Angry emails poured into Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Commissioner Katrina Kessler’s inbox in November 2023, days after Sahan Journal reported that Smith Foundry in south Minneapolis had been violating a federal air quality law for several years.
Residents wanted to know why it took a surprise visit from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency investigators to reveal that the facility emitted twice as much pollution as allowed by its state permit. The metal foundry in one of Minneapolis’ most diverse neighborhoods, East Phillips, had been accused of violating the Clean Air Act for five years when the EPA issued its findings in August 2023.
Kessler responded to one query with a line she would later come to regret: “The EPA also informed MPCA staff that the violations in its Notice of Violations were not a risk to human health,” Kessler wrote, according to email records obtained by Sahan Journal.
Darin Broton, then-director of external affairs for the MPCA, used the same line that month when responding to an email from Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez, whose ward includes Smith Foundry. Broton added that MPCA leaders were asking to meet with Smith Foundry “as soon as possible.”
Kessler and other top brass at the MPCA scrambled to respond to the host of Minneapolis residents, local politicians and environmentalists who questioned why the state hadn’t kept a closer eye on a facility neighbors had complained about for years.
Internal emails from the weeks after Sahan Journal first reported about the EPA violations show that the agency was unprepared to respond to community concerns, downplayed the public harm and allowed a new permit application for Smith Foundry to languish for years. Sahan Journal reviewed hundreds of emails sent and received by MPCA staff in 2023 relating to Smith Foundry, which showed that the agency knew of the violations for months, but had no plans to share the news with residents.
After news coverage of the violations prompted months of contentious community meetings and protests, the EPA in June reached a settlement with Smith Foundry that barred the facility from operating metal melting and pouring lines, essentially removing its ability to be a foundry, and fined the company $80,000.
Zynik Capital, Smith’s parent company, announced plans to continue using the building as a metal finishing facility when the settlement was reached. But the company later said that obtaining a new permit from the MPCA was too difficult, and closed the facility permanently on August 15.
“The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s long-standing focus is to protect the environment and ensure the health and wellness of all Minnesotans, and we expect all companies in Minnesota to follow our environmental laws. The MPCA supported the EPA’s enforcement action and agreement with Smith Foundry,” said a statement issued by the agency after the closure announcement.
But internal emails show that focus waned, and that the MPCA was ill-equipped to ensure compliance from facilities, including Smith Foundry, located in environmental justice neighborhoods.
In a recent interview with Sahan Journal, Kessler said she regrets telling residents the violations didn’t harm human health. That response, she said, was the result of a misunderstanding based on the EPA’s belief that the foundry didn’t need to be immediately shuttered.
“I think there are many things that are frustrating and disappointing that have come to light based on the way that we weren’t organized internally, the way that we weren’t resourced internally. And we have learned and improved based on this experience, and I totally own that,” Kessler said.
MPCA learned from the Smith Foundry violations, and has a new emphasis on hiring inspectors and permit engineers to review facilities in environmental justice areas, Kessler said. Minnesota defines environmental justice areas as census tracts where more than 40% of residents are people of color or speak a language other than English at home, or 35% of the population is at or below 200% of the federal poverty line.
Scramble mode
The EPA notified the MPCA on May 15, 2023, that it would be conducting several unannounced inspections at facilities in environmental justice neighborhoods in Minneapolis that are regulated by the MPCA via state-issued permits. The visits would include stops at Smith Foundry and its nextdoor neighbor, Bituminous Roadways, on May 26, according to emails between the agencies.
The EPA invited MPCA to send its own inspectors to participate. The state chose not to.
The EPA had regular correspondence with the MPCA inquiring about Smith Foundry after the inspection, and notified Minnesota officials in advance that a federal Notice of Violation would be issued on August 15 outlining the foundry’s failings. The violation was shared with the land and air compliance manager of the MPCA’s industrial division when it was issued.
Kessler told Sahan Journal she was informed of the Smith Foundry violations in late October 2023, but didn’t learn the details until she read about them in the news. The agency didn’t have internal policies in place at the time to immediately inform leadership about federal investigations in the state.
While some at the MPCA knew of the EPA case, word of the violations documented at Smith Foundry were not widely spread within the agency. Several staff members found out by reading the November 2 Sahan Journal article, which was the first time the violations were widely disclosed publicly.
Jose Luis Villaseñor, who coordinates the MPCA’s environmental justice advisory group, emailed Kessler, Broton and other top MPCA staff the week after the story ran, saying he received dozens of calls from community members about the violations. He said he was unaware of the EPA findings until he read the article.
