Source: Kathy Easthagen

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Minnesota sent Hennepin County commissioners a letter criticizing new restrictions the county plans to impose on Occupy Wall Street protesters in downtown Minneapolis, who have set up in Hennepin County Government Plaza since the first week of October.

While the ACLU isn’t representing the protesters, ACLU legal counsel Teresa Nelson asked that the county rescind the conditions on the protest–including new limits on what space protesters can occupy, storage of personal possessions and whether they’ll be allowed to stay outside when the temperature drops–which the county announced earlier this week.

The ACLU of Minnesota said in a press release that restrictions on free speech need to be narrow, definite and objective.

“When a regulatory scheme limits speech in a traditional public forum, the courts take care to ensure that the constitutionally protected expressed activity at issue be protected from government censorship,” Nelson wrote. “Rules such as the new rules that Hennepin County seeks to impose have the effect of subjecting the First Amendment activity to a prior restraint.”

The letter points out that the rules appear to be “ad-hoc” rules that weren’t previously enforced and that are designed to deal with just Occupy MN protesters: ”Because we believe that these new ad-hoc restrictions run afoul of the First Amendment, we request that you revoke your plan to oppose them.”

The letter was sent to Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, Hennepin County Administrator Richard Johnson, Hennepin County commissioners and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman.
OccupyMNletter11.3.

A transgender woman charged with murder in Hennepin County is currently being held in solitary confinement in the county jail, local LGBT rights activists say. The activists are attacking the county for using a measure criticized by many national transgender rights organizations as a flawed attempt to keep the accused safe while she awaits trial.

The prisoner, 23-year old Chrishaun McDonald, has been charged in the murder of 47-year old Dean Schmitz, of Richfield, outside the Schooner Tavern on the night of June 5. Despite identifying as a woman, McDonald is currently being held on $150,000 bail in the men’s section of the county jail in downtown Minneapolis.

Solitary confinement is an imperfect solution to a terrible problem, said Michael Silverman, Executive Director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“In jail, as in post-sentencing prison, transgender people are at great risk of harm from other prisoners,” Silverman told the Minnesota Independent. “We see high incidences of violence and sexual violence committed against them because they’re transgender.”

In a high-profile February report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), researchers found that 37 percent of transgender inmates surveyed reported harassment by correctional officers, while only 35% reported harassment by fellow inmates. Sixteen percent reported physical assaults, and 15 percent reported sexual assaults while in a prison or a jail. Furthermore, black transgender inmates reported harassment rates 20–25 percent higher than their white peers.

“As a guiding principal, the safety and security of all inmates is paramount,” said Lisa Kiava, spokseperson for the Hennepin County Sherif’s Office.

Officials with the Sheriff’s Department could not be reached for comment on the county’s policies for holding transgender detainees, or why McDonald was being housed in the men’s section of the jail. However, several transgender rights organizations say solitary confinement is one way jails and prisons try to protect transgender prisoners from other inmates.

“It’s a terrible proposed solution that’s implemented too widely,” said Lisa Motett, an attorney with the NGLTF and an author of the Task Force’s recent report on anti-transgender discrimination.

While solitary confinement keeps a transgender prisoner and their assailant separated, Motett said, being kept in solitary confinement typically limits or eliminates a prisoner’s ability to use exercise yards, libraries and other prison facilities.

“Solitary confinement is incredibly punitive,” Motett told the Minnesota Independent. “It punishes the victim instead of the perpetrator.”

“Chrishaun McDonald’s case is a tragedy, but unfortunately it’s not a rarity,” said Katie Burgess, Executive Director of the Trans Youth Support Network. “Although none of us knows all the details about what happened on June 5, we do know that the deck is stacked against Ms. McDonald, and we ask concerned community members to support her in her trial.”

Burgess said at a press conference on Tuesday that she and other community members worried McDonald would not receive a fair trial because she is transgender.

McDonald reportedly confessed to stabbing Schmitz in a fight after Schmitz and others at the Schooner Tavern asked her, “Did you think you were going to rape somebody in those girl clothes?” The remark started a brawl, during which Schmitz was stabbed. He later died from his wounds.

