WASHINGTON — Although they’ve been paused for 30 days, President Donald Trump’s tariff threats showed how dependent Minnesota is on trade with Canada and Mexico.

According to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, about half of Minnesota’s exports went to those two countries and China in 2021, up from about one-third in 2002. And the chamber said trade between Minnesota and Canada grew about 39% from 2019 to 2021.

Those Minnesota exports would suffer if the nations Trump has threatened with tariffs follow through with their own threats to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

And the huge list of U.S. imports from the countries subject to the new tariffs — which range from cars and wine to pharmaceuticals — would be subject to substantial price hikes, fueling inflation, as U.S. importers pass the cost of the new tax along to consumers.

A trade war with the United States’ closest neighbors and allies was forestalled when Trump reached deals with Mexico and Canada, which would have been subject to 25% tariffs on Tuesday.

But on Tuesday, 10% tariffs will be placed on Chinese goods, which already bear tariffs.

Under the terms of Trump’s agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico would send an additional 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and the United States would aim to stop U.S. trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

An agreement with Canada took two phone calls between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had said he would lodge a protest at the World Trade Organization against the new U.S. tariffs, seek redress under the USMCA and impose more than $155 billion worth of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports.

In a posting on X, Trudeau said he “had a good call with President Trump” on Monday afternoon and suggested the pause on tariffs on Canadian goods was in response to Canada’s agreement to target the flow of fentanyl across the border into the United States.

But while a trade war has been postponed, the threat of an economic upheaval still remains.  

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs would be applied to more than 1,000 American products — from agriculture commodities to clothing and shoes to high-tech products. The list also includes paper products and other goods exported to Canada by Maplewood-based 3M.

“3M is reviewing the recently announced tariffs,” the company said. “We are continuing to monitor the situation.”

A USMCA fact sheet says that in 2019 Canada was Minnesota’s largest export destination and Mexico was the state’s second destination of the state-produced goods, accounting for a combined $7.2 billion in export sales that year.

Trump said he plans to extend tariffs to other nations — including European Union countries — and that they are needed to raise money for the U.S. Treasury. But most economists say U.S. consumers will pay for the cost of the tariffs, not foreign exporters.

“Families are already struggling with high prices and across-the-board tariffs will make it worse,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who supported tariffs on foreign steel she said was dumped at lower prices to hurt domestic producers.

“Tariffs should be applied with scalpel-like precision with specific goals,” Klobuchar said. “Instead, the president is using a sledgehammer and it’s going to clobber our economy.”

Well-traveled pigs

Minnesota’s farmers would be hard hit if there’s a trade war with Canada.

When Trump instituted smaller tariffs on certain imported goods and imported steel and aluminum, Minnesota farmers were hurt by plunging commodity prices and a drop in exports.

Trump was forced to tap a Great Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation, to pay farmers $28 billion as recompense for their losses.

The USDA estimated that those payments constituted more than one-third of total farm income in 2019 and 2020.

Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation President Dan Glessing said he hoped Trump’s more recent tariffs threats are merely a “bargaining chip” the president is using to seek concessions from allies.

Glessing said the state’s farm economy could survive a new trade war “as long as it does not drag on too long.” But he said the disruptions in the market come at a bad time — on the heels of a two-year slump in U.S. farm exports.

Klobuchar called Canada “a key economic partner for the northern states” and that tariffs on potash from that nation would sharply increase fertilizer costs for Minnesota farmers.

Trump’s tariff policy also raises other questions because of the close relationship of Minnesota’s farmers with their counterparts to the north.

Canada has an agreement with Minnesota pork producers that send piglets to grow into hogs in Canada. These hogs are shipped back to Minnesota and processed into meat products. Some of those pork products are exported back to Canada.

“When you think of how much back-and-forth there is (in the operation), those tariffs could be considerable,” Glessing said.

Ana Radelat

Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.

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A group of EMS officials from throughout the state gathered in St. Paul to highlight a need for more funding and a restructuring of systems. 

Erik Simonson, a lobbyist with the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities, an organization that lobbied for EMS funding last session, feels hopeful the Legislature will continue to fund the industry beyond a one-time infusion last year to stay afloat – even amid uncertainty with current negotiations.

“I think what you’re seeing right now in the Legislature will work itself out. It will happen in a matter of however much time it takes,” he said.  “I think so many (legislators) said as they were on their way out the door at the end of May, ‘We put a band-aid on the problem, we’ve got to come back in 2025 and find a long term, sustainable solution.’ Now what that is will be shaped by this Legislature in 2025 but I am confident that there are folks on both sides of the political aisle that are willing to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to get that done in a way that provides enough financial support so that people don’t have to worry about, are we going to be here next year?”

EMS is one of the top priorities for the House Health Finance and Policy Committee, said Rep. Jeff Backer, R-Browns Valley, who is the committee’s co-chair along with Rep. Robert Bierman, DFL-Apple Valley. 

“Last year was a band-aid, but it was an important band-aid. … We do need to do more stuff with EMS,” Backer said at the event. 

