Hundreds of Minneapolis park employees are set to strike over the Fourth of July — one of the busiest days for the city’s green spaces.

The union, which represents more than 300 workers who help keep the parks clean and safe, announced strike plans Tuesday. They say the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s latest contract proposal lacks sufficient wage raises and hazard protections — and includes new language that hampers transparency and bias safeguards.

“We’re not asking for special treatment, we’re just asking for fair treatment,” said LIUNA Local 363 business manager AJ Lange at a press conference Tuesday.

That announcement followed more than 15 hours of negotiating with the park board Monday and another seven months of failed negotiations prior. Lange said the union requested another bargaining date, but was met with a refusal. He said workers will strike for one week and are prepared to file another strike notice if the board doesn’t “come back to the table with a fair offer.”

The MPRB argues negotiations have been reasonable and in good faith — and that the final offer is “competitive, fair and equitable.” They are prepared to adjust maintenance service around a smaller staff.

The board also says employees who strike will not be able to return to their job until an agreement is ratified.

“We asked — and still ask — that they bring our last, best and final offer to their members for a vote,” said Robin Smothers, a spokesperson for the board, over email.

The union says they are prepared to file an unfair labor practice charge with the state, after receiving at least one legal opinion from Minneapolis-based law firm Cummins and Cummins that barring striking employees from returning to work constitutes an “illegal threat of a discriminatory lockout.”

Smothers said in a statement that the MPRB legal counsel’s position is that their approach is not an unfair labor practice and they plan to go forward with that plan.

Safety during encampment cleanups an issue

A week before the latest negotiations, the union rallied outside of Lyndale Farmstead Park. That’s where Minneapolis’s Parks superintendents have historically resided, starting with Theodore Wirth in 1910.

The current resident is Al Bangoura. While his superintendent’s salary has climbed alongside inflation, the union argues their positions have not matched pace, falling behind while the park’s reputation consistently soars high on national rankings.

The park board has proposed a 10.25 percent wage increase over three years, including a 2.75 percent increase the first year and a $1.00 market adjustment for 13 positions over the following two years.

Union leadership say they asked for a $5.00 market adjustment and the board’s proposed wage still means some positions would lag behind other cities.

The increase would bring the maximum pay for a “parkkeeper” from $30.99 to $35.52 by 2026, which remains lower than parks maintenance employees at 19 competitive suburbs, according to a League of Minnesota Cities’ 2023 local government salary survey.

“MPRB leadership believes it is vitally important that employee wages and benefits are fair and competitive throughout the organization,” according to a statement, which pointed to a policy of 37 paid days off per year for employees with up to four years of service.

Parkkeeper Lanel Lane provides for a family of four, including a teenaged son and 6-year-old daughter who grew up playing soccer on the park’s greenery. Despite being a dual-income household, Lane says his family doesn’t have enough money to cover the bills or keep up on car repairs.

“I don’t have no money in savings right now,” said the 40-year old. “I’m not living paycheck-to-paycheck, I’m living a check behind paycheck-to-paycheck. If the wages go up, I think we can stay afloat. That’s all we’re asking.”

Lane says he’s been with Minneapolis parks for more than a decade, arriving at 5 a.m. daily in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, during 2020 riots that followed the murder of George Floyd and regularly, when tasked to clean up homeless encampments.

It can be a grueling job, he said. He’s frequently cleaning up broken glass, needles and feces, ensuring the public spaces are safe to enjoy. On one of his most difficult days, Lane said he watched a woman die from an overdose. But like any other day on the job, he pushed on.

“Just to see the poverty was disheartening,” he said. “It touched me, man. I cried a few times just thinking about how people are living out here.”

One major issue the union has with the proposed contract is insufficient hazard protections. The board offered eligible employees safety glasses and a hazard pay hike from $0.75 to $1.50 per hour for workers while performing “encampment clean-ups” with “visible biohazardous material and sharps.”

The union claims the safety glasses provision was a previous “takeaway.” LIUNA Local 363 manager Lange said Tuesday he wanted retaliation protections for workers who raise safety concerns, as well as the ability for workers to request a risk assessment and halt work until that assessment has been completed.

The fear of risky situations is something parkkeeper Hunter Hoppe says he faces on the regular.

“There’s been homeless encampments we’ve had to take down that personally hurt my heart because you don’t know what they’re going through,” Hoppe said. “But even when you’re doing that you don’t know if someone living there is going to come up and potentially get mad at you guys even though we did give them a notice.”

‘Not a middle class job’

Arborist Scott Jaeger said he’s turning 40 soon and had hoped to buy a home by now. What was once feasible for the generation above him feels totally out of reach. He rents an apartment with his partner in Minneapolis where the average rent eats nearly 40 percent of his monthly income, he said.

“I’m a certified arborist working for the best park system in the nation and I can’t afford a home. It’s sad,” he said. “It’s not a middle class job anymore.”

Jaeger wanted to be a civil servant, but the career doesn’t seem sustainable now.

“We love being civil servants,” Jaeger said. “That’s why all of us got into this job. It’s just, eventually your love for helping the community will stop once you can’t afford to pay the bills or live in the city that you serve. So eventually, that’s going to stop.”

