Minneapolis aiming to ban new heavy industry, reducing neighborhood pollution

Minneapolis is poised to ban new metal plating facilities, foundries, chemical manufacturing plants and commercial laundries, saying such industries pose an unacceptable pollution threat to human health and the environment.

The ban wouldn't affect existing heavy industries largely concentrated in low-income minority neighborhoods, which state law prohibits the city from forcing out.

The Planning Commission on Monday approved the latest rezoning draft, which is tentatively scheduled to go to the City Council's Business, Inspections, Housing and Zoning Committee on May 16, followed by the City Council on May 25.

Officials are rezoning the entire city for the first time in 24 years to adapt it to the 2040 Comprehensive Plan, a development strategy to eliminate single-family zoning and create "indoor villages" to provide more beds for people who are homeless.

But despite the plan's goals of reducing the pollution burden in some neighborhoods, the city has limited tools to do so.

"Nothing the zoning code is doing is going to actually decrease pollution. It's just about not making it worse," said Shalini Gupta of Community Members for Environmental Justice, based in north Minneapolis. "It's such a battle to just kind of keep it the status quo."

The city currently has three zones for low-, moderate- and high-impact industrial uses. The proposed rezoning would pare those to light production, which could co-locate with residential areas such as the Northeast Arts District, and heavy production, where zones would shrink.

Some existing heavy industries would become "legal nonconforming uses," meaning they would be grandfathered in while new operations would be banned. State law says a city cannot use its zoning authority to shut down an unwanted use (except for adult-oriented businesses), as long as the facility operates continuously.

At Monday's Planning Commission meeting, environmental advocates pushed for an amendment to prohibit grandfathered industries from expanding in any way that would increase emissions. It failed after Deputy City Attorney Erik Nilsson said the city already had a process to do the same thing.

The commission will ask Mayor Jacob Frey to direct staffers to develop an environmental justice assessment checklist that would be part of the permit review process for moderate- and high-impact facilities by Oct. 31.

According to the city's racial equity impact analysis, race "has been the primary indicator for the placements of toxic facilities in Minneapolis" resulting from historical discrimination in housing policies that barred people of color from living in desirable neighborhoods.

At the same time, the analysis noted that manufacturing districts create jobs and recommended that the city reserve industrial land for facilities that produce minimal pollution impacts and pay a living wage, which are less likely to face community opposition.

Minneapolis' Northside and Southside Green Zone councils, composed of people living in minority neighborhoods next to heavy industry, sent a joint letter last month to Frey, the City Council and other city leaders asking that they do more to reduce pollution.

City planners responded by increasing the 300-foot setback between heavy industry districts and urban neighborhoods to a quarter-mile, effectively prohibiting new high-impact polluters from entering the Green Zones.

But another request from environmentalists, to create a new safeguard for facilities that want to expand, was removed last week from a rezoning draft released in January. That proposal would have required facilities to show they're not contributing to air pollutants above health benchmarks determined by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in a given census block.

The Minneapolis city attorney's office raised a number of red flags, because the MPCA regulates air emissions and the city can't supersede that authority by creating a "shadow" emissions review process, said Planning Director Meg McMahan. City staffers also lack the expertise to review air emissions, she said.

Still, the Minneapolis Health Department wants to measure cumulative industrial impacts on the health of neighborhood residents, even if it's used more for transparency than for permits, McMahan said.