Backer himself is a volunteer EMT, who knows about the difficulties facing the industry, including workforce challenges and the fact that more rural EMS systems often receive lower reimbursement rates because many of their patients rely on Medicare and Medicaid. Last year, he helped author legislation for EMS funds. He said they’ll need time though to put together a plan. 

“Exactly what happens is going to be interesting if we don’t get together ’til the end of March … that’s going to create some challenges. If we can get together sooner, then we have more time,” he said. 

The governor’s budget proposal announced in January allocates funds for the newly established Office of Emergency Medical Services. Those proposed funds would go to things like operating expenses and grants. 

The Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities is advocating this session for additional funding for EMS, as the group thinks the systems have to be well funded in order to work on longer-term strategies to help with workforce and systemic issues.

“If we don’t fix the financial challenge, we can’t touch any of those, right? It just becomes super difficult to try to find those kinds of solutions if we don’t have the money and keep the doors open,” Simonson said. “If we can fix the funding problem once and for all, and then let a lot of these great minds come to work and figure out ways to do things better and more efficiently.”

At the event, officials stressed the need for a longer-term solution that goes further than funding, though funding would help EMS systems that are struggling to stay afloat. Because of the financial and staffing hardships, among other challenges, many EMS providers have considered merging with another service provider, but that’s not always the best for patients. 

“I do think there are a lot of opportunities with consolidation and reducing overhead and sharing expertise,” said Becca Huebsch, the director of Perham Area EMS. “The challenge is … consolidation that’s planned and expected and not out of desperation. It’s one thing when you’re choosing to consolidate because it makes good business sense and you can continue to support your service areas. It’s another thing when you (have) two failing ambulances that say we can’t have two ambulances anymore, what can we do differently? And I think those are different situations, and maybe that’s not consolidation, maybe that’s actually a failure.”

Ava Kian

Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.

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In 2009, an invasive tree pest was discovered on an ash tree in St. Paul. This past fall, 15 years later, the city cut down its last ash tree. 

While St. Paul and other more populated cities have been aware of the emerald ash borer for some time, many Greater Minnesota cities are more recently learning about the pest and facing the challenges it brings their communities. 

Restrictions on moving wood have helped contain the ash borer’s spread, but spread along transitways, mainly through human traffic still persists. 

This past summer, the city of Glenwood in the southwestern part of the state faced its first emerald infestation on an ash tree. Pope County went under “quarantine” per state rules and then the city later conducted an inventory of the ash trees in the area to get a sense of what might be the fallout. 

What they found was approximately 978 ash trees in public areas. Of those, roughly 40% were in the “fair, bad or dead” category, according to city administrator David Iverson. 

“We have to make some decisions of what we’re going to do with regard to these trees,” Iverson said. “Do you start taking them down or not?  And what we’re finding is it sounds like … dead trees are tougher to take down because their branches drop off and they fall around, versus a healthier tree is easier to take down than a dead tree.”

But resources are limited. Glenwood is looking for funding sources for this because if it doesn’t find something, Iverson said there’s a high chance the city would have to do some restructuring of other city projects. Taking down a tree he estimates costs around $1,000 per tree, and that doesn’t take into account replanting. 

“It’s one thing to take down trees, but it’s somewhat unrealistic to think a city our size is going to be able to pay if you were going to take down, say, 100 trees, and take down half of these trees we have in four or five years,” he said. “I just don’t know how some of these small towns are going to be able to come up with funds to do this because there’s always only so much money. So, I have a feeling we are going to have to look to … nibble down the size of some of these other street projects that we look to try to do or forgo a project for a year and just jump on a bid to take down a number of trees and just use the money that way.” 

The League of Minnesota Cities (LMC) is pushing for more state funding for communities struggling with the emerald ash borer. It’s not an issue that’s leaving anytime soon, said Craig Johnson, the senior intergovernmental relations representative for the League of Minnesota Cities. 

According to Johnson, there’s significant cost in doing an inventory to find out where ash trees are and their state of health. A concern is the tree becomes more hazardous as it gets more infested. 

“Ash trees get so brittle when they die that they can literally explode. A six-inch branch can just shatter from even a bird landing on it,” Johnson said. “They are definitely a public health and safety issue. If you have emerald ash borer, and there’s a tree that looks like it’s starting to die, it has to be removed or it is going to start falling on people and cars and houses.” 

There’s an element of timeliness in finding a solution for these communities, but it has to still be financially viable. Iverson said as soon as Glenwood found out about it, city workers strapped in their boots. 

“We have a very green community with a lot of trees, which we really enjoy … and it’s the pride of our town,” Iverson said. “You hate to see the loss of all those trees, but yet, if it’s there, you’ve got to do something. We just cannot sit on our hands.”

LMC has sought funding in past years to give communities with emerald ash borer infestation priority on the state’s money to help with the response, like the community tree-planting grant program, established in 2024 to prioritize projects for communities with emerald ash borer infestations. In the 2023 session, the DNR received funds for a “ReLeaf” program, with around $16 million during that biennium dedicated to grants to help communities with removal and tree planting. In subsequent years, a recurring $400,000 will be granted to the program, which LMC fears might get cut into with a tighter budget.

