The Edina Historical Society is seeking $100,000 in city funding as it aims to revamp its programming to become more relevant to the community.

“When we went to the city, we knew that we kind of have to go big,” said Sarah Solsvig, president of the society’s board. “We want to better serve the needs of the community and want to grow some of the areas that we think need a little bit more attention.”

To land the funding — five times the amount the organization now receives — society leaders will need to convince council members who also are weighing requests from various city departments and trying to settle on a budget for next year. Some of them want the society to make stronger commitments to telling a more diverse set of stories before they will guarantee funding, promises society leaders say they’re willing to make.

Council Member Julie Risser said she respects the society’s work “but I feel like, at the moment, the way things are being messaged, it really doesn’t meet the standards that should be in place for 2024.”

Among other things, she wants to see a greater commitment to telling the stories of Black pioneers who also had a significant presence in the area. And she asked whether it might be time to add a council member to the group’s board.

The Edina Historical Society was founded in 1969 and runs a museum, the Cahill School, which was built in 1864 and was a fixture in the local Irish community, and the Minnehaha Grange Hall, which was built by farmers years later and served as a community meeting place.

The society hosts field trips, trick-or-treating and events focusing on topics like the fashions of World War II. Like other historical societies, it has been challenged in recent years by dwindling school budgets and cultural changes that have made it tougher to find volunteers or part-time workers.

Risser noted Edina leaders will have to weigh the historical society’s request against those from city departments. She noted that the police asked for $80,000 to obtain night vision goggles, an amount that would be equivalent to the increase the society is seeking.

But most concerns about crime are more local.

Moe, the Blaine Republican, said he hears from residents worried about feeling safe at Northtown Mall, especially in the days and weeks after gunfire led to a lockdown. People want to make sure local police departments have adequate staffing, he said, even if there is not much crime in Blaine.

Lucia Wrobleski, a DFLer running against Republican Wayne Johnson for House District 41A, which includes Lake Elmo and Afton and stretches to the St. Croix River, said she also hears worries about crime — something she’s particularly attuned to, she said, as a former St. Paul police officer.

“Our district is generally safe, but I do hear it at the doors,” she said. People worry about property crime in the fast-growing district, and they think about gun violence too, she said, with the February killing of two police officers and a firefighter-paramedic in Burnsville still on residents’ minds.

Jungling said he hears concerns from north metro residents about their safety when they visit Minneapolis and, in their own neighborhoods, property crimes such as catalytic converter thefts or thefts of purebred dogs, as was the case when a valuable French Bulldog puppy was stolen from the porch of a Maplewood home.

But overall, Jungling said, local and state-level issues are of much greater concern than the national political discourse.

PERRY, Fla. — Massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helene left people stranded, without shelter and awaiting rescue, as the cleanup began from a tempest that killed at least 64 people, caused widespread destruction across the U.S. Southeast and knocked out power to millions of people.

”I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,” said Janalea England of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state’s rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes.

Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140 mph (225 kph).

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it ”looks like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air. Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.

Western North Carolina was isolated because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. All those closures delayed the start of the East Tennessee State University football game against The Citadel because the Buccaneers’ drive to Charleston, South Carolina, took 16 hours.

There have been hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday. And the rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was under water.

”To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff.

Asheville resident Mario Moraga said it was ”heartbreaking” to see the damage in the Biltmore Village neighborhood and neighbors have been going house to house to check on each other and offer support.