Dangerous dust in Southport pushes St. Paul residents to take action
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Ron Huy pulled his two dogs in a cart behind him as he walked along the railroad Saturday in Southport, an industrial zone in St. Paul.
He sometimes waits to walk until later in the day, when the metal recycling facility near his home is closed. His skin itches from what he believes is fiberglass drifting from the recycler.
“It’s my neighbor, you know. What can I do?” he said.
Huy sometimes sees plumes of dust blowing off the dirt lots and roads in the strip of residential land where he lives between a railroad and a highway. His car is dirty the day after he cleans it, and the air often feels heavy. When trains idle, sometimes for hours, “rotten diesel” smells drift toward his home.
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Huy is far from the only resident who said they struggle dealing with the pollution in their neighborhood. To combat the potential health hazard, the St. Paul City Council is considering an ordinance requiring businesses to mitigate dust in the area.
Council President Rebecca Noecker represents the area and met with residents last spring.
“Even in the hour and a half I spent there, I felt it in my throat and the back of my mouth — my lungs, my nose, my eyes,” she said. “There clearly is dust pollution there.”
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency put an air quality monitor outside a neighborhood church in 2020. For pollutants like dust, soot or fumes, the agency determines how much is too much using two thresholds: a primary standard created to protect public health, and a secondary “welfare” standard, which accounts for issues like visibility or damage to buildings.
Every year since 2020, the monitor showed pollution surpassed the secondary standard. In 2023, it leapt over the primary standard.
An agency spokesperson told MPR News the state can't enforce the standards because it can't identify which businesses are the ones polluting. Plus, none of the facilities have air permits with the state.
The agency plans to collect more data by placing a mobile air monitor in the neighborhood for several weeks beginning this month, according to the spokesperson.
‘Don’t be sorry. Do something about it.’
Miguel Brito, an organizer with the West Side Community Organization, grew up attending Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church that now houses an air quality monitor on its property. Last year, he began knocking on doors in the neighborhood and organizing meetings for residents.
“People are done with being told that their situation is not fair,” Brito said. “They’ll hear from institutions like, ‘Oh, we're sorry you're going through this.’ Don’t be sorry. Do something about it."
Brito met Samantha Sanchez, a mother of two who lives in the same townhouse complex as Huy, while knocking doors. Sanchez said the pollution is especially hard on her kids.
Her youngest is a baby, who developed breathing problems at 5 months old. She thought it was a cold.
But as the months went on, his coughing worsened. She’s had to take him to the emergency room. Doctors prescribed him a nebulizer, which she gives him a couple times each day.
She’s cautious about letting her kids play outside. And she’s convinced the dust in the air is to blame.
“That to me is so bogus, because why do I have to drive 10 minutes away for my kids to play at a park or outside?" she said.
Others in the neighborhood told MPR News they have asthma and respiratory issues due to what they believe is poor air quality.
Sanchez pointed to state health data suggesting asthma hospitalizations are more common in their zip code, which spans a larger area on the city’s west side, than the average for the Twin Cities metro.
Sanchez is trying to move, but she’s also working with other advocates to ask St. Paul to step in.
Following Detroit’s example
Noecker said she hopes to introduce an ordinance before the end of the year, after meeting with businesses in the area and working with the city attorney. She said it would likely be similar to a proposal Brito, Sanchez and Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy attorney Ashlynn Kendzior brought to the council last month.
They pitched modeling the ordinance after one Detroit approved in 2024. It requires industrial businesses near homes to create a plan to keep dust from spreading. Kendzior said while she researched a “handful” of dust ordinances around the country, Detroit was the largest city she found with one.
The state has a similar rule that requires quote "reasonable precautions" to prevent what it calls "fugitive dust" from escaping property lines.
But again, Noecker said, it's difficult to enforce.
“If no one is making sure it happens, then it's not worth more than the paper it's printed on,” she said. “By passing an ordinance at the city level, what we can do is, even if it duplicates something that exists at the state, now we at the city have the enforcement authority."
Noecker said the Department of Safety and Inspections would enforce the ordinance. Penalties could include fines or action against business licenses.
A spokesperson for the St. Paul Port Authority, which owns much of the land in the area, told MPR News its tenants try to control dust, like paying to sweep the main road through the industrial zone and limiting traffic speed. The metal recycler, EMR, owns its own property and did not respond to a request for comment.
John Perlich, the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce's Vice President of Government Affairs, is holding judgement on a potential dust ordinance until he sees the language. But he's wary of adding regulation he says could make it harder to do business.
"If, for some reason, the current state dust mitigation ordinance isn't working, what is the best avenue to address that? Is it a duplicative city ordinance, or is it a change in state law?" he said.
City planning for everyone
For Brito, it makes sense for the city to act, because the situation resulted from city planning. He traced to the history of the West Side Flats, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood that was prone to flooding.
After an especially destructive flood, the city bought and tore down homes and created an industrial park.
Brito said many families in the area, and even Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, moved from the West Side Flats to Southport.
"When we talk to residents about environmental racism and classism, it's like the things that you're going through were part of city planning that didn't take into consideration everyone as a human being," he said.
Today, Southport is still home to many immigrants. When Huy first moved there in the 1990s, a lot of his neighbors were, like him, refugees from Cambodia. He said he met his childhood best friend, and current next-door neighbor, in a refugee camp.
After leaving the neighborhood for a while, Huy moved back about 10 years ago. With his kids grown, he wanted to be closer to his friend, even if it meant dealing with the dust.
“I’m a single father myself, so I like to be around with people that I grew up with,” he said.