“This year, the budget is going to be extremely tight, and there are going to need to be cuts to the budget, not adding new spending to the budget,” Johnson said. “We are going to be working pretty hard to make sure that the emerald ash borer funds that are in place stay there and that where possible, we reallocate some other funds to provide more resources there, because every year more and more cities are having emerald ash borer hit.” 

Different approaches to the borer 

When dealing with the emerald ash borer, St. Paul opted to get rid of all its ash trees, while Minneapolis took a different approach, targeting at-risk trees and removing those while treating the bigger healthier trees. 

Angela Gupta, an extension educator at the University of Minnesota, said the federal government for a long time supported the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) emerald ash borer surveilling, but it’s no longer a federal priority. MDA still has strict quarantine rules, like policies to limit the spread of firewood in certain areas, which Gupta said is why it’s taken this long for the bug to get to infest some areas of the state. 

“The idea with a quarantine for emerald ash borer is, if you have emerald ash borer in an area, you want to retain it only in the area and don’t let it get out of that area,” she said. “That’s been pretty successful. So part of that is buying time. If we can buy time for science to come up with ways in which to manage emerald ash borer or to mitigate the damage, then we may be protecting our resource.”

Gupta said there are good options for treating the trees now, which can pay off for communities where the concentrations of the pest are low. Treating is a good option for trees that haven’t lost too much of their canopy yet. But if a tree has lost more than 30% of its canopy, it’s likely too late to treat, according to Gupta. For trees near an infestation, Gupta said it’s recommended to treat if it’s within a 10-15 miles radius. 

She advises if a community has to cut down trees, they replant them with a variety of species so they don’t end up in a similar situation down the road.

While Minnesota has been at controlling the spread of the infestation, in recent years even despite quarantines, it has gotten harder to contain the spread, one reason for which is climate change, Gupta said. 

Temperatures of negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit will kill 90% of the insect, studies show.

This past winter, when temperatures were warmer and there was no snow, conditions were ideal for the ash borer to survive and spread. The emerald ash borer is now being found in areas it wasn’t before, like the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota. In areas of the state, like some spots in northern Minnesota, places that previously remained safe from the pest, due to temperature, quarantine rules and other factors, black ash trees may now be more at risk. 

“Emerald ash borer will be able to benefit as we get warmer,” Gupta said. “That’s a concern because Minnesota is the state with the largest ash resource in the United States at this point.”

Ava Kian

Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.

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This article was first published by Project Optimist.

A group of southeastern Minnesotans may start an organization to address transportation barriers. 

The organization, called a transportation management organization (TMO) or transportation management association (TMA), can comprise public and private partners who provide and promote “efficient, reliable, and affordable transportation options within a particular region or jurisdiction,” according to a statement from SE MN Together. The organization aims to address transportation, housing, and economic development issues. 

SE MN Together is seeking a TMO after a 2018-2019 study found the region needed a “holistic” and comprehensive approach to address transportation issues impacting workforce mobility, access to services and post-secondary education, and quality of life in southeastern Minnesota.

Organizers don’t specify what initiatives they plan to offer, because they want to learn about the region’s transportation needs, said Joel Young, project manager, in an email to Project Optimist. The fact-finding phase, which includes a survey, focus groups, and an online form to solicit ideas, is underway and funded by a $350,000 appropriation from the 2023 legislative session. Organizers plan to present their findings before a steering committee later this winter. 

If organizers decide to move forward with a TMO, planners will prepare a report on the organization’s structure, budget, and funding sources by June.

What are TMOs?

Association for Commuter Transportation Executive Director David Straus says TMOs vary by location, but they all strive to encourage people to get around by modes other than driving, either through education, ride matching, incentives, or advocacy. They are often funded by public and private entities. 

“The programs and services that they put out there are based on the needs of the community that it’s located in,” Straus said in a phone interview. He said TMOs can foster carpools, administer subsidy programs to encourage people not to drive, or advocate for bicycling, pedestrian, or public transit improvements. He likened it to a chamber of commerce that fosters economic development activity.

Though TMOs exist in rural areas, Straus added they might not necessarily be a good fit. “It can be difficult in a true rural setting where there may not be any large employment basis to support the organization, but at the same time in those cases, the real question would be, what are the transportation challenges that you’re trying to address in those communities?” Straus said. 

“TMAs stretch to more rural, suburban areas all the time,” he said. “That may focus more heavily on carpooling and vanpooling. Depending on the situation and what’s around, they may look at trying to build support for a more flexible mobility-on-demand service, kind of an on-call public transit service that can be put in place. It’s just a matter of being able to have the resources to support it.”

A TMO/TMA in action

One such TMA serving rural communities in Vermont and New Hampshire is the Upper Valley Transportation Management Association, convened in 2001 between Dartmouth College and local nonprofit Vital Communities.

Funded by dues from local communities and employers based on size, the organization, which transit agencies and planning organizations also participate in, educates people on what they can do without a car. For example, the Upper Valley TMA partnered with a local senior center to teach the elderly how they can get around if they can no longer drive, and offered biking workshops.

