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This was supposed to be a banner year for Maplewood, the 50th anniversary of the inner-ring suburb directly northeast of St. Paul. To commemorate, elected officials and city residents planned numerous events, from a kickoff celebration last month to the White Bear Avenue parade in July.

The suburb of 35,000 residents would seem to have reason to cheer. It's home to 3M's headquarters—the company's sprawling campus dominates the southern end of the town's border at Interstate 94. Blocks of modest, post-World War II bungalows line White Bear Avenue, while more lavish housing developments continue to sprout up along cul-de-sacs on the city's eastern end. The suburb also burnished its hipster credentials with the 2005 opening of Myth, a multilevel nightclub with capacity for 4,000 patrons.

With an average household income of more than $50,000 and a population that's nearly 90 percent white, Maplewood would seem to be your prototypical sleepy suburb, the kind of place parodied in movies like American Beauty. But beneath this veneer of affluence and tranquility, Maplewood has been undergoing the most tumultuous period of its 50-year existence.

In the municipal elections of 2005 and 2006, residents elected a trio of neophyte politicians—Diana Longrie, Erik Hjelle, and Rebecca Cave—who promised change.

They delivered in spades, though not in the way voters had hoped. Holding three of the five seats on Maplewood's City Council, they've effectively become a ruling troika, in the process earning the nickname "The Gang of Three."

Since their rise to power, at least a dozen key municipal employees have resigned, been fired, or had their job eliminated. Those lost include the city manager, human resources director, city attorney, finance director, assistant city manager, deputy police chief, deputy fire chief, and parks and recreation director.

"We've lost over 200 years of experience," says Kathleen Jeunemann, one of the two dissidents on the City Council. "It's the total unraveling of government and it's really scary."

In addition, Maplewood has been sued at least five times in recent months. Four of the lawsuits involve personnel matters, while a fifth deals with a recently enacted moratorium on development in the southern part of the city.

"Maplewood has become the laughingstock of local government," says attorney Robert Fowler, who's handling one of the cases currently pending against the city. "I really do believe the public has just been betrayed."

This is the story of Maplewood, quite possibly the most dysfunctional city in Minnesota.

 

ON PAPER, DIANA LONGRIE would seem to be the perfect mayor. The 48-year-old battled rheumatoid arthritis as a child, and the struggle lives on in her malformed hands and feet. She grew up poor in Grand Rapids, and her dad died when she was young. Despite these difficulties, Longrie went on to graduate from the University of Minnesota and earn a law degree from Hamline University. Along the way she developed a passionate interest in the politics of her adopted hometown, Maplewood.

In 2004, Longrie divorced her first husband and married Kevin Berglund. Her new husband was a notorious figure in Maplewood politics, for years co-hosting the hot-blooded public-access television show Inside Insight, which regularly pilloried city officials and staff. The show had gone so far as to allege that city manager Richard Fursman, whose wife is from the Ukraine, had purchased a mail-order bride with city funds. (Needless to say, Fursman maintains this is not the case.)

After the 2005 election, Longrie joined Erik Hjelle and Rebecca Cave on a slate of candidates promising big changes to the municipal government. Hjelle's bright red lawn signs encapsulated their message: "Change and Common Sense."

Among the key issues motivating voters was debate over the long-gestating Gladstone redevelopment. A panel of residents, business representatives, and city staff had developed a plan calling for 800 new residential units in the center of the city. But many of the existing development's residents aggressively advocated for a scaled-down plan. Longrie, Hjelle, and Cave ran campaigns promising sympathy for their concerns.

 

After two prior unsuccessful runs for City Council, Longrie was considered a long shot. But after knocking out incumbent Mayor Bob Cardinal in the primary, she went on to best Will Rossbach—who retained his City Council post—by 330 votes. "This little lady who had arthritic hands and seems kind of strange kicked his ass," says Hjelle. "That must have been really hard for the guy." For his part, Hjelle was the top vote getter among City Council candidates, succeeding in his first run for public office. Cave, however, fell 49 votes short of securing a seat on the council. Participation in the off-year election was anemic, with 76 percent of registered voters staying home.

But Cave wouldn't have to wait long to get another shot. Council member Jackie Monahan-Junek resigned midterm, necessitating a special election on the last day of February. This time, Cave was the runaway winner, securing 64 percent of the votes cast. Turnout for this midwinter contest was even more feeble, with just 12 percent of registered voters showing up.

Even so, Hjelle argues that the results were a mandate for change. "The vast majority of taxpayers in the city of Maplewood were sick and tired of having a government that didn't listen to them," he says.

After the results were tabulated, it was clear major changes were on the horizon. With the mayor also serving on the City Council, the allies now had a 3-2 voting block. Old scores were about to be settled.

 

THE GRUDGE HAD BEGUN six years earlier, on December 28, 1999, at a party to honor three departing City Council members. Among the people who showed up were Inside Insight hosts Bob Zick and Kevin Berglund. "We wanted to go there and film this for the show," recalls Zick.

