Dana Sande sat slumped in his chair an hour into the Grand Forks city council meeting on February 6. With his tie strewn to the side, Sande, the president of the city council, looked fatigued and even slightly annoyed as an unusually packed crowd of onlookers cheered on Jodi Carlson, a local resident.
“God bless America,” Carlson started when she took the podium during the public comment period of the meeting. “You’re a bunch of fighters,” she said, pointing back to her supporters in the audience.
That night, Sande and members of the city council were set to vote on whether or not to approve a proposal from the Fufeng Group, a Chinese agricultural conglomerate that sought to build a wet corn milling plant on the outskirts of the city. Wet corn milling plants process corn into several profitable products, including corn oil, starch, fructose and animal feed. But Carlson and other critics had a long list of complaints about the proposed plant, including concerns tha
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