Vital Communities also administers the “Emergency Ride Home” program for commuters who live on the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley. Such programs exist across the nation to help commuters who don’t drive to work get home in an emergency by reimbursing their vehicle rental, or taxicab, Uber, or Lyft ride.

However, the program hasn’t gotten any use, because the region doesn’t have many ridehail options. “Some of our towns, there’s no cabs. There’s really no Lyft or Uber. Hanover (N.H.) maybe has one driver sometimes, so there’s just not a lot of other options to get home,” Vital Communities program manager Ellen Hender said.

Even though the program doesn’t get much use, they keep the program because it doesn’t cost them anything to run and want to provide an option for residents living on the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley. 

Vital Communities gauges success of their TMA by measuring engagement and participation satisfaction. “Effectively, do their individual organizations feel supported by the TMA and is it worth their effort to participate,” Hender said in an e-mail. Membership continues to grow and engagement is “consistent,” Hender said.

TMA opens doors to new partnerships

Vital Communities also leads their own transportation programming outside the scope of the TMA and involves TMA members as partners. 

In one such program, they helped local residents and employers discover e-bikes. Vital Communities provides an e-bike subsidy program, which is funded by a $31,500 Vermont Agency of Transportation mobility grant.

Initially a first come, first served program to persuade middle-income people to purchase an e-bike, Vital Communities changed the program to help those who need a form of transportation based on “social determinants of health or socioeconomic touch points,” said program manager Anna Guenther. The program has helped jobseekers, students who are the first in their family to go to college, people who live without a car or not near a public transit stop, as well as neurospicy individuals who get overstimulated by riding public transit. 

“Owning this valuable and useful item is a real, great stepping stone for them, a bit of security and independence and freedom,” said Guenther. 

How can a TMO succeed in southeast Minnesota?

Straus, Association For Commuter Transportation’s executive director, said a TMO needs collaboration and support from private and public entities to work. 

The effort in Southeastern Minnesota has the ingredients.

The Minnesota Legislature has funded the study. Eight of the region’s employers, who have deployed employee shuttles, vanpools, and carpools, believe help in crafting commuter plans and programs would be a “significant benefit,” according to interviews conducted by SE Minnesota Together. And, dial-a-ride transit agencies said serving rural parts of the region is expensive and time-consuming, though some are already working with local businesses to transport the elderly to medical appointments, as well as children to school. 

“Successful TMAs require that collaboration between public entities and the private sector to make it successful,” Straus said.  “The state, the (metropolitan planning organization), they need to be supportive of the formation of the TMAs and helping them succeed, and the private sector needs to be able to see that support and contribute and buy into the organization, and ultimately the organization needs to be empowered to be able to work with and represent those stakeholders that are there.” 

This story was edited and fact-checked by Jen Zettel-Vandenhouten.

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Before they launch a war on fraud, Minnesota’s political leaders first have to wage a war over fraud.

Perhaps by the end of the 2025 session, that is if the session ever really begins, Gov. Tim Walz and the Legislature will agree on how to take on the theft of government money meant for food, housing, child care, autism and other social programs. But because fraud was such a loud and potent political issue through the last two election cycles, it is proving hard for partisans to give it up.

Walz, Republicans charge, has either been asleep at the switch or indifferent to fraud in social programs. Waste, fraud and abuse has been a popular accusation and also a response to the current financial pressure to reduce, or at least control, state spending.

Walz and Democrats have condemned the hundreds of millions in theft by organized rings posing as providers. But they are protective of the programs aimed at low-income residents and until recently have combined those sentiments with condemnations that are aimed at thieves and not the government agencies.

“They are so damaging,” Walz said earlier this month of the scandals. “They undermine people’s faith in government, they undermine the very programs that improve people’s lives. This is fraud against the taxpayers of Minnesota, but the crime is perpetrated upon children.

“I want us to take that attitude seriously,” Walz said.

Both Walz and legislative Republicans have introduced packages of proposals such as stiffening penalties, making state bureaucrats more skeptical of applicants and recipients and even using AI to spot patterns before thefts can occur.

Walz struck first with his package just after the New Year. Standing with state law enforcement, budget and IT leaders, the DFL governor said that while there is no evidence that state workers profited from thefts of child care assistance, children’s feeding programs and now autism services, they need to be more suspicious.

“I think there’s a culture of generosity. I think it is a culture of being a little too trusting on this,” Walz said of those who oversee grant programs. “I don’t think those are bad character traits. But I don’t think they are necessarily effective at a time when we’re seeing fraud increase.”

That reflects a conclusion reached by Judy Randall, the head of the Office of Legislative Auditor, after releasing her findings in the Feeding Our Future scandal that involved charges against 70 people for the theft of $250 million meant to feed children. The OLA found that while some state Education Department employees were suspicious and that the case was eventually turned over to federal law enforcement, state managers didn’t do enough to interrupt the fraud.

Agencies often speak of working “with” beneficiaries of programs because they have a passion for the benefits that often result,” she told the Legislative Audit Commission. The education department referred to the organizations that received child feeding money as “clients” and “patrons” rather than applicants or grantees. 

