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What is Fruit Mania?
“What you’re doing is wrong,” Commissioner Audrey Partridge told the cooperative during Thursday’s hearing, according to news reports. “I think you have lost your tether to the purpose of an electric utility.”
The decision follows a long-running battle over the multimillion-dollar solar project, which the Upper Sioux Community began developing in 2024 to curb electricity costs and advance its clean-energy goals.
In November 2024, Minnesota Valley issued the tribe a cease-and-desist order and threatened to disconnect Prairie’s Edge if the system was activated. The tribe countered that the utility’s generation restrictions did not apply because the system was designed solely to power its own property and would not feed electricity back onto the grid.
About Fruit Mania
Scotts Valley filed suit in response. In October 2025, Judge McFadden ruled that Interior had violated the tribe’s due process rights by rescinding the approval without giving prior notice or an opportunity to respond.
However, McFadden’s ruling left the door open for Interior to formally reconsider the underlying gaming eligibility question.
Scotts Valley has maintained that federal officials reversed course under intense political pressure from the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a neighboring tribe that opposes the Vallejo casino development.
What is Fruit Mania?
While it’s tempting to use AI to help you write a submit, we please ask that you avoid doing so, as once again, the more personal an entry is, the better we can judge it across our key criteria.
The submission form will close on 1 October, at which time nominations will be put to our esteemed panel of judges for final review.
More information on judges, submissions and deadlines can be found here. You can also access interviews with last year’s winners and the final list for 2025, as well as for every year prior.
