Ethics investigation of Rochester council president will outlive complaint

There’s late word from southern Minnesota today that ethics complaints, like toothpaste, can be awfully hard to put back in the tube. Rochester city administrator Steve Kvenvold said this morning he still intends to investigate City Council president Dennis Hanson for a possible ethics violation, even after local businessman Pat Devney withdrew the complaint that he filed on Monday.

The short-lived complaint was the first against a City Council member over the course of his 28 years with the city, Kvenvold told The Rochester Post-Bulletin. That lack of a track record could explain Devney’s apparent expectation that the formal ethics complaint he filed wouldn’t get aired in public. Devney was so bothered by media coverage that he pulled his complaint this morning: "I’m choosing to withdraw it, because I think it is unfair for this to become a public matter."

Kvenvold will look into whether Hanson (pictured at right) acted unethically last week by voting on Weis Builders’ Washington Village housing project. Hanson is director of business development at Kruse Lumber, which does business with Weis. (Weis spent $6,079 at Kruse last year, Hanson says, calling that tab "minimal.")

The 118-unit development on the city’s northwest side has drawn protest and even lawsuit threats due to its size and feared traffic effects. Weis Builders has offices in Rochester, Minneapolis and Chicago, and has projects in the Twin Cities that drew on government subsidies.

Rochester readers got a whiff of Devney’s cold feet in Post-Bulletin Managing Editor Jay Furst’s blog, which warned at the top of an open-book, news-budget post early this morning that the complainant might change his mind. The story that reporter Heather J. Carlson posted online last night—which may have contributed to Devney’s unease—has since been updated.