“Not that that’s wrong, but you can’t just trust everybody,” Randall said of the message the terminology sends. “I wish we could but clearly we can’t.”

Related: Why everyone around state government is talking about OLA: the small office that looks for fraud, missteps … and gets headlines

Walz said he will create, via executive order, a fraud investigation unit that will combine current efforts by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the state Department of Commerce.  

He then asked the Legislature to:

• Add staff to the attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit
• Make clear that state agencies can stop payments to grant recipients suspected or charged with fraud
• Use artificial intelligence programs to spot patterns that suggest fraud in Medicaid programs
• Create a new “Theft of Public Funds” statute that increases criminal penalties by 20% compared to the existing “Theft” statute
• Make providing kickbacks a state crime that the Attorney General would have power to investigate and prosecute

His budget plan called for an additional $45 million in spending to pay for the new efforts.

Legislative Republicans so far are reluctant to give Walz much credit for the plans, calling them too little, too late. They are also unwilling to give up such politically valuable criticism of the 14 years of DFL administrations, which included a series of financial scandals under both Gov. Mark Dayton and Gov. Tim Walz. They include the misuse of funds under the Child Care Assistance Program during the Dayton administration and most recently with accusations of fraud under an autism treatment program.

“It has been shocking for me to come back the last few years and see what has happened in state government,” said Rep. Patti Anderson, R-Dellwood, who was state auditor from 2003 to 2007 before being named commissioner of Department of Employee Relations under Gov. Tim Pawlenty. “Minnesota was a good government state.”

Citing Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger’s prosecutions of Feeding Our Future cases and his statement that no other state had similar scandals in the feeding program, Anderson suggested Walz’s proposed spending controls in the disability waiver program in long-term care wouldn’t be needed if fraud was contained.

“Why?” she asked. “You have half a billion dollars that we know of already and those dollars should go to serve citizens who need services.”

The dollar amounts — fraud losses and Walz’s proposal for slowing the growth of senior citizen long-term care — aren’t comparable, however. Walz’s proposal to slow the growth in spending on what are called disability waivers says that without it, spending on the program will grow from a little less than $2 billion a year in 2022 to more than $5 billion by 2029.

And DFLers object to GOP assertions that they have not acted in the face of scandals like Feeding Our Future and do not agree that GOP administrations were scandal-free. In an op-ed late last year, Senate Taxes Committee Chair Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, described a hearing in which the Office of the Legislative Auditor was noting the lack of transparency and accountability over $4.7 billion paid to nonprofits, including $1 billion the state or counties had handed out in the form of grants.

The year was 2007 and Pawlenty was governor.

“Since 2023, the DFL majorities and the governor have acted in dozens of ways to increase transparency and accountability in the spending of public money,” Rest wrote. “Chief among them was 10 pages of new law and funding for the Office of Grants Management.”

House Republicans are proposing their own batch of bills and created a new committee focused on fraud investigations that will be chaired by Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, (though Friday’s Supreme Court ruling means neither are official). Among the bills are a new matrix that will measure and publicize how state agencies respond to negative findings in Office of Legislative Auditor reports, mandating that state employees who see or suspect fraud to report it to investigative agencies and the Legislature and creating a new Office of Inspector General. The latter proposal by Anderson would create a sister agency to the legislative auditor that would report to the same bipartisan Legislative Audit Commission that she serves on.

That new office would absorb existing inspector generals that are housed in the departments of human services, education and corrections into an agency independent of governor-appointees. It would have power to investigate both agencies that distribute funds and those who receive money. It would have subpoena power and be able to order suspension of payments. While it would not have the authority to prosecute crimes, it would work with state and local prosecutors. Some of the inspectors would be embedded within agencies but report only to the independent inspector general.

The first proposal for an independent Office of Inspector General for this legislative session came from Sen. Heather Gustafson, a DFLer from Vadnais Heights. A draft of her proposal would create an independent inspector general with oversight from a new commission made up of people appointed by the four partisan caucuses of the Legislature as well as someone from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Gustafson said she heard a lot from voters about the Feeding Our Future scandal when running for the first time in 2022 and wanted to see if there was a better way to prevent fraud and punish wrongdoers.

“What I think people are looking for, at least what I hear in my district, is something genuinely independent of all the branches that will work to really identify any fraud, waste and abuse in any entity public or private that takes taxpayer dollars,” Gustafson said.

Her proposal would require the inspector general to meet specific standards including at least 10 years experience in auditing, investigations or law enforcement and be certified by the national organization of inspectors general.

To the criticism that a separate IG would not have the depth of knowledge about agencies and their programs that in-house IG’s now have, Gustafson said the IG can hire inspectors with that knowledge.

“They would just report to the IG instead of the agency heads,” she said. “An independent office is meeting the moment that needs to be met right now. What’s happening and what has happened the last few years is just unacceptable.”

Walz has said he is lukewarm to an independent office, thinking its inspectors wouldn’t have the depth of expertise that an inspector general within an agency would have. His example is the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, whose IGs not only knew the details of the agency and its programs but had veterans top of mind.

