The Heist on Hemingway II, The Sequel How City Hall Betrayed Its Own People, Again.
A few years ago I published my first article documenting the abuse and corruption from the city of North Branch Minnesota, over a utility project completed over 20 years ago on our little country road, Hemingway Avenue. The original story is documented here, The Heist On Hemingway. Today I am writing the sequel, The Heist On Hemingway II, for events that are taking place nearly twenty years later. Our family is still fighting North Branch City Hall for damages and abuse. This isn’t a story about a policy dispute or a stop sign at an intersection, it’s a story about what happens when city hall forgets who it serves, elected politicians forget what representation means, and how ordinary people are hurt.
My parents, Jerry and Dolores Fairbanks, were farmers southeast of North Branch. Jerry bought his farm in 1954, just after returning home from the Korean War. He was a proud veteran, a member of North Branch American Legion Post 85 and the local VFW. He marched in nearly every Midsummer parade with the color guard, and was once named the North Branch Midsummer Grand Marshal. In 1988, he and my mother built their retirement home on a three-acre parcel along Hemingway Avenue, in the south pasture of the family farm. My mother was able to live in that home into her nineties until her passing in 2022. A simple wish, and the dream shared by many elderly Minnesotans. A modest hope to remain on their land, and live out their years in the peace and (well deserved) quiet they so richly earned.
That peace and quiet has been destroyed by the very city government that was supposed to protect and serve it.
In the fall of 2021, I called North Branch City Hall to ask about connecting my mother’s home to the city sewer line. Her septic system was nearing the end of its life, and I thought (naively as it turns out) that connecting to the existing city utility would be a fairly straightforward project. The city had installed those sewer lines more than twenty years earlier, part of a project my parents and other residents had already paid for through dubious special assessments. I soon learned that the sewer line in front of her home was, for some unknown and dumbfounding reason, buried over 23 feet deep, twice the normal depth for residential hookups, making any connection prohibitively expensive.
Still, given how poorly the residents on Hemingway had already been treated 20 years prior in the original Heist on Hemingway, I thought the city might (this time) offer some token of good will. Instead, City Administrator Renae Fry informed me that my elderly mother would be required to connect to the city sewer system “regardless of cost.” Given the criminal level of abuse we’d already experienced, I suppose this should have come as no surprise, yet it still shocked me how little assistance City Hall provided its residents. Ultimately, the sewer line connection bids came in between $77,000 and $140,000 for her home. Not for the entire street mind you, this was the cost to connect a single house to a city sewer line. And, according to Fry, we had no other options. I called and emailed the current mayor at the time, Jim Swenson, now a Chisago County Commissioner, to discuss the issue and sadly my calls and emails were never returned.
I figured in this day and age there might be some more affordable options we could explore, but when I inquired about installing a private septic system, I was told that city code no longer allowed it. A statement, we later learned, was patently false, because city code did not consider private systems on properties like my mother’s. But, by the time we uncovered the truth, the city had already issued threats and ultimatums and held her home hostage for over 2 years, 30 months to be exact.
The situation reached a cruel absurdity in February 2022 when I met with five city employees at City Hall to plead our case. After I explained the issue, the city’s economic development director, Jason Zeimer, told me that we should “sell the house and farm to a developer so they can raze the property and put in a new development.” In a rather absurd attempt to soften the blow, he offered that we might get as much as $125,000 for a house valued at $450,000, as if my parents’ life’s work were a disposable inconvenience placed in the way of a developer’s blueprint.
Days later, the city building official Rich Meyer sent my 90-year-old mother a letter declaring that if she did not hook up to the city sewer, her home would be out of compliance and condemned, conveniently ignoring the fact that the cost of the hookup would cost more than the increase in value to her home. A home that your husband built after serving his country. A home that you have paid taxes on for decades.
That is not governing, that’s a mob-style shakedown and abuse printed on city letterhead.
In December 2022, my mother passed away. Amidst the grief, I had at least assumed (hoped) that her death might at least bring closure to this fiasco. Instead, it only revealed more rot beneath the surface at North Branch city hall.
Despite the code clearly allowing a private septic system, Fry and her fellow racketeers refused to consider it. I reached out repeatedly to Mayor Kevin Schieber and Councilmember Bob Canada, asking them to help and or put the issue on the City Council’s public agenda, a reasonable request in my opinion. Neither of them returned my calls. Schieber later admitted he would not place the issue before the council without the city administrator’s approval, a stunning confession when you consider that, in essence, this meant that the city’s elected leadership would not make a decision without approval from unelected bureaucrats. Fry, to no great surprise, was ultimately ousted from her position as City Administrator for “other reasons”. The one time I got Councilmember Bob Canada on the phone he stated, quote “We’ll have to wait and see what Renea the city administrator wants to do.” * Note Mayor Kevin Schieber is a federal government employee. Councilmember Bob Canada is a former federal government employee.
This stonewalling tactic continued for two years, pulled from the worn pages of the public administrator’s playbook. Their general philosophy seems to be to create an extraordinary level of administrative inertia and only respond when legal action is filed. In effect kicking the can down the road in hopes that the problem disappears or becomes someone else’s responsibility. Then, when taxpaying citizens are suffocated with debt and drained of hope, they offer a small settlement tied to a non-disclosure agreement to cover up their deceit. This is abuse to a captive customer by definition.
Rather than surrender to the delay and deflect maneuver, I fought as the caregiver for my parents. And, three and a half years after my initial call, a shallow septic solution was installed. We did not connect to the city sewer 23ft below the street. Of course, by then both the emotional and financial toll was enormous. Even with a shallow 240′ alternative sewer hook up into the adjacent housing development, to a sewer line under a side street, still costing $10,000 more than a standard private septic solution, and the overwhelming legal fees, and 30 months of carrying costs, our family was into all of this for over $72,000. Photos of the massive operation that could have been avoided with a private mound system on a 3 acre parcel.
