In Minneapolis's arsenic triangle, East Phillips residents ask council for a greener future

Cities need roads and sewers and heavy industry. Cities need someplace to dump the garbage and mix the asphalt and park the rumbling Public Works trucks.

Every neighborhood in Minneapolis benefits from these noisy, smelly, toxic things.

Not every neighborhood has to live next door to them.

When a city needed a solid waste incinerator, it was the poor neighborhoods that choked downwind. When it came time to build a highway, it was the Black and brown neighborhoods they ripped in half.

Neighborhoods like East Phillips were the sort of place where a pesticide plant could feel comfortable dumping its arsenic, knowing the poison would blow for decades into neighborhoods with no say in the matter.

But East Phillips found its voice.

The Minneapolis City Council will meet to talk about East Phillips on Aug. 18.

The Department of Public Works needs a safe, accessible, centralized space for hundreds of workers and hundreds of vehicles. Someplace to store and maintain the water division's fleet of trucks, so Public Works vehicles can easily fan out across the city to repair and maintain the sewers and water lines.

The preferred site is a city-owned warehouse, right off Hiawatha in East Phillips, next to an existing public works maintenance yard.

But East Phillips found its voice. And what residents of East Phillips want the council to hear them say is no.

What Minneapolis wants is not what East Phillips needs.

Instead of yet another project that benefits the entire city at residents' expense, the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute is dreaming of greener things.

The disputed property — the old Roof Depot warehouse near the corner of Hiawatha Avenue and E. 28th Street — could be converted into an indoor urban farm, with aquaponics and greenhouses growing the kind of produce some neighborhood residents haven't tasted since they left their home countries. It could be a source of green jobs and wholesome food and space for small businesses like bike shops and a community kitchen.

"For me, the space we're talking about is a space of opportunity," said institute board member Cassandra Holmes, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe, who was born and raised in Little Earth, a Native-preference housing complex across the street from the Public Works depot. "Here's this open space in our community with a lot of opportunity that we can be good with," she said. "It's a community plan, it's a community idea. This is what we need."

Public Works could find somewhere else to park its trucks. Walking away from East Phillips and letting the community turn the warehouse into an indoor urban farm would force the city to repay millions of dollars it borrowed from the water fund to buy that warehouse in the first place.

That's millions of reasons to overlook the fact that a large diesel truck yard is the last thing the Minneapolis Arsenic Triangle needed.

East Phillips is so polluted that the city set it aside as a green zone. The designation was intended to make up for generations of environmental injustice by encouraging future generations of green initiatives and green jobs, created in collaboration with the neighborhood.

"That is the main thing I find so tragic," said former state Rep. Karen Clark, who represented East Phillips in the Legislature and once watched as crews in hazmat gear warned her from walking across her own lawn, which had just become part of the nation's largest residential arsenic superfund site. "Here's this so-called green zone, and what's being proposed would actually harm and deteriorate that very designation," Clark said. "It's unbelievable."

For years, the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute has fought and lobbied and sued and lined up investors for the Indoor Urban Farm. Some council members have lined up in support. But lined up against them are years of callous city planning that dumped all the infrastructure you need for a perfect diesel truck yard — an abandoned warehouse sitting on arsenic-laced soil, with eight lanes of traffic zooming by on Hiawatha — in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

You can plot East Phillips' pain on a map. Layer upon layer of pollutants and poisons. Arsenic blown so thickly into neighborhood yards that remediation crews had to haul the soil away. On top of the pollution layers, you can place dots on the map for each resident with damaged lungs and damaged hearts. One of the dots on that map would be Trinidad Flores, Holmes' son, who died in 2013 after transplant surgery to replace his damaged heart. He was 16 years old.

The city says tearing down the warehouse will allow it to build a facility that helps Public Works help the public, while providing city workers with a more comfortable, accessible space.

That's not how Holmes sees it.

"For me [what the city's trying to do] is just more heartaches, more dumping in our community. More cars in our community, more trucks, more pollution," she said. " Their comfort is our death sentence."

jennifer.brooks@startribune.com • 612-673-4008

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