In southwestern Minnesota, the dream of a Buddhist temple collapses

JACKSON, MINN. – Paul Somphanthabansouk survived war in Laos, refugee camps in Thailand and resettlement to America. But he could not stop himself from sobbing Monday as he thought of the destruction of a derelict motel that he and others in the Lao community hoped would become a temple.

"We are sad for what they do to us," said Somphanthabansouk, 62.

He is one of dozens of volunteers who had been working to rehabilitate a motel on a hill in Jackson, a small city about 35 miles east of Worthington. Those efforts came to an end on Monday, when a demolition crew armed with a court order began tearing down the motel. Jackson city officials say the motel is filled with mold and asbestos, its walls rotting from the inside.

The demolition ends a legal saga that dragged for half a decade. It comes as a blow to those in the Lao community in Jackson and nearby Mountain Lake who had been helping Jeeraphan Miyaguchi on her quixotic quest to turn an abandoned motel into a Buddhist temple on the prairie.

Miyaguchi, 58, is Thai but speaks Lao. She came to the U.S. in 1994. She often wears white religious robes; some Lao residents said they considered her to be something of a nun. She moved from California to Minnesota in 2016, after what she described as a messy divorce.

She found the derelict 30-room motel in Jackson on the market for cheap. In 2019, she bought the property, formerly known as the Prairie Winds Motel and built in the late 1960s, for about $30,000. Miyaguchi said she thought the motel, perched on a hill overlooking Jackson and the nearby city golf course, would be a perfect site for a Buddhist temple and community center.

After buying the motel, Miyaguchi turned the dining room next to the lobby into a shrine, with a golden Buddha perched on a desk, next to a large window with an American flag. With some cleaning and gumption, she said, she thought the motel could be a place for parties, funerals and a refuge for traveling monks.

But city officials said the building had underlying problems Miyaguchi refused to acknowledge.

Harry Jenness, building inspector for Jackson, said the Prairie Winds Motel property had a troubled past and sat vacant for three to four years before Miyaguchi bought it. The motel was abandoned by its former owners, who stripped it of the boilers, lights and whatever else they could take, Jenness said.

"Most people when they buy something, they research," Jenness said. "You don't just drive up, say 'It's a beautiful view, I'm going to buy it.'"

Jenness wrote a letter to Miyaguchi in 2019 outlining issues with the motel: It needed new plumbing, sewer lines and smoke detectors, and the roof was leaking. She needed to follow state and local requirements and have work done by qualified professionals before occupancy could be allowed, he said.

Jenness said a series of letters he wrote to Miyaguchi over five years went mostly unanswered. These letters outlined further issues: The foundation was compromised, there was excessive black mold and asbestos, there was a rodent problem that included barking groundhogs. Firefighters would be at unnecessary risk if a blaze broke out, he said.

Miyaguchi said she began to see Jenness, a 75-year-old longtime building inspector, as her primary obstacle. "Why does he have power over something I own?" she said.

Miyaguchi complained about Jenness in court filings and in conversations, and at one point filed a harassment complaint against him, which a judge tossed.

In the afternoons, she'd climb onto the roof of the motel, which Jenness told her was unsafe, and would look out past the golf course at the horizon.

Jenness requested the building be declared a public nuisance in October 2022. The following month, the city entered an order to raze it. Miyaguchi appealed, representing herself in court because, she said, she couldn't find an attorney. She was frequently late with filings, which were often handwritten. A judge rejected her appeal in July.

As the case wound through the courts, dozens of volunteers from the Lao community continued to clean the motel. They scrubbed the mold and painted the walls, put powdered soap on the floors, screwed in wooden particle boards over the doors so homeless people couldn't break in.

For the volunteers from Mountain Lake, the nearest temple is almost 50 miles away in Worthington. One volunteer, Cathy Singharaj said people in the area simply wanted a place of their own to gather, for the benefit of children they feared were losing touch with their culture.

"Our families went through hell and back," she said. A temple would also help elders in the community who have a hard time learning English, she added, and who sometimes need help with the complicated bureaucracy of their new home.

But Singharaj only learned recently of the lost appeal; Miyaguchi hadn't told volunteers, she said.

"She's doing it for the right reasons, but I don't know if she knows what she's doing," Singharaj said of Miyaguchi.

Until the end, Miyaguchi insisted the motel was on its way to becoming a temple, that the rooms were clean and the walls free of mold. She said she invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the motel, but was not able to provide receipts. She would show visitors the fresh white paint on the walls and would tell them she could still win over the judge, if only she could get a lawyer.

On Monday morning, the demolition crew arrived. Miyaguchi confronted them, to no avail.

Jenness was also there Monday. He passed the golden Buddha, which had been taken out of the motel and placed in the back of a semi-trailer, next to a pile of plastic flowers, an American flag and a shop vacuum. The demolition crew lugged bed frames out of the rooms and piled them in the parking lot next to uprooted toilet bowls.

Jenness inspected the motel rooms. He peeled back the wallpaper, revealing a leopard-print pattern of black mold. He gestured at the ceiling, where rings of mold had broken through a coat of fresh white paint.

In court, he and the city had argued that Miyaguchi kept painting over her problems and that he had seen her and the volunteers putting primer over black mold. "If you cover it up, it's just going to come back," Jenness said. He pulled up a corner of carpeting and pointed at the rot in the wooden floorboards.

Inside of a refrigerator, there were colonies of mold so round they looked like charcoal peaches.

When asked whether the black mold underneath the paint and wallpaper proved Jenness was right, Miyaguchi remained adamant. "We don't know underneath," she said on the day of the demolition. "I see what I see."

The city will charge the temple the costs of demolition. If no one pays within a year, the city will foreclose on the property, Jenness said.

Singharaj said she still hopes Lao residents can find their temple.

"The community needs it," she said.