Business & Tech

Erin Brockovich Makes Her Way to the Twin Cities Tonight

The famed activist and subject of an Academy Award-winning movie will host a town hall in Fridley Wednesday night. Here's the rundown.

will be in the Twin Cities all day Wednesday, meeting with Fridley residents to talk about their concerns about the and .

Here’s Patch’s rundown of everything we know about the Brockovich visit:

When and where can I see Erin Brockovich?

Brockovich will hold a two-hour town hall meeting starting at 6:30 p.m. June 27 at the . Doors will open to the public at 6 p.m. and admission will be first-come, first-serve, said Kevin Sage, a project manager for Integrated Resource Management, a company that partners with Brockovich. (Doors open for media at 5:30 p.m.) Attendees who arrive before 6 p.m. will be able to either wait outside the high school or in the lobby, depending on the decision of Brockovich’s team, said Stephen Keeler, the district’s facilities coordinator.

Fridley Patch plans to host here at the Fridley Patch web page.


What will Erin Brockovich talk about?

Brockovich will speak for 30–45 minutes, , during which time she will present her interpretation of historical and anecdotal data collected in the last couple months from citizens and regulatory agencies. During the rest of the meeting Brockovich will listen to residents’ concerns about Fridley’s cancer cases. The investigation has already cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Will members of regulatory and government agencies be participating?

It’s unclear what the extent of their participation will be, but and he plans to invite members of regulatory agencies—including Karla Peterson, the supervisor of the Minnesota Department of Health’s Community Public Water Unit—to sit in on the town hall meeting. The Fridley City Council is officially calling the townhall meeting a special council meeting. That allows a quorum of the council to "attend and participate" without being in violation of Minnesota's open-meeting law.

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In March 2012, the Minnesota Department of Health. Upon further study, the department later and said the still higher-than-average number of cancer cases in Fridley was nothing more than a statistical anomaly, largely attributable to the .

What else will Erin Brockovich be doing in Fridley during her visit?

Brockovich and Bowcock are driving to Minnesota Tuesday night from Wisconsin. Bowcock said that some of on Wednesday before the town hall meeting. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) counts four Fridley locations—FMC Corp., Kurt Manufacturing Co., Fridley Commons Park Well Field and the Naval Industrial Reserve Ordnance Plant—on its Superfund National Priorities List (NPL), the agency’s catalogue of the most hazardous of the nation’s hazardous waste sites.

What’s next for Fridley?

The goal of the visit, , is to determine the next step for Brockovich’s organization to take based on input from Fridley residents. In the future, they may pay to retest soil, working with federal and state agencies to avoid redundant costs. “On cases like this, I’ve spent as little as $10,000 and as much as $10 million,” Bowcock said.

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What else would you like to know?

Leave a comment below and we'll try to find out. Be sure to check out the Fridley Patch "Cancer Concerns" topic page for all of our posts in one place, including our , the , and the .


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