Randall was asked over the summer if her audit team should grow and be given new duties to investigate fraud and prosecute fraudsters. She suggested it would not be a good fit for her office, which has its hands full with its work auditing state agencies. But Randall said last week that the legislative auditor could work closely with an inspector general if that is what the Legislature proposes.

Randall noted that her office is charged with auditing the existing inspectors general in some state agencies and the office even found concerns with how an inspector general at the Department of Human Services performed when fraud was discovered in the Child Care Assistance Program in 2019. Lawmakers this session should include some way of having independent auditing of an independent inspector general.

Randall said she sees benefits with both an independent inspector general and having IGs embedded in agencies under commissioners appointed by governors.

“I don’t think the embedded structure is inherently flawed,” she said, though enforceable protections for that person are needed to ensure their independence. “I don’t think being embedded in and of itself is a show stopper.” The federal model uses embedded IGs and they are well-respected and considered to be free to find problems in their agencies, she said.

But the Friday mass firing by President Trump of 17 agency-based IGs suggests added protections would be needed in Minnesota. Both the Gustafson and Anderson bills have set terms for the IG and removal only for cause.

Unlike the federal model, Minnesota IGs could be appointed to a term and only removed for cause in a public hearing, similar to the independence protections the legislative auditor has, Randall said.

The benefit, Randall said, is they develop deep knowledge of complex systems and programs, knowledge needed to be able to see problems as they are developing. Inspectors general look at both the agency running programs and distributing money and those who receive the money.

“You need subject-matter expertise. You need to understand the rules, how they are licensed, who the licensees are, you need access to their data systems. It’s intense and targeted and focused work,” Randall said.

An independent inspector, however, could serve as the center of a hub and spoke model that facilitates data sharing and standards centrally but has inspectors embedded in the agencies. They would physically be within the agencies they inspect but work for the independent inspector general. That is a model envisioned in Anderson’s GOP bill which would place assistant inspectors general in seven agencies, including Human Services, Education and Children, Youth and Families.

Walz, who also included new funding for his fraud plan in his 2025-26 budget rollout last week, said that as with that budget, he is open to legislative ideas on fraud. 

“We want them to help us if they have good ideas,” Walz said of Republicans in the Legislature. “You don’t need to find a fight when there’s none available. We agree with you. There’s certainly no upside to have fraud in state government.”

Peter Callaghan

Peter Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. Follow him on Twitter @CallaghanPeter or email him at pcallaghan@minnpost.com.

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WASHINGTON — Saying fewer and fewer native-born Americans want to work for them, Minnesota’s farmers, dairymen and ranchers are increasingly reliant on a foreign-born workforce that is under threat in the new Trump administration.

Minnesota’s robust agriculture industry employs both undocumented migrants and foreign-born workers who are in the United States on a provisional or temporary basis. The largest group of immigrant farmworkers are undocumented. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that 86% of agricultural workers are foreign born and 45% of them are undocumented.

Other Minnesota farmers have found legal ways to hire foreign-born workers who are eager to take jobs Americans have turned down.

Doug Diekmann, owner of Diekmann Farms in Beardsley, Minnesota, needed help to raise hogs and grain but did not want to break the law by hiring undocumented workers. So for the past eight years he’s used the federal H-2A program to hire three foreign-born workers – usually Mexicans – for eight or nine months out of the year.

The H-2A program allows foreign workers to legally work for less than a year on a farm or ranch. That worker can enter into new contracts at other agricultural entities for up to three years.

Some migrate from state to state to honor contracts. Farmers who apply for these workers must post their jobs in a way that Americans have priority in filling them. Only if the jobs still go begging, can the farmer hire an H-2A visa holder.

That farmer must also agree to provide certain benefits and worker protections that elude undocumented farm workers. He or she must agree to provide housing and transportation for an H-2A visa holder, as well as pay the prevailing wage set by the federal government. At Diekmann Farms, that wage is $18.15 an hour.

The prevalence of these undocumented workers often leads to abuse. For instance, last year  a dairy operation that had dozens of farms in central Minnesota was accused of wage theft and of charging their mostly undocumented workers to live in garages, barns and other buildings unfit for human habitation. 

Diekmann’s workers live in three apartments he owns in a nearby town and he must provide them with a vehicle, or pick them up himself, to go to work. He also pays their airfare every year to travel from Mexico to Fargo or Minneapolis.

“It’s not cheap by any means to hire these people,” Diekmann said.

But he said the cost is worth it because “they have more of a desire to work” than Americans he’s tried to employ and they appreciate the opportunity to work on his farm, which sells about 30,000 hogs every year.

The politics of immigration 

There were about 3,500 H-2A visa holders working on Minnesota farms last year and about 380,000 employed in agriculture across the United States.

While farmers say they are needed and major agriculture organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Milk Producers Association, have been lobbying for an expansion of the H-2A program for years, there are concerns about the anti-immigrant politics espoused by President Donald Trump and his political supporters.

Those politics played out on X last month in a very public feud over a similar foreign-worker program, the H-1B visas that are given to highly educated workers who come to the United States to work in technological and scientific fields.

