Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Restaurant Owners Keep Making It About Them
Susan Du does an excellent job in the Strib writing about how the city of Minneapolis’s proposed Labor Standards Board is continuing to make restaurateurs lose their collective mind. Du catches the owners in several fabrications. For instance: "’Nobody here is saying no to a Labor Standards Board,’ [Nettie Colon of Red Hen Gastrolab] said, contradicting [a] letter signed by the 100 restaurant operators.” Ordinance-opposed owners have also complained that there would be seats on the board reserved for union officials. (There won’t.) All this over an ordinance that doesn’t even exist yet—not even in draft form!
In fact, a chief complaint from union officials is that the City Attorney’s Office, which promised a draft for June, not only hasn’t followed through but is refusing to communicate directly with them. Instead, the unions are getting information relayed through City Council members. Reading between the lines here, I’m guessing Mayor Jacob Frey’s idea is to play off City Council against the business owners so then he can step in as a “reasonable mediator” to resolve their differences while spouting some sententious bullshit about civility.
The story also highlights a very obvious fact often overlooked in this discussion: Any Labor Standards Board, if approved, would apply to many businesses, besides restaurants. So why are they making it all about themselves? Dunno, but they are for sure the squeakiest wheels in town these days. "The only parties that have brought up a sector specific to full-service restaurants are the owners and operators of full-service restaurants," says Council Member Aurin Chowdhury, a co-sponsor of the ordinance.
“As a worker who has been pushing for this policy now for over two years, with support from most of the politicians needed to pass it during that time, it is frustrating to still be here two years later without progress," Minneapolis condo worker Lev Roth told Racket last month. "We want this passed as soon as possible to help bring workers, owners, and the community together to start fixing the issues we are facing. If it’s getting held up we want to know why and want to work to get it moving.”
Cop Who Killed Teen Was a Menace Behind the Wheel
It was national news earlier this week when the Olmsted County Attorney’s Office announced that it would bring criminal charges against Shane Roper, the state trooper who killed 18-year-old Olivia Flores during a high-speed chase at the entrance to the Apache Mall in Owatonna this May. Roper was pursuing a speeding vehicle at 83 mph without his emergency lights on when he T-boned the Ford Focus in which Flores was a passenger, according to the charges. Roper’s dashboard camera showed that he had engaged in high-speed driving without his emergency lights four other times that day, hitting 135 mph at one point.
Now MPR News is reporting that Roper was involved in four previous crashes over the past five years, including ones that are eerily similar to the crash that killed Flores. About a year before his latest crash, Roper was pursuing a driver along the same stretch of Hwy. 52, driving more than 90 mph, when he “lost control of his squad car and struck a cable barrier,” according to the story. Roper also crashed into another state vehicle while responding to a call for assistance in 2019, ran a stop sign in 2021, resulting in a collision with another driver, and hit a deer while driving 77 mph on a snowy road, also in 2021.
Roper was suspended twice and received written reprimands for two other crashes.
2025 Plan Eyes Boundary Waters Mining
You’re probably aware by now of the 2025 Plan, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, filled with all sorts of horrific ideas for the nation, many of which have already been set in motion. This is the sort of story where you wish there wasn’t a local angle, but we’re not so lucky. Among the plan’s anti-environmental goals is to open up the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness for sulfide-ore-copper mining. It’s all right here in Chapter 16: a proposal to “abandon withdrawals of lands from leasing” in the Boundary Waters, then “revisit associated leases and permits for energy and mineral production.” This is, unfortunately, entirely expected. After Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior issued an order protecting the BWCA from exploitation for 20 years, nature-hating ghoul Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) proposed legislation to override the order and open the area back up to mining leases. The bill passed the GOP House but died in the DFL-controlled Senate. Next time we may not be so lucky.
Beast Barbecue Is Next on the Block
If you were bummed to learn yesterday about the closure of Eli's Food & Cocktails, a downtown Minneapolis fixture for 64 years, well, sorry but here’s some additional news that’s not so great either. J.D. Duggan reports in the Business Journal that two restaurants belonging to Eli’s owner, Eli’s East and Beast Barbecue, are also up for sale. Why that matters (as Axios might say): Just last month, Michaelangelo Matos wrote for Racket about how Beast Barbecue had become a hub for the house music community in the Twin Cities, taking over after the closure of the nearby club Honey in March 2020. As Duggan points out, both Eli’s and Beast Barbecue are listed as “investment or owner user,” which means the businesses themselves may be up for sale as well as the properties.
