Wanna Buy a $38M Police Training Facility?

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

Minneapolis, Cop City?

Let’s say a genie granted Minneapolis $38 million tomorrow. How would you want to spend it?

If you said “on a brand new police training facility, obviously,” well, certain city officials agree with you. Others, naturally, are opposed, and the two sides of the debate are squaring off as the Minneapolis City Council is being asked to approve the $6.1 million purchase of industrial land for the facility.

Council Member Robin Wonsley of Ward 2 is calling it “Cop City 2.0,” in reference to the notorious Atlanta training center. It’s no such thing, objects Community Safety Commissioner Toddrick Barnette, who “visibly bristles” at the comparison, as Kyle Stokes reports for Axios. (Barnette’s job, local politics observers will note, is keeping Jacob Frey’s name out of the news whenever there’s a touchy public safety issue the mayor doesn’t want to be associated with.) 

The Strib ran dueling viewpoints from Council Member Linea Palmisano of Ward 13 alleging that opponents of the facility “want to see the police fail” (pretty sure the MPD can handle that on its own) and Ward 8 City Council Member Soren Stevenson. As Stevenson notes, “In my community’s experience, when we propose creative and common-sense projects in order to build a thriving city accessible to everyone, the administration responds with a wall of ‘no.’”

I Hear That Sports Bars Are Making a Comeback

We have a saying in publishing: Three’s a trend. And according to this story from J.D. Duggan in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, three new sports bars are opening in the Minneapolis area: Asher's Bar & Grill, on the ground level of Beach Club Residences; Fathead Bill’s Sports Pub & Grill on Washington Avenue in the Mill District (or EaTo, as locals call it), and the General Sports Bar near 50th & France. A trend!

Duggan bolsters his argument by pointing to the success of Tom’s Watch Bar in downtown Minneapolis and the women’s-sports-themed A Bar of Their Own. 

So why is this happening? Well, I’m no expert, but my guess is that people like drinking while they watch sports. Yes, but why is it happening now? 

“People are not seeking out as much that chef-driven dining experience [where] dining itself is the event,” Asher’s co-owner Zach Sussman explains. Duggan also suggests that a rise in ticket prices and in the cost of streaming services might have something to with it.

We Should Fund HCMC Instead of Letting Poor People Die

As you may have heard, the Hennepin County Medical Center is in bad shape financially. And as Alec Williams, policy researcher for We Make Minnesota, writes for the Minnesota Reformer, it’s through no fault of the hospital’s own. Instead, he says, “its circumstances reflect the broken structure of our current health care system.” 

“HCMC is the hospital that doesn’t turn people away,” Williams explains. That means lots of unpaid bills from un- or underinsured or just plain poor patients. Williams contrasts the financial status of HCMC with that of the “nonprofit” Mayo Clinic, which was $1.5 billion in the black last year. Under our current system, he says, we get “private profits for Mayo, socialized losses for HCMC.” 

Williams notes that the leading plan to fund HCMC is to raise the Hennepin County sales tax. In other words, part of the metro would pay for a service that the whole state benefits from. But ain’t that always the way.

Rural MN: Growing Now, Dying Soon

The good news? The population of rural Minnesota is growing. I guess that’s good news. In any case, it’s news. As Harshawn Ratanpal reports for MPR News, the population of those areas have been declining for my entire life and probably yours. 

The bad news, if you’re a town in outstate Minnesota that hopes to continue existing, is that the influx won’t be enough in the long run. Quite simply, “there are more deaths than births,” Ratanpal writes, and no influx of new residents will make up for that. Even the Baby Boomers will someday die, or so I’m told.

And there’s one more variable to consider: “It will take a while for data to show whether immigration enforcement throughout the state this year had an impact on migration.”