Good morning, and happy Monday. It was a damp and dreary weekend in the Twin Cities, but nothing like what Houston and other parts of Texas are dealing with. Here’s the Digest.
1. All three branches of government will converge in a state Capitol courtroom Monday morning as lawyers argue over the constitutional powers of Minnesota’s governor. Gov. Mark Dayton is asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s ruling that his line-item vetoes of funding for the House and Senate violated the separation of powers clause of the state constitution by preventing the Legislature from exercising its duties. Dayton zeroed out the funding for the House and Senate to try to lure Republican leaders back into negotiations on a handful of tax and policy items that he already signed into law. That led leaders to sue the governor, and they won the first round in Ramsey County District Court. (MPR News)
2. Nursing homes and senior living centers in Southeastern Minnesota are facing their worst shortage of caregivers in decades, area nursing home CEOs say. And they say it’s only going to get more challenging. There was a similar shortage in the late 1990s due to a tight job market. This time the shortage is driven by a surge of baby boomers flooding into their retirement years. It’s estimated that 60,000 Minnesotans are turning 65 every year, and yet the number of people entering the workforce at the other end is a trickle by comparison. The imbalance has caught nursing homes in an ever-tightening vise. ( Rochester Post Bulletin)
3. Meanwhile nationwide, more than one-quarter of serious cases of nursing home abuse are not reported to the police, according to an alert released Monday morning by the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services. The cases went unreported despite the fact that state and federal law require that serious cases of abuse in nursing homes be turned over to the police. Government investigators are conducting an ongoing review into nursing home abuse and neglect but say they are releasing the alert now because they want immediate fixes. ( NPR)
4. A federal judge has ordered the Minnesota Department of Commerce to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees racked up by a windshield-repair company the department had challenged over its business tactics. The order stems from a more than two-year dispute between state commerce officials and Safelite AutoGlass, an Ohio-based company with 11 locations and 165 employees in Minnesota. Commerce Commissioner Michael Rothman alleged that Safelite used sales strategies that quashed competition from other auto-glass businesses and hurt consumers, and tried to block insurance companies from doing business with Safelite. In response, Safelite sued the Department of Commerce. In earlier rulings, an administrative law judge found that the Department of Commerce’s investigation had not turned up wrongdoing by Safelite — prompting the company to try to recoup its extensive legal costs. (Star Tribune)
5. Former Minneapolis Chief Janee Harteau says she is focused on her future, a month after being forced to resign amid the scrutiny of the fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk. Harteau is advertising work as a consultant, a coach and a speaker on her new web site. But she said she’s not currently looking for a job as a chief. “I would never say never, because I don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “But there’s just a lot of opportunities to do things on a more global basis and I’d prefer to entertain those first and really try to have an impact on the profession and women in leadership in both the private sector and the public sector.” (MPR News)
