Unions decry state lawmakers’ move to close Stillwater prison

Corrections officers and other Stillwater prison workers are demanding that state leaders reconsider their plan, announced as part of a bipartisan budget agreement earlier this month, to close the facility by 2029.

That is, if they have a plan.

Members of AFSCME Council 5 and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees say the state should have consulted them before making the announcement, which impacts about 560 workers and 1,200 offenders housed at the Washington County facility, which is actually located in Bayport.

Instead, union leaders said, they got a call about 15 minutes before the news became public May 15.

“I find it hard to believe that this chip that was put on the table at the 11th hour wasn’t discussed thoroughly before it got put on the table,” Council 5 Executive Director Bart Andersen said. “There had to have been various conversations about what could the implications of this be. Did anybody think about that? Because if they would have asked us, we would have had a laundry list of concerns.”

Those concerns include how the state’s other prisons will absorb inmates from Stillwater – and do it safely.

“If there are 1,200 beds within the Minnesota Department of Corrections, we would like to see where those are,” Dan Gorman, who has worked as an officer in Stillwater for 20 years, said during a Capitol press conference the day after state leaders’ announcement.

Gorman added that the roughly 450 AFSCME members who work at the facility had been told by management that the prison’s population would reduce by half over the next “two or three years” before closing in the fourth year. Stillwater’s level-four security designation means that it can house the state’s most serious offenders.

“Now you start sending those (offenders) to other facilities, overpopulating those facilities, and it makes it very dangerous for the inmate population and for the staff that work in those facilities,” Gorman said.

Jeff Larson, chair of Council 5’s corrections officer council, said workers across Minnesota’s prisons were bracing for the impact of closing the system’s second-largest facility.

“Moving hundreds of staff and offenders across the state with no clear-cut plan?” Larson said. “That’s dangerous.”

Prison workers also expressed concerns for their careers, their families and the local community.

“I’ve had co-workers in tears,” Gorman said. “I’ve had seasoned officers coming to me and telling me they don’t know how much more of this they can take. And I’ve had new officers questioning whether they made the right choice joining this department at all.”

MAPE President Megan Dayton, whose union represents caseworkers and other workers in the DOC, said the community members deserved transparency and a chance to offer feedback before lawmakers arrived at the decision. Instead, they got “another behind-closed-doors decision.”

“That is not planning; that is scrambling,” Dayton said.

State officials argued that the prison has become less safe as it has fallen into greater disrepair. Its backlog of deferred maintenance projects would cost an estimated $700 million to address, according to a state analysis issued five years ago.

But Gorman pointed to a list of low-cost security improvements rejected by the agency in recent years, and Andersen said the state could invest in keeping the 111-year-old prison, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

“This Capitol is not brand new,” Andersen said. “The Governor’s Mansion is not brand new. There’s a brand new Senate building. There were capital investments to make sure all those facilities are up and running and renovated and maintained. Why can’t that happen with Stillwater?”

The news about Stillwater prison came as Walz’s administration was negotiating new union contracts with MAPE and Council 5’s state-employee locals, covering over 40,000 employees.

Those talks got off to a contentious start this spring after the governor unilaterally changed the state’s policy on remote work, giving thousands of workers mere months to plan for a partial return to the office.

Union leaders said they expect better from Walz and other elected officials who claim to support labor and law enforcement, but hope there’s still time to reverse course.

“You love to stand next to us when we have our uniforms on and take pictures with us and claim you support us,” Gorman said. “This is a moment to have your vote match your words or your social media posts.”