Will I-94 Get 86’d?

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

Our Streets' I-94 Removal Dream Advances

"What if we... converted a big chunk of I-94?" a March Flyover headline asked. Well, incredibly, we might actually get to find out.

Back in March, a coalition of transportation advocacy orgs had just released an 84-page report (which you can read in full here) on the feasibility of conducting a "highway-to-boulevard conversion" on the 7.5-mile stretch of I-94 between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was the latest in MnDOT's ongoing "Rethinking I-94" project, which kicked off in 2016 and seeks to reconnect the neighborhoods decimated by the highway's construction in the mid-1900s.

This Thursday, writes Sahan Journal's Andrew Hazzard, Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a resolution that strongly opposes any expansion of I-94 in Minneapolis. In fact, the resolution reads, City Council "supports a wide variety of highway removal options in the upcoming Rethinking I-94 scoping decision document, including the addition of a 'restored network' alternative with fewer lanes, which would maximize the potential to repurpose highway land for new public housing, affordable commercial space, parks, community gardens, or other uses determined by surrounding communities."

Don't bust out the shovels and champagne just yet: As Hazzard writes, construction is likely years away, and no funding has been secured for any of this at the moment. Still, pretty cool to see a governing body take such an ambitious proposal seriously rather than dismissing it outright. And for all you pie-in-the-sky naysayers: There's already a successful urban highway removal project in Rochester, New York, and a similar proposal in Oakland, California, appears to be gaining steam.

Report: Payroll Fraud Rampant in MN

Nearly 1 in 10 workers are misclassified as independent contractors, according to a report from think tank North Star Policy Action. “Based on that analysis, the group estimates workers lost between $2.9 billion and $6.2 billion in 2019,” writes Max Nesterak in his weekly labor blog for Minnesota Reformer. And they're not just losing regular income either. Victims often miss out on things like healthcare, retirement contributions, overtime, paid time off, and workers’ comp as a result of misclassification. 

The report also found that companies who commit this type of fraud often face little or no consequence. The Minnesota Department of Revenue has gotten involved in at least one high-profile case. In 2020, Minnesota United’s video crew complained that they had been misclassified as independent contractors, and a few years later the team’s scoreboard operators would unionize over similar issues.

We’ll end our blurb on this mind-boggling stat: “10,073 cars were stolen in Minnesota in 2017, compared to 316,000 people who experienced wage theft,” researcher Aaron Rosenthal told the Attorney General’s task force. So, if you work in the private sector, you’re three times more likely to experience employer theft than car theft.

Mall Installs Shot-Detecting Tech

The Mall of America is now using shot detection tech, WCCO reports, with $1 million toward the system kicked in by the city of Bloomington. AmberBox, the tech vendor, says it can notify authorities in less than four seconds after a shot and pinpoint the shots from within 60 feet. 

The city's police chief, Booker Hodges, says the technology will help "apprehend criminals sooner than if it had not been used"—in other words, it's not gonna do a whole lot to keep a gun from getting shot in the first place. Plus, for all their societal faults, guns already do a pretty great job letting know they've been shot via their famously loud gunshots.

The MOA, you may recall, has already started using facial recognition, a technology that tends to have built-in racist flaws. "We have an incredibly unique property, which is why we're taking an industry leading approach to protecting it," says a mall spokesperson. I’m sure they meant to say “our visitors” rather than “it,” right?

Extra! Extra! Paid Brand Influencer Piles Praise on Strib Rebrand

As the Star Tribune Media Co. rushed through a brand refresh this year, we had multiple questions: How much did it cost? Is it a conflict of interest that Colle McVoy, the ad firm headed by current Strib board chair Christine Fruechte, won the job? And does Stribby, the paper’s brand-new grey duck mascot, possess his species’ anatomically correct corkscrew dick? The Strib’s PR man wouldn’t get into specifics about the first two, and we smartly didn’t pose the last one.

Last week the freshly minted *Minnesota* Star Tribune received more effusive feedback via The Brand Blueprint, which appears to be a “brand + marketing strategy insight” TikTok influencer account with 39,000+ followers. Its NYC-based founder, Brooke Yoakam, uses an "omnichannel platform" approach boosted by AI to "[help] consumer brands unlock customers to spend." (Typing that sequence of jargon took years off my life.) And she loves what the Minnesota Star Tribune is cookin', no doubt in part because the TikTok post is “in partnership with the Minnesota Star Tribune.” 

"One of the most interesting rebrands just happened,” she begins in peak TikTok-voice. "It might not seem like that big of a rebrand but it's actually huge. So they added Minnesota to the name because the goal of the rebrand is to cover news across the whole state of Minnesota." Wow, huge if true! Yoakam goes on to praise the symbology of the star logo (four points representing covering all four corners of Minnesota, though commenters point out the state has several additional corners) and the indented “i” (apparently a callback to the old logo). The Stribby mascot is “really great for marketing and Gen Z,” we learn. Her video has been viewed almost 1 million times; the top-voted comment (“Can I read the articles for free though?") isn’t exactly a marketing win.  

Add “How much did this shit cost and could it have been spent on reporting?” to our list of armchair Strib executive Qs. (On a much brighter note, the company did just hire one of the state’s very best reporters, the Minnesota Reformer’s Deena Winter.) Oh, and to the anonymous Strib tipster who keeps emailing Racket newsroom dirt without any ability to reply? Let us email you back! These things require two-way streets.