Good morning, and welcome to Thursday. Here’s the Digest.
1. Voters approve some big school measures. “It was a really good night for schools,” said Greg Abbott, communications director for the Minnesota School Boards Association. A full 88 percent of school operating levies on Minnesota ballots passed on Tuesday. That’s an approval rate surpassed only in 2015, when Minnesota saw 90 percent approval. School bond questions — in the form of property tax increases to pay for repairs or new schools — also fared well. More than 7 in 10 passed, which is the third highest rate since the MSBA began tracking school referendums in 1980. Among those approved bond referendums was the largest in state history: a $326 million initiative for a variety of building projects in White Bear Lake. “That just shows the public support,” Abbott said. “They want their schools and they want their buildings to be competitive.” Rural Minnesota districts also set records this year. A full 84 percent of bond and operating referendums passed outside the metro area — the highest rate in recent history. Minnesota has long had a disparity between rural and urban districts when it comes to approving school referendums. The Minnesota Rural Education Association estimates approximately half of rural school bond issues have passed in recent years — a rate much lower than that in urban districts. MPR News
2. Election administrators say Tuesday's election was a good warm-up for 2020. State and local election officials were generally pleased with the off-year voting that took place Tuesday in many Minnesota cities, counties and school districts. They say their voting systems appear sound and secure heading toward 2020, when voter turnout is expected to be much higher. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon says it was a very good Election Day, with generally smooth processes and mostly clear results. One of the day’s few glitches happened at Simon’s office when the website developed connectivity problems while reporting results. “The functionality, the actual election night reporting never went down. There was no dent. There was no ding whatsoever. It was just how people accessed that information that was down momentarily.” Simon said turnout was mixed throughout the state. He said the numbers were flat in some communities and high in others. One of the high turnout pockets was in the city of St. Paul, where a referendum of trash collection drew a lot of interest. There were also city council seats decided. Dave Triplett, the interim elections manager in Ramsey County, said unofficial turnout in St. Paul was more than 56,000. He says that’s double the turnout of the last off-year election in 2015. "Overall, we didn't get a lot of concerns or phone calls to our attention, and it was a fairly smooth day countywide." MPR News
3. Klobuchar will be in December debate. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, inching up in the polls of the Democratic presidential primary race, has now qualified for a candidate debate in December. The Minnesota senator clinched the spot Wednesday with a 5-percent showing in a Quinnipiac University poll of Iowa. That's Klobuchar's best showing to date in the Hawkeye State, whose first-in-the-nation caucus is pivotal to her presidential hopes next year. That's the fourth national or early-state poll in which Klobuchar did well enough to meet the Democratic National Committee's polling criteria for the December debate, to be held on Dec. 19 in Los Angeles. She had already met the DNC's fundraising criteria. Klobuchar also registered a 5-percent showing in a CNN/University of New Hampshire poll of that state, whose primary is eight days after the Iowa Caucus. Star Tribune
4. Supporters push financial benefits of legal marijuana. Minnesota could generate billions in new tax revenue over the next five years by legalizing recreational marijuana, according to one Denver-based pot consultancy and research firm. By the Marijuana Policy Group's estimate, legalization would also create approximately new 27,000 jobs. That might not be reason enough to legalize cannabis outright, lawmakers and lobbyists said Thursday, but it's at least worth talking about. "Cannabis by itself is not going to fix the financial woes of any state," said Sal Barnes at Thursday's cannabis symposium in downtown Minneapolis. But in states like Colorado that have legalized the drug for recreational use, he said, it can at the least provide a new source of funding for municipal governments and local schools. Barnes, the firm's strategy director, said the catch is in regulating pot to a point where businesses still have a fair shot to break into the market for it but not so loosely as to inadvertently create an illegal market for it. He cited Texas as an example, where he said licensing fees for medical cannabis-related businesses were high enough to prevent many who wanted to start them from doing so. Texas only allows marijuana to be used for certain medical conditions, and only in the form of oil with low levels of THC, the psychoactive chemical compound found in pot. On the other hand, he said that the abundance of legally cultivated marijuana in Oregon — where recreational use is legal — has led to it appearing in the black market. Inforum
5. 30 years of tracking domestic homicides. For the last three decades, a group of women have shared a grim task: collecting the names of every victim of domestic homicide in Minnesota. Known for years as the annual Femicide Report, it started in 1989 as a way to fill in a gap in reporting gender-bias violence against women and girls. There was no other state or national group collecting this kind of data at the time, and to this day no state agency collects comparable data. "Every month or so a woman, and or her children, and or her partner or mother or neighbor got killed, and it was like a flash in the pan,” said Julie Tilley, who first decided to start collecting the names as a staffer at the Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women. “One of our goals was not only to honor the victims of this horrendous violence but to make this violence visible. It was so clear to us at that time that people weren’t seeing what was happening all around us.” The report has evolved over the last 30 years, even as the list of names grew to a total of 685 women, children and men who have been killed by an intimate partner or while intervening in a case of domestic violence. The youngest victim was just 22 weeks old, the oldest 88. It’s inspired others to start tracking similar data: A nurse in Texas is collecting names of domestic homicide victims across the country dating back to the 1950s, and a woman from Argentina recently consulted with Tilley before starting her own list. MPR News
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