This is, of course, only the most recent chapter of the sordid history of corruption on Hemingway Avenue. Back in 2004, the city imposed over $500,000 of special assessments for a utility project that benefited exactly no one, except a new small development put in to add more roofs to the tax roll for the city. The city claimed the utility improvements are a “special benefit.” I claim it is government-sanctioned extortion and a forced investment that never provided a return. To date, twenty years later, several private property owners along Hemingway Avenue have received ZERO benefit from the city sewer and water buried 23ft under the road. In fact, the last few years and the facts contained here in the Heist on Hemingway II, prove that the “improvements” actually hurt the property owners, due to the cost of connecting to them.
The sad part is that we are not without precedent in our experience. I’ve spoken first-hand with residents who’ve also been stonewalled, ignored, and bullied by the same officials at North Branch city hall and in other cities across the state. Residents who’ve been told their homes would be condemned if they didn’t comply with these dubious city demands. People who’ve lost faith in the rather fantastic notion that local government actually works for them as a civil service.
The moral failure exhibited in North Branch is not just bureaucratic incompetence, it’s ethical decay. When elected leaders defer to staff rather than to citizens, when administrators manipulate codes to abuse the people they’re supposed to serve, liberty begins to die in the smallest, quietest ways, and abuse becomes the norm.
There are lessons to be learned in this mess. The first is that elected officials are (evidently) the last line of defense against bureaucratic abuse, at least in North Branch. When administrators forget their role as civil servants, it is incumbent upon mayors and councilmembers to step in and govern, not run away and hide. The second is that governing is hard work. It should never be considered a part-time hobby or a ceremonial title. It requires reading, questioning, investigating, listening and above all, understanding. Too many elected officials rubber-stamp their days away, never asking (or understanding) the collateral damage they leave behind. Complacency like this allows rot and abuse to spread.
It’s fair to say that, for me, this fight has always been about much more than plumbing and paperwork. It’s about honesty, transparency and, most especially, dignity. My parents, myself and our neighbors on Hemingway Avenue built their lives on the belief that if you worked hard, paid your taxes, and treated people fairly, your local city government would do the same. We believed in the basic decency of public service. The belief in any form of responsible governing is shattered in North Branch and remains so until further notice.
City hall in North Branch has become a place where arrogance and entitlement masquerades as authority, and compassion is treated as a weakness. And frankly, until residents start demanding accountability, loudly, publicly, and persistently, the abuse of power will continue.
Breakdown of aged assessments against our property with zero benefit , aka the taking.
Wrongful Assessment of $31,358.26 House on a 3 acre parcel old city sewer and water assessments from 2004- No benefit for 20 years. Cost to hook up too excessive per bids collected in 2022. $77,000 to connect to 24ft buried utilities for one house. 2024 real estate listing proved zero buyers wanted to pay the assessment and saw zero value nor benefit.
| Principal Outstanding | $ 16,520.00 |
| Deferred Interest | $ 14,838.26 |
| Total Forcefully Paid in 2024 | $ 31,358.26 |
Wrongful assessment of $37,434.40 on an old farm site 3.9 acres city sewer and water assessments from 2004. 2024 real estate listing proved zero buyers wanted to pay the assessment and saw zero value nor benefit. 3 years marketing to developers and zero interest in subdividing. Moreover, there is already city water and sewer on the west side of this parcel from adjacent housing development, before the 2004 Hemingway City Utility project (forced investment)
| Principal Outstanding | $ 19,721.00 |
| Deferred Interest | $ 17,713.40 |
| Total Forcefully Paid in 2024 | $ 37,434.40 |
Wrongful assessment of $129,647.06 raw land on a 37.5 acre old assessment form 2004. 20 years have proven zero special benefit. Zero benefit for the utilities under Hemingway Ave, when there was already city sewer and water at nearby housing development prior to the Hemingway Ave utility project.
| Principal Outstanding | $ 68,300.00 |
| Deferred Interest | $ 61,347.06 |
| Total Outstanding | $ 129,647.06 |
Several other large 10 plus acre parcels along Hemingway where families were assessed $18-$25k with the city profiting bankers interest of 4.9% have also suffered from what I like to call theft through bureaucratic swindle. Existing homes that already had septic systems and have not hooked up in 20 years, but assessments had to be paid. Zero benefit and a taking. The abuse documented above is sadly too commonplace for property owners or “captive customers”.
Two lessons to learn and to raise awareness
- Elected officials are the failsafe to abusive public employees who have lost their way from serving the public as civil servants. Should bitter public employees be a good choice as elected officials?
- Politicians who work hard to campaign and get elected should understand that these elected positions take work, a lot of work. They are not part time. They require constant listening and representation, and research. Believing the information in the monthly pre-meeting packets, compiled by the in-house public employees, is only half of the information needed, and does not tell the entire story nor have all of the facts on a particular issue. Elected officials will need to put in the time and work to research many issues that come before them. Don’t be lazy, and don’t become complacent. Abusive actions and public policy can and will affect your community and your legacy.
It’s 2025 folks, we are living in an era where checks and balances should exist at every level of the bureaucracy, and accountability structures should be woven through every department. Yet we are still fighting fraud, waste and abuse here in Minnesota. Still trying to make sure that what happened to Jerry and Dolores Fairbanks, to their neighbors, and to our family, doesn’t happen to you. The Heist on Hemingway continues.
Jake Mayne 612-518-7425 contact@northbranchpolitics.org
Link to the Original Heist On Hemingway Article
