Good Wednesday morning. Public impeachment hearings start today, and you can catch them live on MPR News stations.  Here’s your Digest.

1. New poll shows Klobuchar in 5th place in Iowa. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has joined former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at the top of the leaderboard in the third Monmouth University Poll of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses. Other candidates register single digit support among all likely caucusgoers, including Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (5%). Klobuchar also holds a relatively strong rating of 54% favorable and 18% unfavorable (similar to her 51%-18% rating in August). Monmouth University Polling Institute

2. More legislators announce retirements. Two more incumbent Minnesota legislators have announced they won’t run for reelection next year. Longtime state Rep. Jean Wagenius, DFL-Minneapolis, and freshman Rep. Hunter Cantrell, DFL-Savage, are the latest lawmakers to say they will step aside in 2020. Wagenius was first elected to the Minnesota House in 1986. She is currently serving her 17th two-year term. Wagenius chairs the House Energy and Climate Finance and Policy Committee. Two other Democrats had already filed to run for her District 63B seat. Cantrell was elected in 2018 to the District 56A seat that had previously been in Republican hands. He serves on capital investment, health and human services, judiciary and civil law committees. MPR News

3. Deal reached to redevelop Ford site. St. Paul has struck a final deal with the developer planning to remake the massive former Ford Motor Company assembly plant in St. Paul. Mayor Melvin Carter and Ryan Companies on Tuesday announced the agreement on the vacant 122-acre site in the Highland Park neighborhood, promising hundreds of new housing units, more than 13,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs on the site.  They also said it would have 3,800 housing units, 265,000 square feet of office space and 150,000 square feet of retail space. “This is just the beginning,” said Tony Barranco with Ryan Cos. “We’ll have more conversations with the City Council. “We’d like to get started on construction in the spring.” The deal calls for 20 percent of the housing to be income-restricted, with 760 units affordable to households within 30 to 60 percent of the area’s median income. MPR News

4. Kahn Rule will accelerate Minneapolis council elections. When the law passed a decade ago, its implications were so far off in the future that it was barely noticed. But now the effects of the so-called Kahn Rule are just two years away — and the 13 incumbent members of the Minneapolis City Council are facing a 2021 election in which they will be forced to run for two-year terms instead of four. And without further changes to state law, council elections would then be decoupled from mayor elections, even after the council returns to four-year terms. The provision, named for former state Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, requires Minneapolis to hold elections soon after census-driven redistricting of council wards. Kahn pushed for the change in response to the 2000 census and 2001 redistricting, which resulted in Minneapolis council members serving three years in wards that had changed — sometimes considerably — since they had last won their seats. That left some voters in the new wards waiting until 2005 to elect a council member who represented them. MinnPost

5. Conflicting accounts of farm bailout spending. President Donald Trump’s $16 billion bailout package for farmers hurt by the trade war with China unfairly benefits the South at the expense of the North and wealthy producers over smaller farms, Democratic senators concluded in a report released Tuesday. The report, one of the sharpest congressional critiques yet of the Market Facilitation Program, said five southern states receive the highest average payments per acre under the program — Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas. The analysis by Democratic committee staffers concluded that farmers in the Midwest and Northern Plains have been hurt the most. It also asserted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has done nothing to target the assistance to vulnerable small, medium and beginning farmers.  The USDA said in a statement that payments are based on trade damage, not regions or farm size.According to the USDA, the states collecting the highest overall totals as of Tuesday — more than 60% of the total funds — are Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, and Kansas. A separate analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation released later Tuesday backed up the USDA’s assertion the dollars have flowed mostly to the Midwest, even though the per-acre rates are higher in parts of the South. The Farm Bureau report said that’s because most of the acres planted in crops that are eligible for MFP payments are planted in the Midwest. The Associated Press