Vice President Kamala Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit a clinic that provides abortions in St. Paul on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Months later, President Joe Biden withdrew as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate, and Harris took his place at the top of the ticket. Photo by Madison McVan/Minnesota Reformer.
There’s a certain type of email that consistently arrives in my inbox — it’s long, and it describes one issue or story that the author has researched at length. It’s often conspiratorial in tone, and accompanied by pages of links and documents to back up the author’s account.
Lots of reporters get these emails. Sometimes they’re anonymous, nonsensical ramblings. Other times they’re just hate mail. But in some cases, they’re legitimate — the person writing them is experiencing a real problem, and the issues they lay out in the email are not being covered by other news outlets.
I learned from former Reformer reporter Deena Winter that those emails, even when they seem like out-there conspiracies, are always worth reading and investigating, because they can lead you to the best stories.
An email like that led me to the issues many homeowners in Minnesota are facing with their homeowners’ associations. Without a single statewide organization to advocate for homeowners’ association reform, a few homeowners have taken it upon themselves to research, raise awareness of and organize around HOAs.
Toward the end of the year, I reported the first two stories in a series we’re calling “HOA files,” which examines the impact of homeowners’ associations, property management companies and insurance on homeowners in the state. I plan to publish more stories in this vein next year.
Housing at the Legislature
The 2024 legislative session was my first in Minnesota and I followed a series of ambitious housing policies pushed by lawmakers who want to build more types of housing in more places.
All of those policies failed: eliminating city-imposed parking minimums for new buildings; banning single-family zoning statewide; allowing apartments to be built in areas zoned for commercial use, and more. Following those bills, and their unceremonious death at the Legislature, was an instructive lesson for me in the workings of Minnesota state politics.
And, because some of them garnered bipartisan support, I suspect we’ll see similar conversations happening again next session — possibly accompanied by smaller, more realistic bills.
Odds and ends
My favorite part of working at the Reformer is that my editor will always publish a good story — even if it’s outside my usual area of coverage.
Some of my favorite stories this year came from one-off events or ideas.
I finally got a chance to write a story that I’d been considering for years: a deep dive into the small-town politics surrounding the proposed expansion of a dairy in Winona County. (After this story ran, higher courts continued to uphold the county’s ban on large livestock operations.)
When I was on the phone with a source in Waite Park, she mentioned that the mass at her church had been canceled, and that it had been the only Spanish-language mass in the St. Cloud metro. I ran with the story, especially since local news wasn’t covering the issue, and our story reached lots of central Minnesotans.
I covered Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to a St. Paul Planned Parenthood, months before she took over as the Democratic presidential candidate.
And I wrote this feature about Minnesota’s religious left. I’ve always been interested in how politics and religion intersect, and it was the perfect excuse to have long conversations with thoughtful people about how they arrived at their personal beliefs and values.
I’m looking forward to the stories that 2025 brings us.