Hot-mic slurs by International Falls City Council fuel frustrations and recall campaigns

INTERNATIONAL FALLS, MINN. – Council meetings here are packed to the gills lately. Tensions run high. Recall petitions have been circulating. And Rhonda Benedix is disgusted.

The lifelong International Falls resident addressed the council in February, something she had done only once before about tax hikes. Residents have been in an uproar for months over the city spending millions on police headquarters — and not because they don’t support police. Benedix used to be married to someone in law enforcement, she said, like her daughter is now.

“We all think that they do a great job,” she told the council. “Nobody’s disputing their job.”

But many in this Canadian border community are frustrated that the city is renovating a different building for police after turning down offers to share Koochiching County’s new $26.5 million sheriff’s office and jail, now under construction. Police also could have stayed in the old law enforcement center that it shared with the sheriff’s office since 1981.

But despite residents and the county pleading with the city to share space in the name of cost efficiency and collaboration, the council went a different way. The reason is elusive.

“That is such a controversial topic in town,” Mayor Drake Dill said in an interview. “I don’t even know if I want to comment on it. … The public answer that the police chief is giving the public is we just want our own identity.”

Dill added: “It’s an insufficient answer in the name of transparency.”

On top of taxpayers footing the $26.5 million bill for the new sheriff’s headquarters, they passed a $14 million school bond in August and $4.5 million bond to upgrade the ice arena and football stadium. The city is seeking bids on a nearly $9 million street repair project. Then there’s a $2.7 million bond for rehabbing the public works building and a $12 million water plant project in the pipeline, for which the city is asking the Legislature for $4.8 million.

Now another $1.6 million to $5 million could be spent on the police — an agency with a dozen full-time officers — and residents say they can’t afford all of it at once. Not when this blue-collar town of 5,600 people is shrinking as the cost of living is snowballing.

Benedix, 58, spoke to this at the Feb. 18 meeting, as did a dozen others, and she returned to the next meeting on March 3 physically shaking in rage.

She said Council Member Pete Kalar called her a slur referring to the vagina at the previous meeting, and it was caught on video. The recording also caught him saying another vulgarity under his breath when he saw her approaching the council.

Someone on the council was also on hot mic saying a disparaging term for a person with developmental disabilities. The muttering was directed at resident Sharon Ball, who was also speaking out against the police project when her taxes have already risen 40% on her fixed income.

Ball told the council she felt abused at the Feb. 18 meeting.

“We don’t think that the police aren’t necessary,” she said. “We just don’t know if we can afford everything, and that’s all we’re saying.”

Benedix told Kalar that he called her “a very vile and disgusting word.”

“We voted you in to sit on those seats, and that’s how we’re treated?” she said, at times shouting into the mic. “My taxes are getting raised and I’m worried about it, and I come here and voice my opinion, that’s how I’m treated?”

Kalar responded by saying that he didn’t “recall saying that, but I’ll take her word for it, and I apologize. That is very unprofessional, and I should know better.”

Benedix said he should step down, to which Kalar said, “I’m not stepping down. There’s a recall petition out. So that’s where we’re at.”

In a phone interview, Kalar denied saying the vulgarities.

Ed Bates moved to International Falls a decade ago from across the Rainy River in Canada and started paying close attention to city finances after the pandemic, often sharing updates in a local Facebook group.

He had already considered initiating recall petitions against all four City Council members over issues surrounding the police headquarters project.

When the vulgarities flew, Bates launched the petitions against all but the at-large member. That petition is still circulating.

He garnered enough signatures for the other three, though not without pushback, he said. Opponents, positioning the petitions as anti-police, called businesses where Bates got permission to have a table for folks to sign. Callers harassed employees for hosting recall efforts, Bates said.

At the April 7 council meeting, Bates asked council members to resign; when they wouldn’t, he submitted the petitions.

The following week, city administrator Betty Bergstrom informed Bates in letters that he didn’t get birth dates of signees and failed to prove malfeasance, so she said the petitions were insufficient.

The city charter doesn’t require signees to provide birth dates and says petitions need “a general statement of the grounds for the removal sought.”

The petition statements said: “Failure to be transparent and inclusive in the presentation of public issues and mismanagement of taxpayer funds.”

Bergstrom declined to comment for this story when a reporter stopped by City Hall on Thursday.

Bates intends to question the dismissals at a meeting Monday night before the charter commission, which Kalar chairs.

Dill, the mayor, who was elected in November, is not subject to recall efforts. Kalar ran for the vacant mayor seat, and Dill, son of late Rep. David Dill, was a write-in candidate who had never served on the council.

He won with 58% of the vote.

Bates called the victory “a resounding big middle finger to the rest of the City Council.”

Dill campaigned on fiscal responsibility and repairing the city’s relationship with the county.

“There’s enough uncertainty in the community already with a looming trade war, and what the fallout from that could be,” Dill said in his office Thursday. “Is a lack of Canadian customers going to be a new normal for those businesses?”

Dill asked the council to withdraw its plan to proceed with the police project and has tried in vain to get a third-party audit of city finances. He established rules of decorum for the council after the hot-mic vulgarities.

Council members have since asked the mayor to enforce rules for residents speaking at council meetings: no profanities or singling out council members, and a five-minute limit.

Benedix told the council that enforcing this code of conduct on residents is insulting and hypocritical.

“The citizens have lost faith and trust in you and to be honest it’s downright disgusting,” Benedix said at the April 7 meeting to the crowd’s applause.

The two law enforcement agencies in this small community shared a joint law enforcement center for 42 years.

The jail was in poor condition and subject to annual state inspections, but the rest of the facility is fairly turnkey. After a rent increase, the police department moved out in 2023.

In January, the city was open to moving back in, but by February, the council instead voted to spend $3 million to renovate the Kootasca community center, down from an initial $5 million estimate. Two weeks later, with rancor growing at meetings, the council proceeded with a $1.6 million renovation estimate by using city employees to do some work.

County administrator Adam Coe wrote to Dill and Bergstrom in February saying the county was open to negotiate terms at the old law enforcement center. Bergstrom responded in a letter the following month that the city was declining lease offers.

Synergy is lost without the agencies sharing space, Coe said in an interview.

Kalar, a former jailer and dispatcher, stands by the council’s decision to not move into the county’s old law enforcement center — or the new one.

But asked if that was the best long-term decision, Kalar said, “I would guess it wouldn’t be.”

Police Chief Mike Kostiuk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Sheriff Perryn Hedlund said the size of the new facility was cut in half with police out of the picture. It’s expected to open in the fall.

More recently, it was revealed that the Kootasca project would have two phases; it remains to be seen how much it will all cost.

Benedix and other residents are paying close attention.

She’s been to more council meetings this year than her entire life in International Falls. And she vows to keep showing up.

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