Court rules in favor of East Side Corridor
The ruling is in – and residents along the proposed East Side Corridor Project have prevailed.
The Minnesota Court of Administrative Hearings agreed with the residents’ claim that Steele County officials – including the county attorney and the county administrator – violated the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act.
In an order filed Monday, the court also issued a civil penalty of $300 and ordered the county to reimburse $950 of the complainant’s $1,000 filing fee. The county was also ordered to reimburse the CAH for its costs in conducting the matter, up to $1,000.
The group, led by Matthew Sennott and Melissa Zimmerman, filed a complaint in late May, outlining issues with transparency and accountability concerning public documents about the county’s proposal to build a new road along the eastern edge of Owatonna.
The project aims to reroute traffic out of the city center and onto the new road, but residents who live near the proposed location of that new road had concerns – among them, public safety in their neighborhoods – and organized to advocate and provide input in the project.
The group set out to gather documentation outlining the history of the decision-making process, including correspondence, transfer of federal funds, engineering proposals, traffic study results and analyses.
Between October 2024 and July 2025, the group sent the county a dozen requests for government data. Each time, the data request resulted in a back-and-forth between county officials and the ESC group.
Tension between the two sides escalated.
In his responses to data requests, County Attorney Rob Jarrett told the group that the county would work on fulfilling them in the order they were received. County Administrator Renee Fry confirmed the process.
A May request for three public documents was satisfied in September; “these responses were neither prompt nor appropriate,” the judge wrote.
The first-in-first-out procedure was not always applied, the ruling continued.
“As a result, what appears to be at issue … is the County’s lack of effective or ongoing communication with the Complainants regarding their data requests,” it says. “This lack of communication, rather than the County’s ordering procedure, failed to meet the County’s obligation to make appropriate responses to requests.”
While acknowledging the MGDPA “places significant burdens on government entities,” Judge Christa L. Moseng wrote, “the (County’s) record demonstrates a pattern of responses inappropriate under the MGDPA … that seemingly allowed (Jarrett) to be, in apparent effect, the only check on his own errors, misunderstanding or miscommunications in the context of an ongoing relationship with multiple active data requests – and in which tensions had escalated.”
Still, the judge opined, “the record indicates the County has, and continues to, work diligently to produce any and all data responsive to Complainants’ open requests. The workload created by the requests, together with mutual miscommunications and misunderstandings, caused strain that highlighted weaknesses in the County’s processes.
“As a consequence, the record shows that the County’s processes failed to meet the requirements of the MGDPA … neglected to provide ongoing, timely updates regarding the status of data requests and failed to incorporate a means of validating the propriety of responses to requests.”
Steele County’s Fry acknowledged the decision Monday but said a response would not be forthcoming until after this edition went to press.