Hennepin County attorneys say Schmitz was trying to break up the brawl when McDonald stabbed him, but McDonald’s friends maintain the attack was in self-defense. In a letter sent from jail, McDonald recanted her earlier confession, saying she was covering for unknown members of the group she was with at the Schooner Tavern.

Burgess suggested that transphobia could make a jury discount these and other pieces of McDonald’s story.

Meanwhile, friends of McDonald present at Tuesday’s press conference were adamant that she was not a murderer.

“That’s not CC,” said McDonald’s friend David Tomlinson. “That’s not who she was.”

On the third day of the Minnesota gubernatorial recount, DFLer Mark Dayton’s campaign said it may have eclipsed the 9,000 vote mark in his lead over Republican Tom Emmer. Also on Wednesday, Emmer’s team increased the number of frivolous ballot challenges to 2,141, far exceeding Dayton’s 39, according to numbers released by the Dayton campaign. The vast majority of frivolous challenges came in Hennepin County, where elections manager Rachel Smith asked to make changes to a counting process slowed by the volume of Emmer’s challenges. The Minnesota GOP attacked her for what they said was siding with Dayton.

Emmer’s frivolous challenges caused Hennepin County Elections Manager Rachel Smith to consider adding more hours to the daily recount time and to add more tables to the 25 already dedicated to the recount. She said she reconsidered when the GOP threatened to take her to court.

“We basically were told if we tried to add more tables we’d be taken into court,” Smith told the Pioneer Press.

GOP chair Tony Sutton went on the attack.

“After overseeing an unprecedented 400,000 vote error on election night, Hennepin County Elections Manager Rachel Smith today tried to change the rules in the middle of game to advance the interests of Mark Dayton,” Sutton said in a statement. “Smith has repeatedly inserted herself into the action by siding with the Dayton campaign on a host of issues, including her attempt today to arbitrarily change the recount schedule. Instead of expediting the recount, Smith’s machinations have only served to slow things down. As the advocates for Tom Emmer’s interests in this process, we will not be intimidated by Smith.”

Smith defended her actions in an interview with MinnPost.

“I don’t work for either party, I work for the citizens of Hennepin County,” she said. “I am trying to do the best job I can to get through a half-million ballots in the allotted time, and do it as fairly and expeditiously as I can.”

The recount is already 84 percent complete, according to the Secretary of State. The Dayton campaign says it may have a vote margin of more than 9,000 for the first time and released numbers showing a 8,998 lead. With a large number of challenges still in the system, that number could change.

However, the number of legitimately challenged ballots is much smaller than Dayton’s lead — just over 700 so far.

Ramsey, Anoka and Hennepin counties as well as Mark Dayton’s legal team and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie have filed paperwork arguing against the Republican Party of Minnesota’s Supreme Court challenge alleging phantom votes and asking for a reconciliation of voter sign-ins with ballots in all 4,130 precincts in the state. All parties argue that precincts followed procedures that have been in place since 1982.

Election judges count the number of voter receipts and compare them to the number of ballots to ensure that no ballots have counted twice. The Emmer team wants all precincts in the state to go back and count precinct rosters where voters sign in on election day and compare those to the number of ballots instead. But, elections officials say that they’ve followed a modern interpretation of the law.

“Although Minnesota Statutes section 204C.20, subdivision 1, continues to refer to voter’s certificates that are no longer in use, Rule 8700.9300, subpart 10, allows election judges to determine the number of ballots to be counted by reference to either the number of voter’s receipts or signatures on the polling place roster,” wrote Ritchie in a filing with the court. “Furthermore, Petitioner’s supporting affidavits do not substantiate any claim that the reported election results are inaccurate. In fact, the petition does not suggest any reason why the use of voter receipts is more likely to generate errors than using the (now obsolete) certificates, or roster signatures.”

Hennepin County argued that the current manner of reconciling ballots is more accurate than the manner the Emmer team is arguing for.

“There is no requirement to compare the ballot total from the summary statement to a count of the number of signatures on the polling place rosters,” read the Hennepin County brief. “In 1982, a Minnesota Rule was added that authorized elections officials to use either the number of names om the polling place roster or the number of voter’s receipts when determining the number of ballots to be counted.”

The brief continued, “Voter’s receipts are a more accurate method for counting the number of voters than having election judges counting thousands of signatures from polling place rosters at the end of election night.”

