Daily Digest: Ordered to court

Wednesday's here and so, too, is your Digest. Enjoy.

1. Judge orders Minneapolis officials to court in Jamar Clark case. A federal judge has demanded on two days’ notice that high-ranking Minneapolis officials show up in his courtroom Wednesday to discuss the status of a lawsuit over the police shooting death of Jamar Clark in November 2015. Senior U.S. District Court Michael Davis’ order provided no detail about what will happen at the hearing, but it came down the first business day after the city reached a $20 million settlement with the family of Justine Ruszczyk Damond. Then-Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor fatally shot Damond on July 15, 2017, in the alley behind her home after she called 911 about a possible sexual assault. He was convicted of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter last month. Clark’s family filed an excessive force lawsuit over his death on June 8, 2017, a month before Damond was killed. Clark was shot in the head on Nov. 15, 2015 after an encounter with Minneapolis police officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman declined to charge the two officers and the lawsuit over Clark’s death is still pending in federal court. (Star Tribune)

2. Another day of little budging in budget talks. Budget negotiations involving Gov. Tim Walz, House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka resumed briefly Tuesday afternoon with hopes that the agreement they failed to reach a day earlier could yet be found. But the result was the same, big differences remain, and no deal is in sight. Walz told reporters that he continues to wait for a “meaningful” counter-offer from Senate Republicans. Walz and House Democrats offered to reduce their spending proposals, but Senate Republicans have not moved in their direction. “To have a counter offer be $0 and no changes is not a serious counter-offer,” Walz said. Still, Walz insisted that the negotiation sessions to this point have not been a waste of time. (MPR News)

3. Regent appointments back on track. State lawmakers will come together to appoint new members to the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents after all. Legislative leaders have agreed to call a joint convention at noon Thursday. Members of both chambers will cast votes for who they think should serve on the university’s governing board. They will fill four vacancies, including a 5th Congressional District seat, two at-large seats and a student seat. For weeks it had looked unlikely that the House and Senate would pick regents. That would have been historic — lawmakers have failed to elect new regents on just four occasions in the past 90 years. Disagreements among Democrats in the House had delayed the selection. Some Democrats wanted the Legislature to boost diversity on the board by appointing four people of color. They argued the university has made little progress in its quest to improve the retention and recruitment of minority students, and that a more diverse Board of Regents would see that these goals are fulfilled. (Pioneer Press)

4. Another take on Klobuchar and her dad. On a recent April morning, Amy Klobuchar stood in her dining room flipping through a scrapbook of her father’s newspaper articles. She was on a brief break from the campaign trail, trading hard-hat tours of ethanol plants in Iowa and a uniform of nondescript blazers from New Hampshire town halls for a quiet morning at home in a comfy pastel fleece. “I just remember being horrified by this headline,” she told me, pointing to a yellowing page that featured portraits of her, a recent high school graduate with hair down to her turtleneck, and her father, who wore long sideburns and a cardigan. The article detailed a bicycle trip the father-daughter duo had undertaken and was titled: “Jim Klobuchar and daughter encounter new relationship.” Amy, 58, shook her head and laughed, her short bob swaying side to side. It’s been something of a theme over the course of Amy’s life; both an evolving kinship with her father and being mortified by things he put in the paper. For decades, Jim Klobuchar was a daily columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune; part sportswriter, raconteur-adventurer, voice for the voiceless, and needler of the ruling class. Little in his life, or Amy’s, was off limits. (Washington Post)

5.  St. Paul street maintenance bills too high for some homeowners. Not long after they bought a house on Osceola Avenue in St. Paul in October 2017, Simon and Christina Anderson Taghioff were surprised to see an “invoice” from the city for mill and overlay work to Victoria Street. Because they live on a corner lot, with 150 feet fronting Victoria, they were charged nearly $5,000 for its repaving. “Our first reaction was, ‘Is this normal?’ ” Simon Taghioff said. It wasn’t. At least not until the state Supreme Court in 2016 threw out St. Paul’s previous system of paying for street maintenance — a right-of-way fee charged to all properties, including churches. For mill and overlay projects, done on the city’s busier streets, St. Paul in 2017 started charging property owners 50% of the repair cost, based on their linear feet of street frontage, with the city picking up the rest. That meant whopping new bills of as much as $8,000 for some homeowners. Now members of the City Council are taking another look at how to pay for street maintenance. (Star Tribune)

 

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