Star Tribune
St. Paul’s Rondo Days is a no-go this year
For the fourth year in a row, there will be no Rondo Days celebration in St. Paul.
But Gayle Smaller, chairman of the board of Rondo Avenue Inc., said the festival isn’t going away permanently. It’s coming back bigger and better, over several days and at several sites, in 2024.
While the festival has been derailed by a number of factors — from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd to the rising cost of security — Smaller said the focus now is creating an event that appeals to a younger and more diverse demographic.
“Really just broaden it out, while keeping the underlying history and significance in place,” Smaller said Wednesday. “We really had no intention of doing it this year. The goal was to bring it back in 2024, while filling the generational gap.”
Rondo Days was started in 1983 by Floyd Smaller, Gayle Smaller’s father, and Marvin Anderson to remember and celebrate what had once been St. Paul’s vibrant, predominantly Black neighborhood surrounding the former Rondo Avenue. In the late 1950s and 1960s, planning and construction of Interstate 94 cut that community geographically in half while removing hundreds of homes and businesses.
Rondo Days’ founding board members are now in their 80s and are finding it harder to stay involved, Gayle Smaller said, but the surrounding neighborhood looks very different demographically. Future Rondo Days need to have broader appeal, he said.
Rather than a large, single-day event in a park with a parade, Smaller said the idea moving forward is to host a variety of events at area parks and businesses — from a brunch honoring the neighborhood’s history to performances and parades appealing to the present.
“The community that was once here doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “But we’re building an even bigger event. It’s really going to be about, what does the celebration look like now? We’re excited.”
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, who grew up in Rondo, said in a statement Wednesday that he “cherished” Rondo Days growing up and was “disappointed to see it canceled” this year.
“We stand ready to partner with the organizers as they rethink and re-establish this beloved community gathering,” Carter said.
In a letter to the community confirming that there will be no festival this year, Smaller said the work now will be to reflect the demographics and interests of Rondo’s new residents, while still honoring its past.
“In regards to next steps, we will be adding new board members starting [Aug. 1], and have begun building a solid foundation to ensure that the Legacy of our founders and the community that raised them continues,” he wrote, “and is held in the brightest of light as we honor one of the country’s brightest historically Black communities.”
The Pentagon would not go into detail about how American trainers are helping Taiwan build defenses. But making clear to the Chinese that an amphibious assault would be fraught is part of the U.S. military’s deterrence plan.
Army officials also say they hope joint exercises with Pacific partners will show Chinese military officials all the capabilities that the United States has and can bring to bear.
The officials point out that more than a quarter of the service’s 450,000 active-duty troops are already tasked to the Pacific. But they define that region liberally, to encompass troops not only in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines but also in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and California. Taiwan is more than 6,000 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, a separation the Army refers to as “the tyranny of distance.”
Docked in Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army vessel Maj. Gen. Robert Smalls will be critical to getting all the apparatuses of the Army into the Pacific theater. The 300-foot-long ship, which recently arrived from Norfolk, Virginia, via the Panama Canal for the exercises, can beach itself, discharging 900 tons of vehicles and cargo — and, if necessary, troops — onto islands.
Capt. Ander Thompson, the commander of the 7th Engineer Dive Detachment out of Pearl Harbor, was part of a detachment that spent several weeks this past summer with Filipino military divers clearing debris from a strategic port in the northern Philippine island of Batan, about 120 miles south of Taiwan.
The operation, which also deepened the harbor, will give Army and Navy ships better access to the port should conflict break out. Batan is near the Bashi Channel, a potential transit point for American forces headed to the Taiwan Strait.
For a handful of school board candidates across the state, the final weeks of campaigning have included an effort to lose support — or at least distance themselves ― from an organization known for backing conservative candidates and wading into local culture wars.
At least four candidates have stated publicly that they had not connected with or sought support from the Minnesota Parents Alliance before seeing their name appear on the group’s online voters guide. Some candidates said they were not aware of such an endorsement until voters reached out to them with questions about it.
“Without my knowledge or consent, I was added to the Minnesota Parents Alliance recommended candidate list,” Todd Haugen, a candidate for the Bemidji school board, wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page. “I did not seek this endorsement, and I have now requested more than once to be taken off of the list.”
The Minnesota Parents Alliance bills its voters guide as a nonpartisan resource, though the group lists several conservative groups, including the think tank Center of the American Experiment, on its list of resources for candidates.
The organization’s executive director, Cristine Trooien, said the voter guide recommendations are based on an independent evaluation of candidates’ campaigns, public engagement, and input received from parents and community members. Trooien launched the group in 2022 as a response to equity efforts in schools. Its initial goal included recruiting and supporting school board candidates who would champion ‘parents’ rights’ in education.
The group, and several others like it — on both sides of the political spectrum — cropped up during the pandemic, when tensions flared in school board rooms across the country as parents fought over mask mandates, curriculum and policies involving gender and race. Increasingly, school board races are drawing more money than ever — largely a result of outside groups lobbying amid those ongoing culture wars.
In general, endorsements aren’t new to school board races. Political parties, teachers unions and other educational organizations have long declared their support for candidates that align with their missions.
Minnesota Parents Alliance, Trooien said, does not coordinate its voter guide recommendations with candidates or require them to pledge their allegiance to the organization. She sees that as the antidote to what she called a “quid pro quo endorsement process” by teachers unions and interest groups, which offer support in “exchange for prioritizing that organization’s agenda at the board table,” she said.
Rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine was arrested in New York City on Tuesday for alleged parole violations that were set when he was sentenced several years ago to two years in prison in a racketeering case.
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