All right.

Welcome to this morning's Ramsey County Board Shop Board Workshop.

The workshop will be a presentation on restrictive covenants updates.

As a reminder, the last time we received this update was probably last year.

About this.

And the courtesy reminder that the board workshop is recorded and it is live streamed on the Zoom webinars.

There are no votes that will be taken during this workshop.

Let's start off with introduction of commissioners and presenters around their table, then to the rest of the room.

Commissioner My Chong Zhang.

I have the privilege and honor of representing District Six.

Ken Miller, Ramsey County Commissioner District 7.

Wayne Anderson, Ramsey County Examiner of Titles.

Pat Shapman, Ramsey County Assessor.

Rafael Data, Personal District 5.

Oh, um, and Commissioner McGuire.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Commissioner Mary Joe McGuire, Commissioner District 2.

Gracie Westracker, Pete Chris Carly.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're all titled happiness and turn for the version.

Thank you.

All right.

Um, the workshop today will highlight Ramsey County's efforts and progress to discharge uh restrictive covenants.

We'll hear a brief history of the restorative covenants.

And the assessor will give results from a canvassing effort done last year and next steps in this process.

Um so I'll hand it off to our presenters.

Uh thank you, Commissioner Zhang.

Uh commissioners, um we are here to give an update of the progress around uh discharging restrictive covenants.

Um Wayne is gonna give you an overview and a slight history, a brief history of this work.

Um many of you uh been involved in it before, and many of you have heard about it, uh, but we wanted to give a brief update.

And then at the end, I'll wrap up some work about uh the way the assessor's office has gone about this in a in a more pointed fashion.

So I'll hand it off to one.

Thank you, Pat.

There you go.

All right.

We're gonna actually go to the next.

All right.

There are a couple of statutes that are uh key to the work we're doing.

And the first one is from 1953, which uh our legislature uh enacted a statute that made restrictions related to religious faith, creed, national organ, race and color uh illegal and unenforceable.

Um the next statute um is more recent from 2019, which gave uh property owners the opportunity to discharge the covenants, although they were not enforceable, they're still part of the land records.

Um in abstract, they will just be old documents that people don't look at.

And in the Toronto's office, some of them still appear on the certificates of title.

Um the property owner can record an affidavit, a discharge uh against their title to show that they have discharge the the covenant.

And in working on this, uh we we use the particular definition of discharge from Maryam Webster, the act of relieving of something that oppresses.

Uh and that sort of aggressive why we think this matters since the covenants are not enforceable.

We think that uh they they still do oppress the property by having them on uh in Ramsey County restrictive covenants began around in 1910.

There are probably a few that are a little older.

Um they really picked up uh being applied to properties both in Ramsey County, statewide, nationwide during uh the new deal.

The FHA required that properties have restrictions on them to qualify for FHA mortgages.

They used redlining to block off the yes, we can make loans in this area, but not in this other area in Ramsey County.

Uh Frankson's Como Park, huge development subject to the covenants.

And I'm not, I don't want to say that the Frankstons were terrible.

Following the law to enable people to buy their houses and get funding.

Um in 1948, the US Supreme Court declared that racial covenants of this type were unconstitutional a violation of equal protection.

So they became unenforceable at that point, and then the legislature adopted the rule that we couldn't even record uh such a restriction anymore in Minnesota.

Um in 1973, our legislature adopted a statute that applied to Torrance property, which allowed the it's 508.71 and it begins at the request of the registered owner or other person in interest, and it allows the examiner titles to remove from a certificate of title the document that uh contains a racial covenant.

Occasionally we can't remove them because they also have utility easements or things we need to preserve.

So we um addressed the we addressed the unenforceable portion by saying only the easements are remaining effect.

Um then 2019, uh the legislation was adopted that allowed the discharge by the property owner, and the uh registrar and reporter provided uh documents to the mapping prejudice process project, which allowed them to create a map of Ramsey County.