By Shannon Fiecke, Staff Writer 

 Despite pleas from neighbors, city leaders said there’s nothing they can do to prevent a program for at-risk youth from opening in a Shakopee neighborhood.

Representatives of the Lost Harbor Institute, a nonprofit group that plans to help teach job and living skills to older boys and young men, however, insist neighbors have nothing to worry about.

A group of residents that lives near a house being leased by Lost Harbor showed up at the City Council meeting two weeks ago with safety concerns.

But so long as the Lost Harbor Institute has six or fewer residents and doesn’t include sexual predators, city officials said they can’t place any special conditions upon the residential program or stop it from operating at 729 Dakota St. S.

“In a situation like this, we really don’t have any control whatsoever,” Mayor John Schmitt said.

Lost Harbor was unable to send a representative to the meeting, but it had been communicating for a while with the city Police Department about its intention to open. Program staff feels neighbors’ concerns will be placated once they know more about how Lost Harbor will operate.

One neighbor who spoke with the council was concerned that the youths at the home will likely have been in trouble with the law before: “We don’t know what kind of crime they’ve committed.” 

 “I’m just really happy we already have an alarm system,” one woman said.

Former Shakopee police officer Earl Fleck, who lives in the neighborhood, questioned the location of the facility near an elementary school. He said one of the residents will have a record of a lack of impulse control.

“When an impulse control problem meets opportunity, then we’re going to have a problem in the neighborhood,” he said.

City Councilor Matt Lehman, who lives in the neighborhood, said he’s amazed there isn’t an opportunity for a community forum when a residential facility such as this considers locating in a neighborhood, given the potential impact to people’s property and safety.

The institute is designed to be a short-term program that helps young men, who may have been homeless or in a juvenile correctional facility, transition to living on their own.

Lost Harbor co-founder Ben Kaeding of Eden Prairie said the program will be selective in whom it accepts and won’t take any youths he wouldn’t be willing to have live in his own home.

“We want to be good neighbors and work with the community, and we want to make a difference in the lives of these kids,” Kaeding, the director of operations, said.

Youths will choose to enroll in the program because they want to change their lives, staff said.

The program’s house, which isn’t occupied yet, was recently licensed by the state to serve up to four males, ages 16 to 21. Director Garius Carey said Lost Harbor started setting up in the house about a month ago.

The only other licensed children’s residential facility in Shakopee, Journey for Girls, is operated by the Mid-America Baptist Service Organization, with a similar mission to help teenage females and young women.

Lost Harbor staff said they were waiting for licensing to go through and to figure out the appropriate way to approach neighbors before announcing the program to the neighborhood.

In the meantime, neighbors happened to find out that a home for boys was opening through Kaeding’s daughter, who was outside playing, and they requested to speak to the City Council. They were upset they hadn’t been informed of the residential facility and that Lost Harbor wasn’t at the meeting.

Lost Harbor staff said they didn’t have a representative available to send to the City Council meeting, and they’re now trying to clear up some of the concerns that were raised there. They plan to have an open house on June 22 so neighbors can view the facility before residents move in.  

According to admission criteria, youths must be employed, seeking employment or enrolled in an academic or vocational program while at Lost Harbor. They must be leaving out-of-home placement, be homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Lost Harbor says it won’t enroll youths with current drug or alcohol problems, violent behaviors or unresolved mental-health disorders.

Kaeding said participants will likely come from Carver, Scott or Hennepin counties.

They will be referred to the program through agents like social workers and probation officers, Facilities Manager Patricia Vonderharr said.

Staff anticipates that some of the young men may be transitioning from detention or correctional facilities, prior to living independently.

Neighbors also questioned why they hadn’t been invited to serve on an advisory council or board of directors for the program.

Vonderharr said Lost Harbor welcomes neighbors to serve in an advisory council capacity, but it will wait to recruit community members for the board of directors until a more permanent home is found for the program.

Lost Harbor is currently leasing the house, Vonderharr said, and its long-term goal is to find a permanent spot along the Minnesota River.

The program is intended to be water-based and teach carpentry trades to youths by having them work on boats, said Kaeding, a computer programmer and licensed merchant marine who used to work on tugboats on the Minnesota River.

Staff point to the Alexandria Seaport Foundation, an East Coast facility that teaches boat-building to help turn youth around, as a model for Lost Harbor.

The work skills Lost Harbor teaches youths will be very basic, with the intention to help them obtain entry-level employment, Kaeding said.

Given the state of the housing construction market right now, in the beginning, the program will be teaching youth other ways of working with their hands besides carpentry, such as repairing and maintaining motor vehicles, Kaeding said. 

Lost Harbor is seeking volunteers to help teach trades to the young men.

The organization has already hired eight staff. Carey said there will be two to three employees on during the day and one to two awake staff at night.

Kaeding said Lost Harbor’s board of directors include himself and Carey, as well as a nurse from Eden Prairie who has experience running children’s camps and a Native American woman from Burnsville who works in the finance industry and is particularly interested in helping Native American youths.

The institute, which also has a diverse staff, hopes to serve youths from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

An acquaintance introduced Carey to Kaeding. They and a group of acquaintances, co-workers and friends who wanted to do something to make a difference in society developed the program together, said Kaeding.

Carey, who has worked as a teacher’s aide and in various capacities for the Minneapolis Public Schools, said he’s been mentoring kids since he was a student athlete in high school. He went to college in Mankato for social work and sociology and long has had a vision of establishing a program for at risk-youth, which he outlined in a college thesis paper.

The purpose of Last Harbor is to help kids become contributing members of society, he said, and he hopes the Shakopee community will back the effort.

Shannon Fiecke can be reached at (952) 345-6679 or sfiecke@swpub.com.