Star Tribune
Saturday, August 21, 2010
By RANDY FURST
The state Department of Human Rights announced Friday that it will open a regional office Sept. 1 in St. Cloud, a changing community beset in recent years by sporadic controversies over racism and discrimination.
Though city leaders and civil rights activists welcomed the news, they said the area's problems are no different than those of other metropolitan areas that have grown more diverse.
The new office will be staffed by a full-time enforcement officer and a part-time administrative assistant, making it possible for people to file complaints locally.
Jeff Holman, a Human Rights Department spokesman, said it will be the only regional office in the state. He said Duluth had a regional office in the early 1980s. He said the new office "happened because people in St. Cloud came to us and asked us to establish the office."
The office will be a partnership between the Human Rights Department and a joint powers board of city officials from St. Cloud and nearby St. Joseph, with hopes other communities abutting St. Cloud will also join, said St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis.
"It has probably been talked about since before I was mayor, and I have been mayor for five years," Kleis said. Plans for the office first were announced by Gov. Tim Pawlenty at a Martin Luther King Day celebration in St. Cloud in January 2008, but Kleis said it took time to set it up and get the funding from St. Cloud and St. Joseph.
Much of that money will come from community development block grant funds. Kleis said St. Cloud has had an employee in the city attorney's office assigned to human rights cases for years, but the employee lacked enforcement power.
Although there have been sporadic news reports about racism and discrimination in St. Cloud, Holman declined to discuss them, referring questions to Kleis, who chose his words carefully.
"About 10 percent of the region's population is minorities," he said. "There has been an increase in the immigrant population since 2002. There have been isolated issues of racism, no different than any city in the nation. I believe St. Cloud is a very welcoming community."
Katrina Scott, president of the St. Cloud NAACP, applauded the news about the new office. She said her office gets "a lot of complaints" of housing discrimination from people who say they were turned down for apartments for what they believe were bogus reasons. She said the office also gets calls from parents, the majority immigrants from Somalia and other parts of Africa, who say their children were mistreated in school.
She said racism and discrimination in St. Cloud are "more blatant, in-your-face" than in the Twin Cities, where she used to live. But she said St. Cloud is not unlike many other cities facing racial issues and that those problems do not reflect the city as a whole.
The budget for the regional office is $55,000 for the rest of 2010, and $110,000 annually for 2011 and 2012.
It will be staffed full time by J. Richard Cousin, currently employed by a state workforce center in St. Cloud. He previously was a federal police officer for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Duluth.
"Discriminatory acts seldom follow strict political or geographic boundaries," James Kirkpatrick, the state human rights commissioner, said in a statement. "For this reason, we have established a regional human rights office in the St. Cloud area to increase enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and promote the goal of eliminating discrimination in the state of Minnesota."
Staff researcher John Wareham contributed to this article. Randy Furst • 612-673-7382
Source: Star Tribune