Good morning and congratulations for making it to Wednesday. Here’s a look at a few stories in the news.
1. It’s not the kind of headline you might expect someone who’s running for governor to want to see, but St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said in his final annual budget address Tuesday that the 2018 property tax levy — the sum total of all taxes collected by the city — will rise an unprecedented 23.9 percent. Coleman says you have to dig deeper into the numbers for the rest of the story. The city is shifting costs from its “right-of-way” street maintenance fees to property taxes. That means homeowners can expect their annual right of way bills to drop dramatically, even as property taxes increase. But don’t expect his political opponents to play it that way. ( Pioneer Press)
2. When Gov. Mark Dayton goes to Mankato tonight to talk about water quality, he’s likely to get an earful. Rivers surrounding the city of more than 40,000 people are heavily polluted, largely because of agricultural runoff, and taxpayers are shelling out growing amounts of money to deal with it. Mankato officials want the state to do more to stop farm runoff, which is a major source of water pollution. (MPR News)
3. Members of Minnesota’s two big public employee unions have voted overwhelmingly to ratify new two-year contracts with the state. The tentative agreements with the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees and AFSCME Council 5 still need legislative approval. Under the contracts, more than 30,000 state workers would receive raises of 2 percent this year and 2.25 percent next year. There are also step increases each year and a six-week parental leave benefit. (MPR News)
4. Business executives, including 3M CEO Inge Thulin, are facing pressure to quit a manufacturing council that advises President Trump after the president’s handling of the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. over the weekend. Four CEOs have quit the manufacturing alliance because they felt the president did not come out strongly enough against white supremacists. In a tweet Tuesday, Trump blasted the executives who resigned. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, one of the country’s largest unions, resigned from the council late Tuesday. 3M did not respond to repeated requests for comment Monday and Tuesday.( Star Tribune)
5. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other members of the Trump administration used the term “domestic terrorism” to describe the act of a man who allegedly rammed his car into a crown of protesters in Charlottesville, killing one woman and injuring more than a dozen other people. But what does the term mean? Under the law, not much, according to people who have studied the issue. “Terrorism really is an almost meaningless term,” said Ruth DeFoster, a communications studies professor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. The question of why some acts of violence are considered terrorism and others are not intrigued her so much that she wrote a book about it. ( MPR News)