Hennepin County also said that Emmer’s line of attack would disenfranchise voters.

“Any additional reconciliation lacks any factual support and would serve only to add confusion, delay, and uncertainty in the service of an exceedingly suspect goal of randomly removing properly cast ballots of fully eligible voters.”

Cynthia Reichert, elections manager for Anoka County, said her county only had one more ballot than receipt that couldn’t be explained by human or machine error, according to court documents. The county argued that tossing out that one vote, or many votes, would disenfranchise voters.

“There can be no reasonably based allegation that that ballot was not cast by a legal voter,” Anoka County wrote in the brief. “And any attempt to nullify that vote would only act to disenfranchise an Anoka County voter.”

Ramsey County said Emmer’s argument is flawed.

“The petitioners’ argument is fundamentally flawed because they rely on a statute that uses obsolete language that is inconsistent with modern election day practices,” according to a filing with the court.

Dayton’s campaign echoed those sentiments. “Relying on flawed arguments that could and should have been raised well in advance of the election, Candidate Tom Emmer now petitions this Court in an eleventh-hour effort to disrupt and delay the Canvassing Board certification process through the unwarranted disenfranchisement of voters,” Dayton’s legal team wrote. “This effort should be denied.”

Dayton’s team also had strong words for Emmer in a press release on Friday. “By bringing this up now, they’re acting like a four-year-old who just lost playing Candyland — they want to change the rules when they find out they lost. That’s not how elections work in Minnesota,” said Dayton recount director Ken Martin. “We play by the rules.”

The Minnesota Supreme Court is expected to take the issue up on Monday.

With a recount looking more and more likely, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has laid out a plan for the canvasing operations. The recount of the governor’s race is set for Nov. 29, which will follow the Canvassing Board’s decision on whether a recount will happen. That board is scheduled to meet on Nov. 23. Leading up to those meetings, counties are prepping for the recount and dealing with an enormous number of data practices request from the campaigns. DFLer Mark Dayton leads Republican Tom Emmer by more than 8,700 votes.

Hennepin County conducted a post-election mandatory review and found that Dayton picked up three votes and Emmer lost 2 votes, for a net gain of 5 votes for Dayton. The process is part of a mandated review that all counties must undergo and is a hand count of random precincts. The county checked 13 precincts and 12,500 votes.

Ramsey County’s review showed there was no change from election night results.

St. Louis County, which has been the target of a lawsuit by the Emmer campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota after the county said it would take at least 14 days to fill a request for voting machine tapes, summary statements, ballot security information, revisions to reported election night results, photocopies of all accepted and rejected absentee ballot information, names and addresses of everyone who applied for an absentee ballot, voter registration information, names of election judges, election night incident reports, and all information provided to the Dayton campaign. The county has announced that it is in negotiations to provide documents.

The duo also sued Pine County. Officials for the county told the Star Tribune on Tuesday they didn’t receive the data requests and only learned of the lawsuit in the local paper.

“I don’t think [the GOP and Emmer] handled it as well as they could have,” Pine County auditor Cathy Clemmer told Strib Eric Roper. “It would have been much simpler to pick up the phone and say, ‘Gee whiz, we haven’t heard from you. Did you get our e-mail?’ Instead of going directly to a lawsuit.”

While the statewide recount nears, three Minnesota House races are also at a razor thin margin. In District 15B, Republican St. Cloud State professor King Banaian has a 10-vote lead over DFLer Carol Lewis. In District 25B, Republican Kelby Woodard leads DFL Rep. David Bly by 31 votes and, in District 27A which contains Albert Lea, Republican Rich Murray leads Rep. Robin Brown by 57 votes. All three are within the 0.5 percent margin that triggers an automatic recount. Those recounts are scheduled for Nov. 29.

In an editorial on Tuesday, the Star Tribune questioned whether the 0.5 percent margin is too high a threshold to trigger a recount, noting that legislators had tried to scale it back to 0.25 percent.

