Hennepin County Surveilled Anti-HERC Activists Since 2023

A report released by the Zero Burn Coalition documents years of surveillance conducted against activists pushing for clean air in Minneapolis. The revelations came from documents that the organization

Minneapolis, MN — A report released by the Zero Burn Coalition documents years of surveillance conducted against activists pushing for clean air in Minneapolis. The revelations came from documents that the organization obtained through public information requests.

At the center of this is the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC), a nearly 40-year-old trash incinerator neighboring Target Field in Minneapolis permitted to burn 365,000 tons of garbage annually. Activists, including those with the Zero Burn Coalition, have advocated for its closure for years, citing the amount of pollution it produces and the disproportionate effect on marginalized communities.

A short walk to the west of the facility is historically Black and working-class neighborhoods of North Minneapolis, which bear the brunt of the plant’s pollution.

Coinciding with the release of the report on Oct. 22, community members and Minnesota Environmental Justice Table (MNEJT) activists and leaders convened along Olson Memorial Highway in the Heritage Park neighborhood for a press conference, in full view of HERC’s foreboding smoke stacks on the other side of Interstate 94.

“Instead of addressing the concerns raised by residents, the county has devoted staff time and resources to tracking the people organizing for change,” MNEJT Associate Director Adina Black said. “This raises serious questions about accountability, transparency, and the county’s treatment of the communities it has a responsibility to serve.”

The eight-page report details seven separate instances of the county surveilling activists and the role former environmental justice leader Joe Vital played in that.

Vital was a part of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute’s successful push to acquire the former Roof Depot site from the city of Minneapolis in 2023. Since then, he has become Hennepin County’s Environmental Engagement Coordinator and would attend activist meetings to feed his notes to other Hennepin County employees, such as the county’s Department of Environment and Energy Assistant Director David McNary.

The report alleges that Vital also attempted to learn the identity of a county whistleblower through conversation with Minnesota Environmental Justice Table’s co-founder Nazir Khan.

In emails acquired by the Zero Burn Coalition, McNary would forward alerts from the activists to Tim Steinbeck, the president of Great River Energy, the company operating HERC. McNary and Steinbeck both served simultaneously as the treasurer-secretary of Minnesota Resource Recovery Association, a group formed by leaders of the incinerator industry.

In March 2024, an amortization bill was introduced in the state legislature that would allow cities to phase out sources of pollution in vulnerable neighborhoods without requiring them to do so. The House committee considering the bill narrowed it to only the state’s largest cities.

Under Minnesota law at the time, amortization could only be used against adult-only stores and criminal nuisances.

While advocates rallied around the bill, McNary forwarded the private emails of activists to Steinbeck and other industry representatives, urging them to oppose it.

“They start with the big cities and before long it will be the entire state,” McNary wrote in the email thread while pushing the idea that the amortization process would come to affect other industries.

Read all of the documents published to the public by the Zero Burn Coalition.

HERC, which began operation in 1989, is a “waste-to-energy” facility, meaning it produces energy for the power grid by incinerating garbage. Since its construction, the population within five kilometers of the plant has grown to nearly 250,000.

Despite politicians and others framing “waste-to-energy” as environmentally friendly, a peer-reviewed study published in 2023 found that “incinerators emit more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity produced … than any other power source.” The study also added that the inclusion of incinerators in “‘renewable’ or ‘clean’ energy standards is thus counterproductive, as they also divert more than $40 million in subsidies annually from cleaner energy sources.”

HERC, which has been operated by Great River Energy since 2018, annually produces roughly 350,000 million tons of carbon dioxide and 72,000 million tons of incinerator ashes, according to a report published on Oct. 13 by the international environmental advocacy organization Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).

The report titled, The Burn Book: Incinerators that Threaten the Climare, Public Health, and our Finances, covers 20 incinerator facilities from around the world, including three in the United States.

“This facility actually has garnered international attention,” Minnesota Environmental Justice campaign manager Isuru Herath said, referencing GAIA’s report. “So there’s no reason why Hennepin County cannot move towards actually setting the closure date because this issue extends beyond the state of Minnesota.”

The community response long predates the plant’s current opposition, going all the way back to hazmat suit-dressed protesters parading around the office of then-Hennepin County Commissioner Randy Johnson during the planning phase in the mid-1980s. Although the protests did not stop the project, they continued for the next several decades.

In October 2023, numerous organizations came together to form the Zero Burn Coalition, which explicitly focuses on and organizes against HERC, advocating for the facility’s complete closure.

“[HERC] concentrates pollution, health risk, and harm in neighborhoods that are disproportionately low-income and people of color, while wealthier parts of the county send their trash here and bear none of the burden,” the organization’s website reads.

On Oct. 24, 2023, the Hennepin County board of commissioners adopted a resolution to plan for the facility’s closure sometime between 2028 and 2040. The county’s Zero Waste Plan, released that same year, calls specifically for a 90% reduction in waste from landfills and incinerators.

More than a year later, on Oct. 30, 2024, the Minneapolis City Council approved a resolution to permanently close HERC by Dec. 31, 2027. The resolution relied on the city’s 2017 Zero Waste Plan, a “road map for the city to achieve its waste reduction goals,” that plans for 80% of the city’s waste to be recycled or composted by 2030.

That resolution, however, is non-binding and does not actually force Hennepin County to close the plant within that time frame.

Zero Burn Coalition is holding a community response meeting on Thursday, Nov. 5 at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

Images, including cover image, are from screen grabs of video contributed by L. Cam Anderson.

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