Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
New Plan? Ding Fateh as a Champagne Socialist.
The internet is abuzz today with news that DFL-endorsed mayoral candidate Omar Fateh owns a black 2023 BMW X3. As someone who drove a 12-year-old Dodge Dart in high school and was raised to hate Beamer owners—hey, it was the ’80s—I certainly recognize the class animus this stirs up. (Do kids still say BMW stands for “break my windshield”?)
And I can’t blame Mayor Jacob Frey for taking the opportunity to tout his humble 2003 Honda. (The mayor of Minneapolis, of course, is driven around town while he’s in office.)
Still, ya gotta wonder if folks would be this worked up about Fateh driving, say, a new F-150. The news surfaced in Rochelle Olson’s column today, which handed out a "jeers" to Fateh for being ticketed twice for violating the state’s hands-free cellphone law. And, yes, texting while driving is bad. Put the phone away, dude. Don't do it, kids. Etc.
But everything you read about Fateh in the Star Tribune has to be placed in its proper context. For instance, the opinion section of the paper’s homepage looked like this yesterday:
(Jacob Hill, incidentally, is the executive director of the Frey-backing PAC All of Minneapolis, though he is not identified as such in the Strib.)
So pardon me for sniffing a little consent bein' manufactured in these parts, but the BMW news seems like the beginnings of an effort to paint Fateh as a champagne socialist. Over on X, Strib columnist (and Frey donor) Andy Brehm disingenuously wonders how Fateh can afford his car on his senator’s salary, knowing full well Minnesota does not have a full-time legislature and Fateh has another job. (The replies, as you might expect, are not at all racist.)
Anyway, as the current owner of a 2009 Civic with a busted back driver’s side quarter, let me suggest that how much money a candidate has is less significant than who the people with money have chosen as their candidate. Anyway, in the words of late, great 19th century Wobbly leader Big Bill Heywood, “Nothing’s too good for the working class.”
PS: Our own attempt at reverse muckracking was for naught. The most we learned was that Frey was ticketed for driving with expired tabs, and I can say much worse things about the guy without doing a public records search.
Audit: Mpls Separation Ordinance May Be Outdated and Insufficient
Sometimes a straightforward headline doesn’t tell the whole story. Take “Audit: Minneapolis didn’t violate policy in federal raid” (from the Star Tribune) or “Audit: Minneapolis did not violate separation ordinance during June federal investigation” (via MPR). Both are accurate readings of the city auditor report released Tuesday, which looked into the Minneapolis police presence at the federal raid on Las Cuatro Milpas in south Minneapolis on June 3.
Accurate, but incomplete. Keep reading these stories and you’ll learn that while City Auditor Robert Timmerman determined that the MPD behaved narrowly within the letter of its policy not to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, he also suggested that the current policy is insufficient. He also found communications between the mayor's office, the police department, and city council lacking.
The Frey administration has touted the auditor’s report as a full exoneration and used this as an opportunity to further accuse councilmembers like Jason Chavez, who correctly noted on social media that ICE was present at the raid, of spreading fear. “In moments of crisis, our residents deserve clear, accurate information,” Frey crowed, but the report noted that city council members were not informed of the operation until 1:50 p.m., nearly four hours after the MPD had learned of it.
In the auditor’s words, the city “should develop communication sequencing protocols,” saying, “this incident demonstrated a need to better prepare a united response to a real or perceived federal immigration enforcement action.”
More to the point, the report notes that the separation ordinance was adopted in 2003, prior to the creation of ICE "and has not been updated to reflect the changing landscape surrounding immigration enforcement." Its language, the report says, "may contradict many people’s understanding of its protections."
In other words, as a militarized anti-immigrant policing force with limitless federal resources is dispatched into U.S. cities to create mayhem and fear, the question of how a city like Minneapolis works with the federal government (or doesn't) becomes essential. How will Minneapolis act to protect its residents from federal forces? What happens when city policy is in direct opposition to federal action? These are the questions we need to be asking now.
In closing, let’s consider these alternate headlines: “Council kept in dark for four hours about federal raid.” Or how about the one I used here?
Let’s Get Drunk and Wander Around Shakopee
Sorry, Anoka, but you no longer hold the distinction of being the only town in Minnesota that allows a “sip-and-stroll” zone. As Mark Reilly reports for the Business Journal, Shakopee will be joining the public intoxication fun next month, having created two “social districts” (one downtown, the other near Canterbury Park) permitting open containers in public.
Anoka is an old hand at this game, with social districts established back in 2022. As of now, Minnesota municipalities must still individually seek state approval to create social districts; an effort earlier this year to pass legislation that would allow towns to create the zones without state say-so failed.
So far, three cities have received state approval for social districts, but the third, Stillwater, is on the fence, with plenty of residents opposed to the idea. Half of the respondents to a city survey opposed to a downtown social district. And as Reilly notes, "Opposition was stronger among downtown residents." I get it.
Where'd Our Building Go?
Accidents happen, it’s true, but sometimes you’ve got to wonder how. Every year, wood artists Anna and Nathanael Bailey of Duluth, aka Bailey Builds, bring a custom building to the State Fair. And afterward, they place the building in storage in the Twin Cities, where it’s kept safe in a shipping container.
But, reports Brianna Kelly for Bring Me the News, when the Baileys went to check on their building recently, something terrible had happened: The storage company had sold the container, thinking it was theirs. As Anna put it on Facebook: “Walls, flooring, signage, lights… all the things we’ve used to show up and do what we do each year at the Fair. Gone.”
But that doesn't mean the Baileys are sitting this year out. “We will still be at the Minnesota State Fair,” Bailey writes. “It just might look a little different this year.”