“I have to share that as someone who lives less than half a block from Smith Foundry, I am also frustrated that I was unaware of this information,” Villaseñor wrote. “The EJ [environmental justice] team has always encouraged MPCA staff to honor our commitment to authentic community engagement by inform (sic) communities as soon as we know what is happening at the facilities we regulate in communities like the one my son and I live in.”
Notice of Violations issued by the EPA are public information, but MPCA leadership said in an interview that they did not know that, and did not think that they were allowed to share the news with the public.
Shortly after Sahan Journal’s first story published, Broton sent a message to other members of MPCA’s leadership team warning them to expect a slew of angry emails that were sure to hit their inboxes. Hundreds of messages came in from community members and local elected officials. Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley wrote to agency leadership on November 6, asking for the MPCA’s stance on environmental racism and urging them to hold a public meeting.
Internal emails show that the MPCA urgently tried to get the EPA to participate in a community meeting about the violations, but the federal agency initially declined the invitation, citing its policy to not discuss ongoing violation cases.
Kessler emailed her staff on November 8.
“I think we need to re-ask EPA and [EPA Staff member] to attend,” she wrote.
Broton emailed the EPA employee expressing frustration that the federal agency didn’t want to participate in the community meeting. He complained about being forced to explain to environmental justice groups that the EPA’s Notice of Violations was not the agency’s final ruling.
“It is not the MPCA’s role to explain the EPA process, but the lack of engagement/ communication from the federal agency is forcing us into this uncomfortable position,” Broton wrote.
Ultimately the EPA agreed to send staff members to a November 27 public meeting at an East Phillips recreation center, the first time the MPCA and EPA met with community members about the violations.
Angry residents packed the room, noting their longstanding concerns about the facility and asking pointed questions of the MPCA. The meeting was tense, with dozens of neighbors telling stories about holding their children during asthma attacks and losing young family members to heart conditions. They felt ignored and disrespected, shunted to the side due to the neighborhood’s diverse, working-class makeup.
Jolene Jones, a longtime resident of East Phillips’ Little Earth of United Tribes community, told officials at the meeting that the foundry has angered residents since Little Earth was built in the 1970s. East Phillips is in south Minneapolis, bordered by Lake Street to the south, 24th Street to the north, Hiawatha Avenue to the east and Bloomington Avenue to the west.
“We’ve complained about the Smith Foundry since day one,” Jones said at the meeting.
Kessler and other MPCA staff who attended the meeting absorbed the criticism in a state of shock. One compliance staffer became emotional and said it wasn’t easy for the agency to hear the comments.
“I am taking it in, honestly,” Kessler said at the meeting.
The agency learned from that fallout that it needs to strengthen its internal policies and share news of federal violations with leadership, Kessler said in her interview with Sahan Journal. The MPCA has added staff who coordinate information between the public and federal and state agencies, and staff who specifically work on community engagement in environmental justice areas.
“We need to change the playbook and really look for ways to engage with communities, particularly environmental justice communities, when we are looking at enforcement in their communities,” said Frank Kohlasch, MPCA’s assistant commissioner for air and climate policy.
Allison Lind, a pediatric nurse practitioner, brings her son to the Circulo de Amigos Child Care Center near Smith Foundry. Her husband is Dominican, and they wanted to send their child to a Spanish immersion school so that he can communicate with relatives. Like many parents, she thought about curriculum, cost and location when choosing a daycare.
“Never did I think, ‘Is the daycare located across the street from an EPA- and OSHA-violating facility emitting lead into the air?’” Lind said.
She often transports him to school on a bicycle and started noticing the smog and harsh smell when she rolled by Smith Foundry. Lind began complaining about the foundry to the MPCA in October 2023, and continued to after news of the EPA violations broke the next month. That’s when she realized it had been going on for years. Her son has asthma, and she learned that many foundry neighbors suffer from respiratory issues. But, she said, the MPCA often didn’t respond to her emails.
After the news broke, Lind submitted a letter to the editor to the Star Tribune documenting her complaints and calling for the facility to be shut down. At the MPCA, Broton asked staff members to track down complaints they had received from Lind, internal emails show.
Permit delays
Smith Foundry operated on a five-year air permit issued in 1992. The permit was extended indefinitely using a process known as an application shield, in which the company technically applied for a new permit in the ‘90s, but was able to operate under its original permit in perpetuity.
In 2008, the Minnesota Legislature passed a law led by former Representative Karen Clark, an East Phillips resident. Clark brought charts and maps showing the high rates of health issues like asthma and heart conditions in her community, which was zoned to allow industrial facilities. The industrial zoning made it a prime target for redlining, a racist housing policy that penned people of color into pollution-heavy neighborhoods.