Elon Musk’s employment of these H-1B workers at Tesla was bashed by right-wing activist Laura Loomer and former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon for what they said was an attempt to hire foreigners at lower pay at the expense of Americans who need high-tech jobs.

“H1B Visa Program Should be Zeroed-Out – Used to Constantly Drive Wages Down and Replace American Tech Workers – the Foreign Worker Replacements are Treated Like Indentured Servants …” Bannon wrote in one post.

Diekmann said he’s not concerned the H-2A program would come under fire.

“Americans would not be able to buy food and there would be a lot of farms that would not exist,” if the program were eliminated, Diekmann said. 

John Walt Boatright, chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the H-2A program has tripled or quadrupled in size over the past decade.

“Our members are saying that they are not seeing much interest in Americans doing (agricultural) work anymore,” he said.

Yet Boatright said the H-2A program “has its limitations” because “it’s seasonal and temporary by nature.” That means it’s not a good fit for certain agriculture sectors, such as the nation’s dairy industry, that need a year-round work force.

He also said the program is “quite cumbersome” because several federal agencies are involved, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Labor Department, and farmers often have to engage farm labor contractors or immigration attorneys to procure the laborers they need.

He said he’s hopeful a new Congress will finally move on H-2A reforms and  said the farm bureau had also spoken to the Trump transition team about the importance of the program.

Meanwhile, Paul Bleiberg, executive vice president of the National Milk Producers Association, said he hoped Congress would  change the H-2A visa program so its holders could work year-round. But he acknowledged the hurdles that attempts to expand a foreign worker program would face.

“The politics around immigration are very challenging,” he said.

Loan Huynh, the chair of the immigration department at the Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minneapolis, said, under the H-2A program, farmers need to post their jobs at least 75 days before they need a migrant to begin work and a state inspection of the housing provided that worker – a requirement before a visa is granted – must also be completed and could take up to 180 days to schedule. 

She said her firm provides farmers with hundreds of these migrant workers a year, mostly from Mexico.

“As our population grows, we need more workers and our farmers and agricultural workers are finding it harder to find these workers,” Huynh said. “U.S. workers don’t want to do this work.”

Still, Trump and many of his supporters insist that foreign-born workers are taking jobs from Americans who need them. And that might not bode well for the H-2A program, even as American farmers are growing increasingly dependent on it, Huynh said.   

“We are really concerned about an administration that has made it clear that immigration is something they want to decrease rather than increase,” she said.

Anxious about deportations 

The migrant worker program in the United States began with an agreement with Mexico in 1942 that imported Mexican farm and railroad workers into the United States to fill labor shortages during World War II. This “Bracero” program, named after the heavy use of a worker’s arms in manual labor, brought 5 million migrants to the nation before it ended in 1962.

Mary Garcia, the foreign labor supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, is tasked with overseeing the modern version of the Bracero program in the state. She makes sure farm jobs are posted statewide and that the H-2A workers have adequate housing and are aware of state programs that could help them. She said she often runs into undocumented workers during her rounds who are anxious about Trump’s vow to carry out massive deportations.  

Some want to apply for  H-2A visas. But Garcia said they cannot because they are undocumented and to qualify a worker must live outside the United States.

“It really puts us in a bind because we want to help everyone,” she said.

There are other programs that farmers use to legally secure immigrant labor. But those are also threatened by Trump’s vows of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, and some who are here legally as well.

On his first day in office, Trump  issued an executive order ending a “humanitarian parole” program that allowed more than half a million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live in the United States temporarily and, in many cases, apply for a work permit. Some of these migrants found jobs on  Minnesota farms.

Another source of foreign-born labor has is the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) program that was created by Congress in 1990 to give nationals of certain countries that are confronting war, environmental disasters or other extraordinary conditions refuge in the United States for a limited time, with the opportunity to renew their applications until the president thinks this protection from deportation is not needed.

According to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS), there were 4,551 immigrants with TPS protections in Minnesota last year.

Somalis, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, Salvadorans, Sudanese, Ukrainians and other nationals are eligible for this status. But Trump has the authority to decline to renew these programs.

The programs are administered nation-by-nation and have different deadlines for renewal. Those with the most immediate deadlines were  Salvadorans, whose TPS program was scheduled to end on March 10 and  Ukrainians and Sudanese whose deadline was April 20.

One of Joe Biden’s last acts as president was to renew the deadline for these TPS recipients for another 18 months.

Ana Radelat

Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.

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The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency finalized the changes to two of its general permits for feedlots this month, which typically apply to those with 1,000 or more animal units. The changes, which go into effect June 2025 and February 2026, have some farmers worried, but others relieved. 

The main changes are an online tool to develop a manure management plan, added regulations for tracking data when transferring manure to someone else and some prohibitions on manure applications to ensure best management practices. 

Many of these changes are “steps in the right direction,” said Matthew Sheets, a policy organizer with the Land Stewardship Project, a nonprofit with a focus on sustainable agriculture. 

Prior to the plan being finalized, people with various ties to the permitting system voiced their likes and dislikes during an open comment period. 

Sheets said he’s happy with the requirements for tracking manure application. 

