnection of Nicollet Avenue. Nick Halter reports for Axios Twin Cities that it should be reunified on November 24—a Thanksgiving miracle! The Lyndale and Whittier neighborhoods are coming together to celebrate with a community party next week, while Metro Transit confirms that the 18’s route, which loops around the lot via First Avenue, will be adjusted starting December 5, saving precious minutes of ride time.

Minneapolis City Council OKs Sleeping in Cars, Axes Office of Public Safety

Let's close the loop on two proposed Minneapolis City Council measures, both of which passed Thursday.

First, reports Cait Kelley for MPR News, the council has voted to dissolve the Office of Community Safety.

“Our commissioner of Community Safety, while paid in total compensation $375,000 a year, does not have authority over the police chief to hire, fire, or do discipline,” Council Member Soren Stevenson says. “What that means is that when there's something going on and there's a tension between those two, the police chief can say… ‘I'm not going to listen to you.'"

Next, also for MPR News, Cari Spencer writes that the council has given the go-ahead for unsheltered people to sleep in their cars overnight. Under the ordinance co-authored by authored by Council Members Jason Chavez, Aisha Chughtai, and Aurin Chowdhury, the city would create designated, supervised locations where unhoused folks could stay in cars, provided there are "staff on-site at all times, a public safety plan approved by the police department, and accessible bathrooms and trash services."

The council OK'd both ordinances with the nine votes necessary to override a mayoral veto.