“Had their bills become law, Gov.-elect Dayton likely would be announcing his top commissioner appointees this week,” the paper wrote. “Legislators of both parties would begin crafting legislation, knowing whose signature their bills would require in order to be enacted. And Minnesotans would at least be assured that their government was gearing up to tackle the biggest state fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning … 

ST. PAUL: Okay, let’s talk … but very late this week. And I’m not giving no stinkin’ budget address to the state Legislature, says Gov. Pawlenty to top DFLers. [Associated Press; Minnesota Public Radio]

ST. CLOUD: Ladies and gentlemen … Norm Coleman! Fresh off his election loss (sorta), the former U.S. Senator will speak at a GOP state Senate District 15 fundraiser Saturday. [Hot Dish Politics]

SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Grand Old Tea Party. U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann says the GOP should embrace the upstarts “with full arms.” [ThinkProgress]

BURNSVILLE: A mayor’s mayor. Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautzman leads the U.S. Conference of Mayors starting today. [Minnesota Public Radio]

ST. PAUL: Mayor leans on white pine metaphor. Chris Coleman’s choice of tree for his inaugural address wasn’t entirely apt — not gnarly enough. [City Hall Scoop]

MINNEAPOLIS: All business in metaphor-free mayoral address. Better to play it safe, as R.T. Rybak did, with bullet points. [CIty of Minneapolis]

Como Student Community Cooperative. Photo: Chris Steller

The University of Minnesota has quickly, if quietly, begun to address threats posed by a toxic waste dump it discovered under student family housing in Southeast Minneapolis.

The university found the toxins under three buildings on a four-city-block residential complex last year.

On Sept. 18, 2008, workers digging a trench at the Como Student Community Cooperative found ash and debris in the ground at its complex. Samples tested that day showed high levels of several toxins, including arsenic and lead. More tests revealed more hazards, so within days, on an emergency basis, the university hauled away 558 tons of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Rosemount.

The university last week finished the first phase of cleanup work, bringing the total amount of soil removed so far to 10,000 tons.

For generations, children have lived and played on the land along East Hennepin Avenue between 27th and 29th avenues SE. And for generations, it seems, the soil around the houses has held rich deposits of lead and arsenic — so much so that a handful of dirt ingested by a child, “if it was from a hot spot, could potentially cause brain damage,” according to Lynne Grigor, project coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Toxins were detected from eight inches to eight feet below ground. Forty-eight soil tests revealed no pattern to the hot spots that would allow targeted removal.

Acting rapidly (compared to the usual pace for such projects) with more than $700,000 from Hennepin County and about $200,000 of its own money, the university last week finished the first phase of cleanup around two of the buildings, hauling away another 9,457 tons of soil.

With another application pending with the county’s brownfield fund, the university hopes to complete the cleanup next year.

Evidence of widespread effects on residents has not emerged. Several children have been tested, CSCC residents and staff said, but no one had heard of anyone showing high lead levels. University of Minnesota Environmental Health specialist Janet Dalgliesh said she knows of one case of elevated levels, for an unrelated toxin.

But it’s unclear whether that’s because the toxic dirt from the dump hasn’t affected anyone, or because people who have been affected haven’t yet been tested.

Jim Kelly, a health risk assessor at the Minnesota Department of Health, said his agency gets involved when local authorities request public health advice, or when blood tests reveal elevated lead levels in children. Neither has happened yet with CSCC, where several people said that the only tests specially spurred by the discovery — on older boys who dug deep in the dirt — didn’t have alarming results.

State law requires notification to the department only if a child younger than age six has more than 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, explained Erik Zabel, who works with immigrant populations for the department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The brains of children develop more quickly at that age and they’re more likely to get dirt in their mouths, he said.

In any case, Zabel said, the state doesn’t have responsibility to inspect for lead in Minneapolis, which has its own health department and lead-poisoning prevention programs, as well as a good rate of kids being tested.

Who knew what when?

Families of international students — married or in domestic partnerships — occupy just over half of CSCC’s 360 apartments (48 percent are from the United States or Canada, 18 percent from China). About 40 percent of the families have children, for a total population of about 1,000, according to General Manager Gerald Erickson, who has been at CSCC for 30 years and said he was surprised to learn about the pollution after the contractors found it last year.

CSCC from above. Toxins were found in soil around the three buildings at the north (upper) end of the complex. Photo: Google Maps

Once the contamination was discovered, Erickson said he left communication about it to the university’s Environmental Health staff, which provided email updates and fliers for residents and spoke at three co-op board meetings.