The law established the neighborhood as the state’s first environmental justice area, and required new MPCA permits for polluting facilities to go through what is known as a cumulative impacts analysis, where the total pollution in an area is considered before a permit is issued.
Smith Foundry began the process of applying for a new permit with the MPCA in 2016, but the progress was slow. The foundry shared a lot with asphalt producer Bituminous Roadways, and the MPCA needed information from both facilities to conduct its analysis, which caused delays.
Seven years later, the permit was still undergoing its cumulative impacts analysis, according to Kohlasch.
“It’s very unclear what has happened in the past six years. And one person working on the permit has raised the lack of urgency in the past as well. If Smith Foundry is a priority permit, it sure doesn’t feel like one,” Broton wrote in a November 3 email to Kessler and other top MPCA officials.
Broton left the MPCA in May 2024 to join the Minnesota AgriGrowth Council, a nonprofit which lobbies on behalf of the agriculture and food industry.
Sahan Journal asked the MPCA about the permit’s status in November 2023. In response, permit staff at the agency sent an email to their communications director saying that the permit was “in a lull,” and that the MPCA expected more information from the company in 2024.
On November 20, 2023, in response to internal inquiries about the delays for a new Smith Foundry permit, MPCA air permitting engineer Cassandra Meyer said it was due to “chronic understaffing and shifting workload priorities with multiple engineers assigned over the years.”
The MPCA takes direction from the EPA and the Minnesota Legislature on which permits it prioritizes, Kohlasch told Sahan Journal. The EPA has the MPCA focus on large, high-emitting pollution sources like power plants and incinerators. The Legislature encourages the MPCA to review permits for construction and expansion projects.
The MPCA knew Smith Foundry was a controversial facility in the community, Kohlasch said, but when larger projects came up, its permit was pushed to the back burner.
“Smith Foundry was neither one of those,” Kohlasch said of the EPA and Legislature’s priorities, “and it did take longer than we would like.”
The EPA cited Smith Foundry for excessive, uncontrolled pollution that emerged from its main metal casting and pouring area. That part of the foundry had no pollution control device, and emissions flowed out of the building from a central roof vent. The EPA calculated that Smith Foundry emitted double the amount of particulate matter that was allowed by its state permit.
The MPCA collects annual emissions data from facilities it regulates. Those emissions are used to calculate the fees that air permit holders pay each year. That work is separate from the agency’s compliance and enforcement department.
The EPA took self-reported hourly emissions from Smith Foundry, and calculated what those amounts totaled over a year to find the heightened emissions. The MPCA rarely did that sort of analysis.
“We haven’t done that as much as we’d like in the past, because until recently, we had a very limited number of air inspectors and 2,200 facilities to be responsible for,” Kohlasch said.
The MPCA receives instructions from the EPA on what kind of facilities to prioritize for inspections. The federal government encouraged the MPCA to focus on inspecting large facilities that are major sources of industrial pollution, which did not include smaller facilities in residential neighborhoods like Smith Foundry, Kohlasch said.
The MPCA fined Smith Foundry $13,871 in 2005 for similar issues uncovered by the EPA in 2023: poor recordkeeping, failure to contain emissions and not notifying the state about changes to its pollution control equipment.
Making changes
Since Smith Foundry’s violations came to light, the MPCA requested and received funding for four permit engineers and seven air inspectors who will focus on environmental justice areas, Kohlasch said. The agency also has new staff who will do more community engagement work in environmental justice areas, to hear from residents about issues in their neighborhoods.
“This is the first time we have the appropriation language and the funding language that specifically prioritizes this work in environmental justice areas,” Kohlasch said.
For East Phillips, the EPA’s inspection of Smith Foundry and its neighbor, Bituminous Roadways, should lead to an improvement in air quality. Bituminous Roadways, an asphalt producer, accelerated plans to leave the neighborhood after the inspection, according to internal emails from the MPCA, and the foundry is closed for good.
Neighbors gathered at a park in East Phillip’s Little Earth community on August 16, 2024, the day after Smith Foundry shut down. They celebrated a new peace of mind and cleaner air for future generations, and remembered the years of community activism and complaints that often went ignored.
Joe Vital, who grew up in East Phillips and is an organizer with the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute board, spoke at the celebration and congratulated generations of area residents who endured and fought against pollution from Smith Foundry over the years. Vital was one of the few community members who first learned about the EPA violations. He was informed by an MPCA staff member at an unrelated community meeting in the fall of 2023, and tipped off Sahan Journal about the violations.
“This is a long time coming,” Vital said.
