Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Is Nicollet Mall Ready to Potty?
Talking about bathrooms sure brings out the snickering 12 year old in even the most ma-choor of us. Take this headline (please!) from Susan Du’s Strib story on the lack of facilities in downtown Minneapolis: “No. 1 problem downtown: Where to go No. 2.”
Or savor these fine puns from outgoing Ward 7 City Council Member Katie Cashman, who introduced an amendment to allot $700,000 for six to eight public bathrooms for Nicollet Mall in the council’s proposed 2026 budget. “I would hate ‘toi-let’ this funding opportunity go to waste,” Cashman said yesterday, adding today, “Let’s relieve ourselves of this budget amendment.” Not sure what she’s got planned after she leaves office but she may have a future at Racket.
Still, all potty humor aside, the lack of facilities for this universal need is a problem, as Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist/human cautionary tale Flea has told us and local entities as varied as the Downtown Council and Street Voices of Change can attest. Perhaps Minneapolis is ready to finally address this issue: The amendment was adopted today.
The common knock on public restrooms is… well, you’ve used a public restroom, haven’t you? But Minneapolis is evaluating proposals from New York City’s Portland Loo and Ann Arbor’s Throne Labs, both of which provide “graffiti-resistant wall panels, time limits, and sensors for air quality and cleanliness,” Du reports.
Open Container Laws—Not Just for Drinking Anymore
At the Minnesota Reformer today, Max Nesterak (welcome back from baby break, Max) reports that since marijuana legalization in 2023 there have been 3,500 charges for possession and 1,200 misdemeanor convictions. How can this be? Well, as Nesterak reports, those folks were driving, and “All cannabis products—including flower, vape pens, wax and edibles—must be in the trunk (or trunk area in the case of SUVs) unless they’re sealed in their original, labeled packaging from a dispensary.”
Did you know that? Probably not! The offense carries a max penalty of $1,000 fine and 90 days in jail, though many are being fined just a few hundred. Still, the concern, as always with low level offenses, is that this will serve as a pretext to hassle certain drivers, and you can guess their skin color. “Now there’s this whole entry point to all of these cars, officers are going to take it every time they get,” says Hennepin County public defender Amanda Brodhag.
ICE Has a Friend in Eagan
As ICE continues to maraud throughout our towns, MPR News asks an important question: How do these fuckers track their targets? Nina Moini spoke with Stevie Glaberson from the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown, who explains that in addition to trawling social media accounts for information, “ICE now has access to vast stores of state, local, and particularly commercial data and this access is constantly expanding.”
Among those commercial data providers, as we discussed here not too long ago, is a Minnesota-based company. Our state does not lack for evil corporations, but one we tend to overlook is Thomson Reuters. (Full disclosure: I worked at TR’s Eagan complex for three years writing about bankruptcy law cases, if that matters. They gave us a free turkey every Thanksgiving.) Once a family-owned St. Paul-based legal publisher, the company has grown since its merger with British journalism service Reuters to become an information tech powerhouse.
Thomson and its ilk “are not only warehousing and providing access to so much data to ICE, but they’re also providing government lawyers with access to legal databases,” Glaberson says.
More like Minnesota YAWN Club
Yes, I did use that same (incredibly funny) joke earlier this year when the first Yacht Club lineup was announced. But honestly, the three-day fest’s 2006 lineup, which includes headliners Matchbox Twenty, the Lumineers, and the Strokes, just doesn’t deserve a new pun.
True, the lineup is peppered with hot younger acts like Geese and Lucy Dacus, and the local picks include both veteran favorites like Atmosphere and Semisonic and younger acts like Prize Horse and this year’s Picked to Click winners, Porch Light. But where last summer’s lineup featured more women than most such festivals, that’s not the case for 2026. And nostalgia acts from the '00s instead of the ’90s ain’t my idea of progress. Grrr!
