Protecting the Health of East Phillips Residents

To Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; Public Works Director Margaret Anderson Kelliher; City Council President Andrea Jenkins; Katrina Kessler, Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency; Brooke Cunningham, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Health; Heidi Richie, Interim Commissioner of the Minneapolis Department of Health; and the Minneapolis Public Health Advisory Committee:

The City of Minneapolis’s proposed “Hiawatha Campus Expansion” project in East Phillips would significantly increase air pollution for years to come in one of the most polluted neighborhoods in Minnesota—until recently a Superfund site, in the top 10% of particulate pollution in the state, and with an asthma hospitalization rate 2-4 times that of the Twin Cities metro area as a whole.

The City has a moral obligation to this area: to reduce local pollution rather than intensify it. The City recognized its special obligation to its most extraordinarily polluted and economically deprived neighborhoods when it declared them to be “Green Zones.” Yet in East Phillips, the heart of the Southside Green Zone, it is intent on adding still more pollution, and steamrolling residents—including residents of Little Earth, the nation’s only Indigenous-preference Section 8 housing community—who have been fighting against the plan for years.

Much of the additional pollution would come from an expanded fleet of diesel trucks refueling at a renovated Public Works facility. Diesel emissions—both particulates and gasses—contribute to life-altering and life-threatening health problems, including asthma, cardiovascular disease, stroke, lung cancer, and diabetes, as well as impaired cognitive development and ADHD in children and Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in adults. And beyond diesel emissions, the ultrafine particles generated by brake wear and by tires-on-road friction generate health hazards that can rival those of diesel emissions.

This Public Works project would intensify pollution for exactly the populations for whom reducing pollution should be a top policy priority. The immediate neighborhood of the proposed facility houses two major sources of industrial pollution, Smith Foundry and Bituminous Roadways (an asphalt plant). East Phillips is ringed by freeways and other major thoroughfares. The volume of pollution generated by these heavily-used roadways has ironically served as a justification for adding pollution through the Public Works project.

Research shows that the health impacts of pollution are worse for people who are exposed to other pollution, who are in poverty, and who experience other consequences of systemic racism. By those measures, East Phillips—one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in Minnesota, and with about 40% of children below the federal poverty line—is one of the worst possible places to add emissions.

Climate change is likely to make these cumulative consequences of pollution even worse. Placing this facility in Phillips is a long-term decision by the City of Minneapolis to de-prioritize Phillips residents’ access to clean air for decades to come.

Compromises offered by the city around electrification and other pollution mitigation efforts offer few significant or enforceable measures to protect residents; they include prioritized tree planting, an “electrification advisory service,” and traffic calming. These vague, unenforceable promises mean little.

Mayor Frey and the City of Minneapolis can and should do more to honor their commitments to environmental justice. For too long, the lives of East Phillips residents have been an afterthought or talking point. Valuing lives means concrete action: committing to no new diesel in East Phillips, even if that substantially alters the Public Works project scope, timeline, or location.

In service of protecting the health of East Phillips residents, we, the undersigned, call on the City of Minneapolis and state agencies to take concrete, transparent, and verifiable steps to ensure that air pollution in East Phillips doesn’t increase—it goes down.

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To become an organizational signatory, please email us.