Anne Steffan wanted to blow the whistle on Rodd Hansen, an unlicensed plumber she hired for her kitchen repair. She was frustrated by the delays in the project, especially after she had paid about $17,000 in advance. After Steffan contacted Whistleblower, I found out that she wasn’t the first person to be fooled by Hansen’s claim that he was a licensed plumber. In my story for Sunday’s paper, I mentioned a 74-year-old woman who had previously contacted the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry to file a complaint against Hansen. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Stadler called me earlier this month to say he’s got a problem with a neighbor. In this case, the neighbor was a tall ash tree with an ominous crack that could send one of its two main branches crashing into his yard. The tree grows on a property that was foreclosed on last year, so Stadler didn’t know who was responsible for it. Stadler said he couldn’t persuade the city to remove the menacing tree. Unlike the leaning tree of Fridley, whose ownership is still in question, this one was definitely on private property. So he called Whistleblower.

This week I traveled up to the 2000 block of Russell Avenue North, in Minneapolis’s Willard-Hay neighborhood, to see the arboreal menace for myself. It wasn’t hard to find.

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My story today about two Brooklyn Center widows’ outrage about the movement of their husbands’ headstones gave me a crash course in cemetery regulation in Minnesota. The Minnesota Department of Health’s Mortuary Science Section has these duties: “Licenses funeral homes, crematories, morticians, funeral directors and oversee cemetery regulation.” David Benke, the section manager, told me that his office wouldn’t get involved in questions of markers and monuments.

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Last week, my colleague Chris Serres’ reported on the collapse of BankFirst, the 55th bank failure in the nation this year, blamed on risky real estate loans in urban areas. That’s a good description of the financing deal that has left a luxury senior housing cooperative, the Gramercy Club of Edina, in foreclosure limbo. Last year, I described how BankFirst was suing each resident individually as part of its effort to foreclose on the co-op’s owner. In February, that owner declared bankruptcy.

This week, I checked in with Jim Campbell, a co-op resident who has taken a leadership role in the residents’ effort to stay in their homes. Campbell told me the co-op is still in real estate paralysis, unable to sell any of its vacant units, although five of them have been rented out. The bankruptcy of the co-op developer delayed the foreclosure proceedings for months. But it isn’t over. Even the government shut-down of the lead creditor can’t stop it - the debt on the $25 million loan still exists, and it’s actually parceled out among 30 or so entities, he said.

His side of the lawsuit was required to submit comments to the judge earlier this week. “I have no idea as to whether the other side [BankFirst] even exists enough to put in any comments,” he said.

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