Board president Kendra Hernandez said the university offered to hold a special meeting for CSCC residents, but the board declined after no residents showed up at its board meeting for an announced university presentation on the topic. “There was never really a huge outcry” among residents, Hernandez said. The biggest complaint may have been about the orange fencing that kept people off the CSCC’s one recreation field and playground with swings. (An on-site child care center also used those play spaces, according to CSCC staff.)

One resident of a building where soil is being replaced, Rachel Dittli, said she considered the notices residents received adequate. But her husband, Albin, said he had concerns about dirt from the cleanup work blowing through windows into the apartment, including onto their kitchen table.

Another resident, Kaying Thao, has been less satisfied with the information she has seen since moving to a CSCC apartment in June. When she heard workers were removing ash, she thought they meant trees. Thao first learned details about the pollution Nov. 4, at a meeting of the broader neighborhood group, the Southeast Como Improvement Association (SECIA), which has made environmental efforts a priority since a pair of nearby chemical-plant fires in the late 1990s.

Two possibly affected populations are more in the dark. Residents living across the street only got notice about the pollution last week, thanks to a SECIA volunteer. Grigor said her agency will review whether adjacent properties can join the queue for state Superfund money. SECIA Environmental Coordinator Justin Eibenholtzl said he was disappointed that neither neighbors or the neighborhood group were notified.

Grigor said the pollution-control agency was also concerned about past residents of the dump-site housing, who wouldn’t know about the pollution at their former homes and may have moved to other polluted areas, increasing risks due to cumulative exposure. But while the MPCA has sometimes tried to track down people in similar situations, the health risks at CSCC aren’t high enough to trigger that sort of response, she said.

People tend to live at CSCC for only two to four years (and must move after seven), so exposure periods for individual residents are limited — a consideration in assessing risks, said the university’s Dalgleish. Short stays meant risks haven’t been “undue,” she said, but once the university learned of the pollution, any risk beyond a residential standard was “unacceptable.”

But high turnover at CSCC also means thousands of former residents don’t know they were living on a toxic waste dump.

Theories and skeptics

How did the ash get there and why did the university build housing on it?

The ash likely came from a municipal incinerator that operated in South Minneapolis from the 1930s until 1960, said Dalgleish, but dumping stopped after the university acquired the property in 1945.

Since 1947, thousands of young parents and children have lived in homes provided by the university on that property. First came quonset huts and trailers where families of G.I. Bill veterans set up housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s came CSCC.

If construction crews noticed the ash in 1982, they may have seen it more for its advantages in building foundations than for its potential hazards. Although the federal Superfund laws were in place by then, contractors’ attitudes and practices concerning polluted building sites didn’t fully change until 1990, she said.

Photo by Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A good theory?

“I think that’s absolutely it,” said Tim Busse, a spokesman for University Services, which includes both Environmental Services and Facilities Management departments. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. The university would not build housing on an ash dump now, he said, but he doesn’t think the university is going to investigate why it happened 27 years ago. “Rather than trying to fix blame, the idea is now to fix the problem and get it cleaned up for the residents,” Busse said.

But the incinerator-dump theory has some detractors among older neighborhood residents.

Joe Stimark, who turned 87 on Monday, still lives in the house where he was born, three blocks from CSCC. He remembers playing baseball there, on what were then open fields. He can tick off the factories and other industrial neighbors down through the decades. He doesn’t remember a dump at the CSCC site.

Dave Williams, 88, a neighborhood resident since 1943, lives a block away from CSCC. Long in the excavation business, he knows how the lay of the land has been altered over the years but recalls no dump on the CSCC site. His guess: the university brought in fill to make a sloping site more level for the post-war quonset huts.

Also skeptical is Connie Sullivan, a neighborhood resident since 1977 and local historian since retiring from the university faculty. Her research shows the land sat unused as railroad property for 50 years before the university bought it.

Whenever the toxic ash arrived and whatever its source, one thing is certain: young people were playing on it. Like her father before her, Stimark’s daughter, Mary Gregg, and her neighborhood friends played hide-and-seek amid waist-high grass there in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the quonsets were gone. Boys drove go-carts there, coming home splattered with mud.

In the 1970s, intramural university softball teams played on three diamonds over the dump site, recalled alum Andy Mickel.

