Star Tribune
St. Paul mayor and city council meeting to reach budget compromise
The middle ground: a 7.2% increase.
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Mayor Jamie Tincher said Carter, too, would like the levy to be lower. But proposing a 5% increase would mean an additional cut of $6 million from 2025 city services — a reduction that could increase fire response times, slow the processing of license applications and reduce parks and rec and library services.
“He doesn’t have a path to do that without reducing services that will be felt by the people who are currently getting them,” Tincher said.
If the two sides cannot agree on a tax levy for 2025, state law would require the city to institute this year’s levy. That, Tincher said, would lead to drastic cuts in city personnel and services, as costs go up every year because of things like health care, insurance and previously negotiated salary increases.
The gap between revenue and costs then, she said, would be $16 million.
Tincher was asked if this year’s negotiations felt “different.”
Star Tribune
Artworks owned by Alicia Keys and husband Swizz Beatz will come to Minnesota in March
The show includes not only photographs, paintings and sculptures but also installations, record albums and musical equipment. In fact, the exhibit has such a natural rhythmic flow, with themes being mixed and remixed, that it sometimes resonates like its own musical composition.
An installation on lost childhood innocence by Chicago-based Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson gives way to a room-sized, 33-panel work by Botswana-born painter and Yale professor Meleko Mokgosi.
A sculptural Soundsuit by fiber artist Nick Cave is in conversation with regal, intricate charcoal-and-pencil paintings by Nigerian artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose jewel-eyed details bring out a sublime grace in her subjects.
“The way that [these pieces] play together is like a song, like a journey, and it’s very beautiful,” Keys said, adding that the exhibit creates “a space to feel your power, your ancestry, your growth, your future, your present. And no matter who you are, what walk of life you’ve come from, you feel it.”
Audiences in New York and Atlanta have quickened to the work.
Star Tribune
One dead, one seriously wounded in shooting in Brooklyn Park strip mall parking lot
One person died and another was seriously wounded in a shooting Saturday afternoon in a Brooklyn Park parking lot.
Brooklyn Park police officers responded to a shooting around 2 p.m. Saturday in a strip mall parking lot near the busy intersection of Brooklyn Blvd. and Bottineau Blvd., not far from a Target and a Menards.
Officers found two victims and began to aid them before both were taken to a hospital, according to a police spokesman.
One of the victims was later pronounced dead. The other was seriously wounded. Identities for the victims werenot available Saturday night.
Star Tribune
Body found in river in Cannon Falls believed to be that of 60-year-old missing man
A body found in the Cannon River on Saturday afternoon is believed to be that of a 60-year-old man missing since Monday, Cannon Falls police said.
Christopher Dobson had been missing since Monday night, when a missing person report was filed after he didn’t return home after taking his dog for a walk. Police officers followed footprints in the woods toward the river before requesting assistance, because it was getting cold and dark, from local fire departments, Goodhue and Dakota county sheriff’s offices and the State Patrol, which sent in a helicopter.
The search continued for much of the week with aerial and amphibious drones as well as rescue personnel on the ground.
When the body was found in the river Saturday afternoon, the missing person search was suspended pending positive identification of the body by the medical examiner’s office.