At least one manufacturer plans to say goodbye to Minneapolis following the recent riots over the death of George Floyd.
What else did you expect would happen in the wake of the city’s nearly total inability to shield its businesses from destruction?
The president of 7-Sigma Inc., which employs roughly 50 people, said he is looking to relocate elsewhere, citing Minneapolis’s failure to protect his plant from being razed to the ground.
“They don’t care about my business,” Kris Wyrobek said of the plant that has operated in south Minneapolis for the past 33 years. “They didn’t protect our people. We were all on our own.”
The Star Tribune reported that the plant, which normally operates until 11 p.m., closed early in preparation for a night of expected civil unrest. Wyrobek said specifically that he sent his staff home early to get them away from the violence. But even these precautions were not enough to spare the business from devastation.
“[Wyrobek] said a production supervisor and a maintenance worker who live in the neighborhood became alarmed when fire broke out at the $30 million Midtown Corner affordable housing apartment complex that was under construction next door,” the report read.
The plant owner claimed a responding fire engine “was just sitting there,” adding further that “they wouldn’t do anything.”
Wyrobek is not alone in suggesting the city failed badly in how it responded to the violence. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz himself characterized the city’s handling of the violent demonstrations as an “abject failure.” The National Guard was even called up (at the explicit request of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey) to help restore a semblance of order. The president of 7-Sigma is also not the only Minneapolis business owner to say city leaders failed him. Many others also claimed that their pleas for protection and order went unanswered, according to the Star Tribune.
The mayor, for his part, has defended his handling of the situation.
“This was a Guard-sized crisis and demanded a Guard-sized response,” Frey said. “And once we had the full presence of the National Guard, which, by the way, hasn’t been deployed since World War II, there was a significantly different result.”
Initial estimates showed that 52 Minneapolis businesses were destroyed completely in the riots and that 30 additional commercial properties also “sustained severe damage,” according to the Star Tribune. The total cost of the damage could be as much as $500 million, which would make the Twin Cities riots the second costliest in American history, right next to the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of police officers who allegedly participated in the beating of Rodney King.
Wyrobek was asked if he had considered relocating his business prior to the riots.
“Not in my wildest nightmare,” he said.
But this week, as Wyrobek picked through the debris that was once his plant, he sang a very different tune.
“We are cautiously optimistic we can [recover],” he said. “But we are certainly not able to do that in Minneapolis.”
On Monday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis city council voted to disband the Police Department. In other words, whatever hope there may have been that 7-Sigma would reconsider relocating its business is almost certainly gone for good now. Those jobs are gone, and they are never coming back. If Minneapolis is lucky, those are the only jobs it will hemorrhage following the riots. But don’t bet on it.