Now, the soil under the polluted play areas has all been removed and replaced. But the long delay put a strain on families with children, said Hernandez, the co-op board president, who coaches a kids’ soccer team on the play field. The pollution cleanup’s pace may have been quick by state standards, she said, but it didn’t feel that way to residents.

“Our big field was out of commission for so long,” she said. “People said, ‘Are they ever going to be done?’”

Hennepin Energy Recovery Center with Target Field (background right). Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) won’t take a position — yet — on whether to require a new environmental study before Hennepin County’s downtown Minneapolis incinerator can burn more trash, because the agency doesn’t have a pending application for the project.

Foes of the expansion at the Hennepin facility petitioned the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board (EQB) for a new environmental assessment.

The EQB assigned the MPCA as the responsible governmental unit to decide whether the county’s proposed 20 percent increase in burning at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, operated by a private contractor, Covanta Energy.

The MPCA told three petitioner groups in letters sent this week that the agency won’t say whether a new assessment is needed without having a pending permit application from Hennepin County.

The petitions will stay current for one year, said Craig Affeldt, head of the MPCA’s environmental review unit, and the agency would restart its review upon receiving an application. The petitioners could also renew their requests if an application is still not in by September 2010, Affeldt tells the Minnesota Independent.

Covanta was stymied last summer by the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which voted down the burner expansion plan on the grounds of potential health impacts from burning more trash. Commissioners weren’t satisfied with information from the environmental review done two decades ago at the facility’s construction, and another more recent study for the new Minnesota Twins stadium across the street.

Covanta appealed to the Minneapolis City Council’s zoning and planning committee, but abruptly withdrew its application at a public hearing. A new hearing before the committee is set for next month.

Nancy Hone of Neighbors Against the Burner, interviewed before learning about the MPCA’s action, said the group is looking beyond merely stopping an expansion. “We’re going to shut it down,” Hone vowed.

Photo: H2OAlchemist, Flickr

“We’re expecting a tsunami of stuff,” state Rep. Paul Gardner, DFL-Shoreview, told the Star Tribune last month. The former executive director of the Recycling Association of Minnesota, he predicts a spike in analog TV sets hitting recyclers as the digital TV conversion deadline approaches.

A four-month delay of the mid-February switchover passed in the Senate Monday would seem to lessen the severity of that storm into a mere squall, but this afternoon House Republicans shot down a similar effort to extend the deadline, leaving the Feb. 17 transition in place.

With just three weeks to go, it raises a few questions. Will consumers opt for converting their old analog TVs or end up ditching them for newer digital-ready sets? If so, how big will the spike in discarded and toxin-laden televisions be?

The picture on that last question is fuzzy, according to local government officials, thrift store owners and landfill operators who’d likely be processing discarded sets.

Dwight (who wouldn’t give his last name), the attendant at the Burnsville Sanitary Landfill, said, “There’s probably more [TVs dropped off] than usual.”

But Mary Sherman, manager of the Savers thrift store on Minneapolis’ Lake Street, said the expected “deluge” of analog sets coming into the store didn’t come to pass. “There are more coming in, but not what I was thinking. I think maybe people are converting more than anything else,” she said.

Likewise, Susan Young, director of Minneapolis’ Solid Waste and Recycling Division, said, “Amazingly, our TV pickups are down right now.”

The city, which includes the disposal of appliances like TVs in regular solid waste fees paid by residents, is seeing far lower rates of appliance and metal pickups than the average, she said. The city usually has around 400 such pickups a day, but now that number is between 50 and 60 daily, Young said.

By contrast, the Twin Cities Salvation Army has seen a 30 percent to 40 percent increase in TVs left at their “in-demand donation sites,” the drop-offs not monitored by employees.

Three months ago, the organization stopped accepting TVs, says John Hulteen, director of operations at the Minneapolis Adult Rehabilitation Center, “because it becomes nothing but an e-waste product for us.”

Disposal of such TVs can cost $15 to $20 per set at area recyclers, but the Salvation Army has a deal with a recycler who charges 12 cents per pound. Currently, Hulteen says, the eight-store network pays nearly $4,000 each month in recycling fees.