The duo was initially rebuffed because they refused to pay the $15 entrance fee, but they talked their way in. Zick and Berglund immediately became a nuisance, shoving their video camera into people's faces, several partygoers say.

"It was really interrupting the party," says Sherrie Le, then the city's human resources director. "People were visibly upset."

Eventually, several police officers tried to remove the film crew from the premises, but Berglund refused to comply. "They tried to escort him out and then he kicked the wall," Le recalls.

Berglund was arrested and charged with trespassing, fifth-degree assault, and disorderly conduct. The cops also confiscated the pair's videotape.

The confrontation continued to percolate through Maplewood politics for years. Berglund was eventually acquitted of all criminal charges. He and Zick filed a lawsuit against the city alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated, but in 2001 the case was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge David Doty. "The judge would not let us get in front of a jury," laments Zick.

Two years later, Maplewood officials took the extraordinary step of seeking a restraining order against Berglund to bar him from having any contact with city officials. According to court records, this measure was necessary because Berglund repeatedly made harassing phone calls to employees, called them disparaging names, and threatened them. Female employees, in particular, were fearful of his aggressive behavior.

Ramsey County District Court issued a temporary restraining order in September 2003, but subsequently modified it to only prohibit contact with four city employees. Ultimately, Ramsey County District Court Judge Michael Fetsch refused to grant a permanent restraining order. He ruled in July 2004 that Berglund's conduct "has never been intimidating, threatening, or assaultive."

 

Maplewood city clerk Karen Guilfoile, one of the employees who was the target of Berglund's ire, subsequently wrote to the judge expressing her displeasure with the ruling.

"I have had dealings with Mr. Berglund for approximately eight years," she wrote. "What the testimony failed to convey, or the Court failed to realize, is that Mr. Berglund's behavior had escalated to a point of brazen confrontation wherein I feared for my safety."

Since his wife was elected mayor, however, Berglund has pretty much disappeared from the Maplewood political scene.

Longrie is not the only current elected official in Maplewood with an ax to grind. In 2004, city officials became concerned that paramedics were shouldering too much work. The city hired an outside consulting firm, which determined that those duties should be shifted off of the police and onto the fire department. Maplewood had previously not employed any full-time firefighters, but this change would require hiring permanent workers.

This decision infuriated some pay-per-call firefighters, particularly Hjelle and George Cave (husband of Rebecca). They feared that this was simply a first step toward establishing a full-time fire department. At one particularly heated meeting on the subject, Fursman was repeatedly interrupted and accused of fudging his statistics on paramedic calls.

Human resources director Sherrie Le was brought in to investigate the behavior of the two firefighters.

"They were the most difficult people I have ever investigated," recalls Le. "Refused to come in, refused to answer anything, and would yell at me. They were very angry about it. They were angry that they were being investigated, they were angry that the findings were that they did something wrong, and they were angry about the discipline that they got."

Ultimately, Cave was suspended for 30 days without pay, while Hjelle was simply given a verbal reprimand.

 

ON JANUARY 11, 2006, JUST days into her tenure as mayor, Longrie sent a testy email to city manager Richard Fursman outlining several requests.

For starters, she wanted a photograph of the previous City Council and any references to her as the "mayor-elect" removed from the city's website. Longrie also asked why her photo had not yet been installed in the lobby of City Hall.

"Frankly, it is not my responsibility to be managing these routine matters but they have to be attended to," she chastised the city manager.

Fursman was bewildered by the complaints. After more than five years as city manager of Maplewood, he'd garnered a reputation as one of the most effective municipal administrators in the Twin Cities. "He was just a complete professional—competent and on top of things," attests former Mayor Bob Cardinal. "A very bright, competent manager."

But now Fursman was being chastised for his failure to promptly hang the mayor's visage in City Hall. "It'd been all of eight hours of work time since she'd been sworn in and she was wondering where her picture was," he recalls. "I was getting a pretty weird vibe."

After this rocky start, Fursman did little to ingratiate himself to the recently elected officials. At the very first meeting of the newly configured council, he presented a report pointing out possible campaign violations by Longrie, Hjelle, and Cave.

During the fall campaign, the trio had stuffed campaign literature together at a city fire station. Fursman was concerned that this constituted an improper use of a public facility for campaign activities. He punished Hjelle (still a city employee) with a one-week suspension. But by a 3-2 vote, the City Council rejected the city manager's report on the potential violations.

Fursman further annoyed the newly elected officials by pointing out potential violations of open meeting laws. In a March memo to the City Council, he described two different instances where the council may have run afoul of the law.

It was clear that the city manager was not long for Maplewood. The council first attempted to oust him just one day after they secured power.

Only a potential legal hurdle saved his paycheck. During the hearing, city attorney Patrick Kelly raised the question of whether Hjelle might have a conflict of interest, given that he also worked as a city firefighter. Hjelle would essentially be voting to fire his own boss, Kelly suggested. Fearing a lawsuit, council adjourned the meeting.

By the April 10 City Council meeting, that hurdle was removed. Just that week, Hjelle had resigned his post as a firefighter. In addition, just hours before the hearing, George Cave resigned from the city.

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