MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Lynx is inspiring the next generation of athletes regardless of whether they win or lose.

Sophia Witkowski went to the game with her mother, Christy, to watch Game 3 of the WNBA Finals.

“For her to see all her idols it’s just so fun,” Christy said.

“I like it because women’s sports aren’t that popular. Now the WNBA is really popular,” Sophia said.

They weren’t the only mother-and-daughter duo at the game. Amanda Williams took her 10-year-old daughter Abby to watch.

“It’s really awesome to have my daughter here to see great role models from the team and the fact,” Amanda said.

“I think that it’s super cool that they get to do what they want to do, and they get paid for it too,” Abby said.

Maggie Niska with Her Next Play, a nonprofit working to empower the next generation of female leaders through sports, said their visibility is everything.

“I think it gives these girls someone to look up to, and it gives them something to aspire to, and by having them in the community it makes seem a little more reachable too,” Niska said.

She said the Lynx Academy put on a basketball clinic for some of her girls in Hopkins Tuesday night. Niska said all of the professional women’s sports teams in Minnesota show girls they can have a future in sports.

“I just think that any visibility these girls can get to women competing at sports at a higher level, hearing these women speak, and seeing them succeed, and getting insight into their lives and what they do to compete at this higher level, I think all of that serves as a great inspiration to these girls,” she said.

It’s something Lynx Head Coach Cheryl Reeve understands well.

“For young girls to see the opportunities for them to play in any sport and then also more in sport, jobs in sports that sports can be a career,” Reeve said.

Sophia Ritter and Taylor Tool drove hours to see the players in action.

“We traveled from Aberdeen, South Dakota and the Northern State women’s basketball team took two vans,” she said.

Ritter and Tool both said it was a cool opportunity for them to see two great teams play on the professional level.

“Growing up, WNBA wasn’t really a big a thing and something that everyone was watching and now that it’s growing it’s really nice to see,” Ritter said.

“It’s really fun seeing all the support and seeing how many people come to watch the games like it’s really cool to see all the fans in the stands filling up and it’s growing,” Tool said.

Gophers’ Shoot Guard Mara Braun went to the game with her team after practice.

“These women out here are just amazingly talented and they play with this toughness that I think we’re really trying to embody as a team,” Braun said.

She knows young girls are looking up to her and her teammates just like they are with the Lynx.

“Especially growing up, you know, you want to play college basketball, and the next level is WNBA or overseas or whatever it is, so for me this is obviously a dream and something I’m working towards to be able to see it,” she said.

Braun dreams of playing in the WNBA and watching the Lynx and the Liberty in the finals makes that dream feel like it could be her new reality.

ST PAUL, Minn. — The City of St. Paul has seen a number of deadly shootings recently, but often it’s the ones that aren’t fatal that don’t get as much attention. And for police, they can also be harder to solve.

The department, though, is trying something new to try and reverse that trend.

“The amount of guns that are on the street right now,” St. Paul Police Commander Nikkole Peterson said about the biggest change she’s seen in the 22 years she’s been a cop. “It’s jaw-dropping.”

Commander Peterson is now in charge of the department’s non-fatal shooting unit that launched in January focusing only on those crimes. 

It’s the only department in the state implementing something like that, after it saw success with the police department in Denver, Colorado doing something similar. 

“If there’s a shooting, it doesn’t matter what time of night that happens or time of day, that sergeant will get called in to begin the investigation immediately,” said Commander Peterson.

The crime used to fall on the homicide unit that’s already burdened by heavy case loads. There’s also usually little victim cooperation which can stall solving non-fatal shootings.

“A lot of times we wouldn’t investigate it any further or the prosecutor wouldn’t charge those crimes and we knew that something different had to be done,” said Commander Peterson.

The unit is now treating non-fatal shootings like homicides and making them a priority. The investigators also rely more heavily on evidence and devote just as many resources, from forensics to video management and even SWAT teams.

“We are utilizing all these different resources to help solve these crimes,” said Commander Peterson. “We’re chasing down every lead that we can.”

