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Rochester firms face bidding, training roadblocks in construction jobs

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ROCHESTER — Not enough construction firms owned by women, veterans and people of color are bidding on city and commercial projects here, and if local leaders want to change that, they should make the bidding process more friendly to contractors.

That’s the message consultants with St. Paul-based MaKee Co. gave to the Rochester City Council on Monday as part of a study on barriers that the city’s so-called disadvantaged business firms face in the community.

Consultants found the city is meeting most of its initial goals to have between 4% and 7% of construction contract costs go to those targeted businesses. Destination Medical Center-funded projects are doing well, but city commercial construction projects during the past two years have lagged: Only about 3.6% of total project costs from 2021 on have gone to disadvantaged businesses, less than the 7% city officials hoped for.

In total, the city has offered about $2.7 million in contracts to disadvantaged firms since November 2021.

“We can do more than this,” said Jorrie Johnson, a project manager for the city working on targeted businesses and workforce compliance.

MaKee Co. CEO R. Lynn Pingol said disadvantaged business contractors interviewed as part of the survey found the city’s bidding process was the biggest obstacle in securing contracts for highway work and other construction projects.

Most business owners said they were unfamiliar with how the city’s process works, though consultants noted that many of the surveyed disadvantaged owners lacked key elements to meet bid qualifications at times — industry-specific training, proper capital reserves or even financial reviews and specifics on overhead costs.

In addition, city officials and general contractors don’t have enough information on disadvantaged businesses in the area. Pingol pointed out that the city doesn’t have a centralized office for bids and lacks relationships with some of the firms who attended listening sessions or were surveyed by consultants, which only compounds issues.

“We have infrastructure dollars coming down the pipeline. We have all this money coming to the city of Rochester,” Pingol said. “We have got to make sure that we’re ready for that, and we need to be inclusive of small businesses.”

Aside from gathering more data on local disadvantaged businesses, Pingol recommended that city officials tweak their business outreach efforts to connect disadvantaged firms to more resources, offer better training to staff and businesses alike and potentially ease some qualifications to get more bids from smaller firms.

City leaders welcomed the feedback, appearing to support incorporating the recommendations into its current plans — such as a $1 million project funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies to boost women of color in construction jobs.

“This holistic approach makes so much sense,” City Council President Brooke Carlson said.



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Harris goes to church while Trump muses about reporters being shot

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LITITZ, Pa. — Kamala Harris told a Michigan church on Sunday that God offers America a ”divine plan strong enough to heal division,” while Donald Trump gave a profane and conspiracy-laden speech in which he mused about reporters being shot and labeled Democrats as ”demonic.”

The two major candidates took starkly different tones on the final Sunday of the campaign. Less than 48 hours before Election Day, Harris, the Democratic vice president, argued that Tuesday’s election offers voters the chance to reject ”chaos, fear and hate,” while Trump, the Republican former president, repeated lies about voter fraud to try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and suggested that the country was falling apart without him in office.

Harris was concentrating her Sunday in Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, a reflection of how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.

”I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. ”I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”

She never mentioned Trump, though she’s certain to return to her more conventional partisan speech in stops later Sunday. But Harris did tell her friendly audience that ”there are those who seek to deepen division, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos.” The election and ”this moment in our nation,” she continued, ”has to be about so much more than partisan politics. It must be about the good work we can do together.”

Harris finished her remarks in about 11 minutes — starting and ending during Trump’s roughly 90-minute speech at a chilly outdoor rally at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, airport.

Trump usually veers from subject to subject, a discursive style he has labeled ”the weave.” But in Lancaster, he went on long tangents and hardly mentioned his usual points on the economy, immigration and rote criticisms of Harris.

Instead, Trump relaunched criticisms of voting procedures across the nation and his own staff. He resurrected grievances about being prosecuted after trying to overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden, suggesting at one point that he ”shouldn’t have left” the White House.



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How votes get counted in Minnesota on Election Day

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If that’s good, in many counties, election judges have a machine tabulate results, or count votes for candidates. In these counties, one copy of the tape the that machine prints in this process is taken to the central office. In most places, that is the county elections office. In others, the central office is the city elections office, which then reports to the county, Simon said.

Some precincts are close to the elections office, and some are far away, which explains some of the variation in when results show up.

But not every county tabulates at the precinct.

In Ramsey County, judges take the ballot counting machines from precincts to the county’s election office, Elections Manager David Triplett said. There, judges of different parties verify the machines’ seals, check the number of ballots against the number of voters that day, and if they add up, tabulate the votes.

“We have 100 receipts; we have 100 ballots. All right, go ahead and let’s report that result,” he said.

It is legal for precincts to transmit results to central offices online, but it’s rare, Simon said. And no devices used in the election can be connected to the internet while voting is in progress.



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Family pleaded to have assault rifle seized before deadly school shooting. Officers had few options

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Then on Oct. 10, Harris drove to a nearby suburb to pay a man $580 in cash for the rifle used in the shooting.

Harris’ family grew more concerned on Oct. 15, when two packages from gun and ammunition suppliers arrived. One of his sisters, Noneeka Harris, opened them, finding a body armor vest, magazine holsters and magazines. She then searched his bedroom and found the rifle inside an old TV box.

Harris’ mother, Tanya Ward, called BJC Mental Health Services and staff there ”deemed the situation as an immediate threat.” They advised her to take the items to the police department and tell officers about her son’s mental illness.

Police at the station told her they couldn’t take the firearm because Harris was of legal age to possess it. They said she should head home and an officer would meet them there. By the time she returned, Harris was home and insistent that he keep the gun.

His mother was adamant that the gun not be in the house, so the officers suggested a storage unit. The report said the officers also advised her on steps she needed to take to have her son deemed mentally unstable.

Federal law has banned some mentally ill people from buying guns since 1968, including those deemed a danger to themselves or others, who have been involuntarily committed, or judged not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial.



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