Minneapolis parks workers want you to know why they’re striking

Dan Ament works seven days a week, all summer long, so Minneapolis can play.

He’s a golf course foreman, supervising two of the city’s public golf courses — Hiawatha and Fort Snelling. The terms of his contract require one full-time employee to be on hand at all times at every public golf course. Ament has two golf courses and he’s one of two full-time employees. So.

“We work seven days a week, from the beginning of the season to the end,” said Ament, who maintains two historic courses and 27 holes with the help of 15 part-time seasonal groundskeepers.

When it came time to negotiate a new contract, he and his colleagues asked the Park Board for more full-time help. Management, he said, said no — budgets stretched thin by the pandemic and inflation could not stretch that far.

So on July Fourth, as golfers headed to the greens, Ament headed to the picket line.

“I love what I do. I really don’t want to do anything else,” he said Tuesday, on the sixth day of a planned seven-day strike by Minneapolis park workers. “I love public golf more than anything else, which is why I’m here. I’ve had opportunities to go to other organizations — I’ve turned them all down. … I firmly believe that every single individual should be entitled to great public golf in our state.”

On the picket line in the park, workers in union orange waved “STRIKE” signs in front of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Behind them sat the Spoonbridge and Cherry, that big blue chicken and 11 acres of lovingly landscaped public parkland. A city treasure, maintained by workers who say they’ve been asked to do too much with too little for too long.

In most of Minneapolis, you’re never more than six blocks from a park. Mitchell Clendenen certainly never wanted to be. The parks of his hometown were his playground when he was a child. Now they’re his life’s work.

“I grew up in these parks,” said Clendenen, who said he was named Park Board volunteer of the year when he was in middle school. He applied for a job as soon as he turned 18, and today, he’s a crew leader, responsible for the maintenance of six south Minneapolis parks. “I learned how to ride my bike [in the park]. My brothers taught me how to play hockey at Lake of the Isles. … The neighborhood parks were just a backyard for everyone. Being part of that makes you feel good.”

But a kid can ride a bike in the park only if someone is out there picking broken glass off the paths. The neighborhood park feels as safe and welcoming as your own backyard only because someone is out there collecting the trash, planting the flowers, mowing the grass and frantically cleaning up after people who treat public spaces like an open-air toilet. Minneapolis parks are a jewel because of workers like Mitchell Clendenen, who’s on strike from the job he loves.

Wednesday is the final day of a weeklong strike by City Employees Local 363. About a third of the park workforce walked off the job on Independence Day.

Before they head back to work — now that the Park Board has backed off its threat to lock them out — they hope Minneapolis residents will look around their beautiful parks and see the people who keep them that way.

“We called a weeklong strike just to bring awareness,” said arborist Scott Jaeger, resting on a park bench in the shade of one of the trees he tends. “We all care about our parks. We love the parks. I would say all of us use the parks just as much if not more than the residents of Minneapolis.”

Jaeger and his team cultivate an urban forest. Fifty-eight arborists, 600,000 trees shading the parks and boulevards of a city Jaeger says he can’t afford on an arborist’s salary.

At park board meetings “they keep saying, ‘We’re not trying to make anyone rich.’ Neither am I,” said Jaeger, who had to move out of Minneapolis to stretch his $67,000 income to cover the cost of housing. Starter homes in Minneapolis start around $300,000. “I just want to be able to buy a home, to live in the city. If that’s what park board management sees as being ‘rich’ — to be able to afford a home in Minneapolis — I think that sends a terrible message.”