County shared activist emails with incinerator industry, records show
Newly released emails show Hennepin County officials monitored environmental justice activists working to close the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC), the waste incinerator in north Minneapolis, activist groups allege. The Zero Burn Coalition, the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table (MNEJT), and other advocacy groups and leaders obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request and published some of those emails in a report, saying county employees collected intelligence on activists and shared it with supervisors and, in some instances, with industry, including the company that owns the incinerator.
Hennepin County disputed the account. The allegations “mischaracterize the county’s community engagement work and staff responsibilities,” the county said through a spokesperson, adding that officials “routinely attend public community meetings, stakeholder discussions and participate in social media to listen, learn, share information, and understand different perspectives on issues affecting the county and our residents.” A spokesperson separately described the actions as “ordinary functions of government” and said “the county seeks to find alignment, when possible, but working together does not mean agreement on every issue.”
Much of the alleged operation ran through Joe Vital, the county’s environmental engagement coordinator, hired in 2021, who many in environmental justice leadership had considered an ally and associate, according to the report. Vital previously chaired the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party Native Peoples Caucus, worked with MNEJT members to oppose Line 3, an Enbridge fossil fuel pipeline proposal, and helped lead fights against other area polluters. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In June 2023, advocates held a Zoom meeting, open to the public, to plan next steps in their campaign to shut down the incinerator; organizers vet participants to determine whether industry or political opponents are present. Vital went unnoticed in the advocates’ screening process, MNEJT executive director Nazir Khan told the Guardian. Khan said the environmental groups screen for potential county or industry employees and greet people they do not know, so they would have noticed Vital’s name had it been displayed. Emails show Angie Timmons, a county environmental department manager, saw the meeting invitation and asked Vital to attend. He developed a dossier noting who attended — including a sitting state representative and a former city council member — and each group’s and individual’s planned activities, and sent it to his superiors.
Among those who received the dossier was Rosemary Lavin, Hennepin County’s energy and environment department director. County emails show supervisors planned to meet to discuss Vital’s findings and report them to “Lisa,” whom advocates said is almost certainly Lisa Cerney, a top county public works official who reports directly to political leadership. Cerney later made public media statements in support of the incinerator.
The emails show other instances of Vital developing reports on advocates’ activities and sending them to supervisors. During a conversation with Khan, Vital also tried to confirm the identity of a whistleblower, a recording shows. Khan said activists confronted Vital over the information-gathering; in recordings provided to the Guardian, Vital suggested the advocates had it wrong and that he was actually working for the activists. Khan said Vital described his activity as part of a ploy to gain intelligence on county officials, describing the tradeoff this way: “You have to offer a pound of flesh to maintain inside the room.” Khan said Vital provided very little information of value to advocates, and the groups do not believe his claim that he is on their side.
Information also reached David McNary, a county official who sits on the board of the Minnesota Resource Recovery Association, an industry trade group that describes itself as a “private-public membership organization that supports the utilization of today’s waste as a local, renewable, and sustainable source for tomorrow’s energy” and that represents companies including the incinerator’s owners.
In 2024, county employee Mallory Anderson, who had gotten on advocates’ email list without their realization, sent their organizing emails to McNary. On 12 March 2024, McNary wrote that he feared the bill — which proposed letting cities phase out polluting land uses — “could impact [incinerator] facilities as well as every other production, processing and industrial facility in the state.”
The following day, McNary sent the advocates’ emails to an industry trade-group attorney, HERC operator president Tim Steinbeck, and other industry representatives. “The following email is from the EJ groups trying to get people to testify in favor of the bill,” he wrote, and asked the attorney, “Have you been able to get any information on who is opposing this bill?” Steinbeck responded that the bill would be “detrimental” to the incinerator industry and urged everyone on the thread to testify against it. Their efforts to help kill the bill were successful.
Audua Pugh, a Minneapolis organizer who was among those surveilled, asked county political leadership during a board meeting this week: “Why are public resources and county staff time being directed toward monitoring community members who are simply organizing to shut down an aging, outdated trash burner that should have been closed nearly a decade ago?”
HERC, which emits pollution into the low-income neighborhoods around it, burns 365,000 tons of trash annually. Nearly 100 municipal or hazardous waste incinerators operate nationally, including seven in Minnesota, and they have drawn increased scrutiny in part because they are known to release high levels of PFAS “forever chemicals,” which are widely used across the economy and concentrate in municipal waste but cannot be fully destroyed by the incineration process, along with other pollutants. The waste management industry markets them as recycling or “green” operations. Similar battles to close polluting facilities are playing out in cities like Baltimore and Miami.
Khan said the emails reveal other instances of the county passing on emails to industry and illustrate how Hennepin County, which has 9,000 employees, dispatches staff into community-facing roles to gather information. Advocates “let down their defenses because the county is using people who are seen as part of the community to get in the door and build a relationship, then gather intelligence,” he said. “[Advocates] assume [the county employees] are an ally, but they’re trying to cultivate these relationships so that they can then share information up the chain.”