Same for Hennepin County, which partners with the city of Minneapolis in recycling appliances. Last year, the county had 12 percent more pickups compared to 2007, said Amy Roering of Hennepin’s Environmental Services division. In 2008, 50,005 televisions were collected — 5,400 more than the year before. (Since 2001, Hennepin County has collected 278,379 sets for recycling, Roering added.)

That volume of discarded televisions could pose serious environmental problems. According to John Nordwell, owner of Hopkins’ Avista Recycling, “There’s lead in the tubes, and in the green board, there’s material that’s not good for the ground.”

But little of it will actually get into the ground. Thanks to legislation banning electronics dumping in 2006, the 2007 signing of the Electronics Recycling Act, which requires manufacturers of monitors and TVs to “collect and recycle 60 percent by weight of their products sold in Minnesota,” numbers are way up for recycling programs, according to a Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) report.

According to data provided by the MPCA’s Garth Hickle, the first year of the Act saw 153 collectors pick up a whopping 33.4 million pounds of such devices statewide.

As for Rep. Gardner’s “tsunami”? Reached by email this week, he was optimistic about recyclers’ ability to deal with discarded TVs.

“The good news is that the collection programs have been in place for awhile, a lot of consumers have gotten rid of their stockpiles and the recyclers are ready,” he said. “So hopefully the tsunami will end up being just a big wave.”

Photo: H20Alchemist, Flickr

As on Friday, five sitting justices grilled campaign attorneys, signaling dissatisfaction with both sides’ positions on a Coleman recount lawsuit. (Two of the seven-member court absented themselves because they’re serving on the State Canvassing Board that the Coleman campaign has been named as a defendant in the duplicates case.)

Roger Magnuson, Coleman’s attorney, asserted there’s evidence of double counting in 25 counties and wants the State Canvassing Board to check it out before certifying the vote. The double counting allegedly happened when voters’ original ballots got separated from the duplicate ballots onto which local election officials transferred the votes when vote-counting machines couldn’t read the original.

“This disenfranchises all the other voters,” Magnuson said, adding that the narrow margin of the race, which now unofficially has Franken at a 47-vote advantage, raises the specter “that the loser is declared the winner.”

Associate Justice Paul Anderson prodded Magnuson on questions of evidence and process. “Isn’t this an evidentiary issue best left for an election contest?” Anderson asked. (Election contests are lawsuits filed after the State Canvassing Board certifies the election results.) He also asked how the electoral emergency that the Coleman side asserts in the lawsuit measures up against the judicial yardstick scenario of a house burning down.

“[There is] enough suspicion, enough evidence,” Magnuson said. “[We're asking for] an extraordinary intervention simply to do the due diligence to settle this matter.”

Magnuson cited comments of concern about the likelihood of double-counted votes that Associate Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson made last week as a member of the State Canvassing Board. (Chief Justice Eric Magnuson was also not present for today’s hearing because, like G. Barry Anderson, he’s on the State Canvassing Board.) Associate Justice Alan Page bristled at that: “Our fellow justices aren’t here and they don’t have to wrestle with this issue like we do.”

One major point of contention was how much work the requested court action would compel on the part of local election officials. Attorney Magnuson said it would be limited to 25 precincts statewide; “They’re cherry picking,” Franken attorney Bill Pentelovich countered. The Coleman camp is trying to rewrite agreed-upon rules for counting duplicate ballots, he said, and to ensure fairness “all 4,001 precincts would have to be recounted.”

Attorney Dan Rogan, speaking on behalf of defendant Hennepin County, said Coleman’s suit was wrong to single out counties at all because the remedy of recounting bypasses county canvassing boards.

Assistant Minneapolis City Attorney Peter Ginder said statements by City Elections Director Cindy Reichert about cases of double-counted votes — which Coleman’s camp frequently cites to buttress its claims — merely represented one of several possible explanations for tabulation discrepancies.

Attorney General Lori Swanson asserted the State Canvassing Board’s duty to sidestep the duplicate ballot question since — despite four of its members being judges — it has no authority to conduct the necessary fact-finding and make judgements based on such evidence.

That wasn’t sufficient, Attorney Magnuson said: “This court ought not to remain passive because this particular issue might determine the election in terms of who’s declared [victor].”

With that the court adjourned, making no immediate ruling from the bench — though a decision could come at any time.