In a press conference on Tuesday, St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry said there have been 86 non-fatal shootings compared to 99 this same time last year. But two years ago, there were 170, putting the city’s solve rate around 60%.

“Anything above 50% is just incredible and so we’re really happy with where we’re at right now,” said Commander Peterson.

Commander Peterson also credits the city’s ASPIRE program that focuses on intervention, particularly with youth. She also points to the Office of Neighborhood Safety that partners with local organizations working on prevention, saying this cooperation is ultimately what will reduce crime. 

ST PAUL, Minn. — A ballot question up for consideration in St. Paul right now would authorize the city to raise property taxes by $110 million over the next ten years in order to help pay for childcare for some low-income families.

But regardless of how that vote goes, Mayor Melvin Carter said he has no plans to follow through.

“I am telling our community that, based on my judgment, it can’t be done, so we’ll continue to do the work that we’ve been doing,” Carter said. “If our voters say yes to this, they’ll say yes to authorizing us, not directing it to be done. Those two things are actually opposites.”

St. Paul city council member, Rebecca Noecker, who supports and helped craft the 2024 Early Care and Learning Proposal, said the Mayor’s stance is concerning. 

“I find it very alarming to hear an elected leader in a democracy say that he would not accept the results of an election,” she said. “That’s just, that’s really concerning from a democracy standpoint to me.”

The mayor’s argument for ignoring a voter-authorized tax hike centers on the language of the ballot question itself, which reads:

“In order to create a dedicated fund for children’s early care and education to be administered by a City department or office that provides subsidies to families and providers so that early care and education is no cost to low-income families and available on a sliding scale to other families, and so as to increase the number of child care slots and support the child care workforce, shall the City of Saint Paul be authorized to levy property taxes in the amount of $2,000,000 in the first year, to increase by the same amount each year following for the next nine years ($4,000,000 of property taxes levied in year two, $6,000,000 in year three, $8,000,000 in year four and so on until $20,000,000 of property taxes are levied in year ten).” 

“If I’m a voter, I think, if we vote yes on this, then childcare will be available in the city at no cost to low-income families,” Carter said. “This proposal would serve an average of only 404 children per year, at a total cost of $110 million in property tax increases.”

“We can’t ask (St. Paul voters) to pass the largest single property tax increase that I can ever remember on the basis of making a promise that explicitly says all children, and then turn around and say, ‘Oh, of the 20,000 children in our city under age five, we only meant 404 of them.”

The mayor isn’t the only one who has been clear about their stance for more than a year.

Advocates for the ballot question say they have been clear about who is – and isn’t – covered by the proposal since the council voted to override his veto.

“There’s never been a claim that this would cover every single child on day one,” Noecker told KARE11 back in the summer of 2023. “This is to provide low-income families with free child care, and to make it more affordable for families above that.”

Even though the proposal doesn’t come close to covering all low-income families, she stands by the language on the ballot and the information that supports it.

“Even if this does move forward, there’s just no scenario in which the city can administer this program as it’s currently framed,” Mayor Carter said during a news conference in the summer of 2023.

“I think that the ballot question is really clear as to who is going to be eligible for the program. But I think that in any ballot question, you only have so many words and so much space, and that’s why it’s so important to have accompanying information that goes along with that ballot question,” Noecker said. “This program will not meet the entire need. And that’s, that’s the case with every single public program that we have in our country.”

Despite her concern with the Mayor’s latest comments, Noecker said she remains hopeful that voters will be given the ultimate say.

“I haven’t really contemplated what happens after Nov. 5 if the mayor is not ready to respect the results of the election,” she said. “That’s something that my council colleagues and I will need to talk about and we’ll need to discuss what our options are in that situation.”

If it does pass, Mayor Carter said he’s not the only one who will have questions to answer.

“The folks who put this plan together by ignoring every concern, by ignoring everything my team and I have brought forward, those are the folks who should tell us what they plan to do if this passes,” Carter said. “The council member seems to have, essentially at this point, a two-part plan number one is ignoring all of my input and number two is counting on me to do all the work and they’re going to need a better plan than that.”