When her memoir hit bookstores in 2007, Laurie Lindeen couldn’t complain about the reviews or reception for it, each glowing.

The singer/guitarist in the Twin Cities’ pioneering all-female rock band Zuzu’s Petals did have one gripe, though: Her life’s story was filed on bookshelves among music biographies and not with women’s books or general autobiographies.

“It’s shelved in between John Lennon and Marilyn Manson,” she groaned in a Star Tribune interview at the time. “It’s driving me crazy. I go in one store a day and go: `No woman is going to come back here!’”

Fourteen years after the publication of “Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story” — and 30 years since the band it was based around packed it in — Lindeen died unexpectedly Monday of a brain aneurysm at age 62, according to friends. Word is she had hit the beach that day on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where she had been living for the past two years.

Close friend and fellow Minneapolis musician John Eller saw her East Coast relocation as the last in a steady line of bold moves.

Other gambits on Lindeen’s list included becoming an author, a New York Times-published essayist, a college and grammar school writing teacher, a mother, and a wife to a much more famous rock star, Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg — all after her own 1990s-era music career with Zuzu’s Petals.

“She announced to all of us she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard, and we thought, ‘How are you going to swing that?’” Eller recounted. “She did it, of course, and loved it.”

Lindeen showed similar gumption when she left her native Madison, Wis., for Minneapolis in 1987 with the goal of starting a band. Never mind that she had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she and her bandmate, Coleen Elwood, were both music novices at the time.

“Sure, I’ll take my college degree, move to Minneapolis and start a band with you before I can play the bass,” Elwood humorously recalled Tuesday in a Facebook post. “She was one of the smartest and funniest [and] could convince me to do just about anything.”

Named after the rose petals carried by James Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Zuzu’s Petals quickly became a fan favorite at venues including the 400 Bar, 7th St. Entry and Uptown Bar and Grill. The trio recorded a debut four-song cassette with help from Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks while Lindeen also worked as a waitress at Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown.

After recruiting second drummer Linda Pitmon — who’s returning to the Twin Cities this weekend with members of R.E.M. in the Baseball Project — Zuzu’s Petals got more serious, hit the road (and Europe) and released two full-length albums for Twin/Tone Records, 1992′s “When No One’s Looking” and 1994′s “The Music of Your Life.”

“They just ripped,” recounted former Pioneer Press and City Pages music scribe Jim Walsh, who later served as a witness at Lindeen’s and Westerberg’s courthouse wedding.

“When you talk about the ’90s grunge thing and bands making all that wonderful guitar noise of that era, you have to save a place for Zuzu’s Petals.”

Minnesota Public Radio operations director Ali Lozoff, who was recruited at age 20 to help manage Zuzu’s Petals, remembered the difficulty the band sometimes faced getting gigs despite being on a reputable record label.

“As much as we all loved the other all-female bands in town,” Lozoff said, ticking off a list that included Babes in Toyland and Smut, “a lot of clubs still didn’t want to book more than one of those bands on a bill.”

Zuzu’s Petals’ successes and foils alongside Lindeen’s steadfast feminism were humorously and bluntly covered in “Petal Pusher,” a book that Publishers Weekly called “sharp and sensitive, stoned silly and serious, all in the right places.” Lindeen wrote the memoir after earning a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Minnesota while also raising her son with Westerberg, Johnny.

One of her best-loved writing pieces was a 2017 essay for the New York Times, “Johnny Goes to College,” which tearfully and laughingly recounted driving her son to college in Colorado with her “professional rebel” ex-husband.

“At IHOP he ordered pancakes slathered in whipped cream and strawberries,” Lindeen wrote of her son. “This kid is clearly too young to be on his own.”

Lindeen still performed occasionally on stage, including at the annual David Bowie feline-rescue fundraiser tribute at First Avenue, shows that were co-led by Eller with Lindeen’s former sister-in-law, ex-Current DJ Mary Lucia. First Ave posted a tribute to Lindeen on Tuesday calling her “a dominant force in the ’80s and ’90s female rock movement in Minneapolis.”

She mostly focused on teaching in recent years, offering writing and literature lessons at the University of St. Thomas, St. Cloud State University, the Loft Literary Center and grammar schools. She also led writing retreats at Madeline Island in Wisconsin and other locations and worked as a coach-for-hire helping kids write college entrance essays.

One of her most recent writings, titled “My Third Act” and published by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association, detailed her move to Martha’s Vineyard with her new partner, Jim Diem.

“After COVID, online teaching, losing my best friend suddenly to heart failure, followed by the decline and deaths of my mother and my best dog,” Lindeen wrote, “I decided to take a leap of faith and move toward a meaningful and courageous Act Three of my life.”

Lindeen’s family in Wisconsin — including two sisters and a brother — made national news in 2021 when their paid obituary for their mother, Carol Lindeen, asked for donations in lieu of flowers to be made to “[Sen.] Ron Johnson’s opponent in 2022,” per Carol’s wishes.

Family memorial information has not yet been issued for Lindeen.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.