The Longfellow man who was severely injured last October when a manhole cover blew off the sidewalk near his home, says the city has done little to prevent another accident from happening.

“The sewer is blowing more now than ever before,” Peter Kadlec told Ryan North in the Longfellow-Nokomis Messenger.

Three Minneapolis high school plays have been selected as part of the Hennepin Theatre Trust’s Spotlight Musical Theater program.

The three plays—Southwest High’s production of Hair, DeLaSalle’s Fiddler on the Roof, and Inter-District Downtown School’s The Wiz—are among 24 performances from around the metro area that will vie for Spotlight Awards during a June showcase. The awards will be given for acting, choreography, music, and overall production, reports Anna Pratt in the Southwest Journal.

After a summer of community meetings and a futile effort to convince the city to increase its budget, the Library Board is likely to vote to close three community libraries as a way to mend its ailing budget and improve services throughout the system.

Already faced with the prospect of Friday night high school football games on their formerly bucolic urban refuge, residents of Nicollet Island last month were rudely awakened--several times--by train whistles.

A government employees’ union is lobbying hard to save a 40-year-old community clinic that could face closure Monday.

According to a report in Workday Minnesota, the board that governs the Community University Health Care Center will vote Monday on a cost-cutting measure that would dramatically cut staff and threaten the survival of the clinic, which has been serving low-income patients in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis since 1966.

City officials are promoting a new Web site that will help residents calculate their household greenhouse gas emissions and show them ways to conserve, reports Dan Haugen in the Southwest Journal.

The Minneapolis Energy Challenge begins by encouraging residents to replace five regular light bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). It may seem like a small step, but Judy Thommes of the Center for Energy and Environment, which developed the Web site, said small changes can mean real savings. “They’ll realize every little thing makes a difference.”

Mayor R.T. Rybak on Wednesday proposed a 2007 city budget that would include $200 million in spending on public safety--enough to bring police staffing back to 2002 levels while investing in a variety of technology designed to make local law enforcement more effective.

Two major players in the local ethnic press--the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder and the Latino Communications Network--announced last week that they had agreed to form a new partnership called Voices United.

As it has done with its historic makeover of Lake Street, Hennepin County is making life difficult for small businesses on Lowry Avenue. But this time, some of those businesspeople are accusing the county of trying to put them out of business.

University of Minnesota officials are warning students to beware of a widespread e-mail scam that has swindled at least one student out of thousands of dollars.

As Sara Schweid reports in The Minnesota Daily, the scam targets students hoping to sublet their apartments. Typically, they’ll receive an e-mail from someone overseas inquiring about the apartment. Once an agreement is worked out, the person subletting the unit will wire a money order or bank check that exceeds the first month’s rent and ask the student to send them the difference. The check then bounces and the student loses the rent check and the remainder of the money.