“For a while it has been that the way that large CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are able to get rid of some of their liquid manure is by working with somebody else who is going to apply that on their fields. They essentially sell it to another person. And up until now, at that point of sale, that’s where the tracking stops as well,” Sheets said. “In these new rules, the tracking doesn’t stop there.” 

He wants more tracking about groundwater quality, but including this manure specification is a good step, he said. 

Hesitations about tracking 

Others, like Loren Dauer, the public policy director at the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation have concerns about application tracking and its associated information. While he’s happy to see the tool online and on an accessible platform, he’s concerned that the owner of the feedlot that’s producing the manure will have the responsibility of collecting that data and sharing it with the state.

“If you’re the farmer or the landowner who utilizes manure, you are now going to be required to essentially give up your crop history data,” he said.  “From our perspective, this was proprietary data. These are farmers, individuals that utilize this information, and if you’re a larger feedlot, and you’re providing this manure to several other landowners or farmers … does that one feedlot have the right to hold all that information and report that back to MPCA? In our opinion, that should not be the case, because it is kind of private.” 

He suggested the MPCA instead collect the information separately instead from the permittee (who’s providing the manure) and the receiver of the manure. 

Glen Groth, the president of the Winona County Farm Bureau Federation, said he’s heard concerns about how this will be tracked. 

“If you give manure to a neighbor or sell manure to a neighbor, you’re expected to ensure they comply with the current manure application regulations. Well, how do you make them comply to it? And then, you know what happens if they say, ‘Yeah, you bet I’ll put down the cover crop within a certain amount of time,’ and then they don’t?  … How do you hold your neighbor to account?” 

The MPCA has stated that feedlot owners are required to ensure manure application is done appropriately and, if a manure recipient consistently fails to comply, then the permittee should consider no longer doing business with that recipient. If despite the permittee’s best efforts, recipients don’t follow the regulations, MPCA can take enforcement action against the manure recipients. 

Those at the Land Stewardship Project disagree, saying that the requirement isn’t necessarily onerous. 

“Even though that is something that is an additional piece that must be kept by the person that is spreading that manure and the operator of the CAFO … it is just one of the bare minimum things that we can be doing to support and ensure that our the best management practices are going to be adhered to,” Sheets said. 

Groth and Dauer are also concerned about the best management practices that are required for permit holders, which include specific practices such as applying the manure to a growing perennial or row crop or planting cover crops to a range of other practices depending on the time of year. There are specific regulations for the areas that are considered “vulnerable groundwater areas.” 

The MPCA has stated it will recognize “good faith efforts” to establish a cover crop because of weather uncertainty, which can impact cover crop growth.

But the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation feels these regulations, when coupled with the existing Groundwater Protection rules, may have farmers in a bind. 

“With the Groundwater Protection rule from the Department of Agriculture, you’re not allowed to apply commercial fertilizer during the fall time without some of these practices. And so a lot of these farmers have kind of turned to using manure from livestock to kind of fill their needs and their nutrient plans,” Dauer said. “We’re not providing a lot of options for our farmers to have nutrient plans in these areas because this new groundwater vulnerable area, is also similarly where the Groundwater Protection area is as well.”  

Groth, who’s not too worried about the impact of these regulations on his own crop operation, said he’s heard from farmers in his area about how these new rules could affect them. 

He’s worried that these new rules may potentially inform future regulations on feedlots, especially expanding these regulations to those who don’t currently need to apply for the permits because of the size of their feedlots. 

“If these regulations apply to smaller family farms, they could be very difficult and very expensive to comply with,” Groth said. 

He said it’ll be financially challenging for farmers to do some of those best management practices, especially regarding manure application, if it has to be done in the spring. 

“The rule says that manure can’t be applied in the fall unless certain conditions are met, or it has to be applied in the spring. Manure applied in the spring, that could greatly increase the amount of manure storage someone has to have, which is very expensive on farms these days. And it could be just a time constraint. We have situations where it’s gone from snowy and frozen to perfect planting field conditions in two weeks. Two weeks aren’t enough for a lot of farmers to get their manure applied in a responsible manner, or to even hire somebody to do something like that.” 

Future impacts on feedlots

In Winona County, Groth estimated there are just a handful or two of feedlots that apply for these permits. But there are many farms on the edge, meaning having just a couple more cows would require them to apply for this permit. 

“There’s a lot of farmers, far more than just a handful, that are just right on that cusp of needing this or not. So the concern is, if this is baked in the law, these somewhat impractical new requirements, that they could lower the threshold at some point in the state of Minnesota … meaning (farms) somewhat suddenly would have to comply with these rules,” Groth said. “And then (that would) apply to hundreds of farms in the county rather than just five to 10 or a couple dozen.” 

He worries that these regulations would prevent farms that want to expand from doing so. 

“I think you see a bit of that in Winona County already. We got this extremely low animal unit cap. And I think you see a number of people in Winona County farm families that either they get away with it by having to own two or three facilities rather than one, which is not efficient from an environmental permitting and manure management standpoint, nor is it from a purely economic production standpoint,” he said. 

Groth said a solution is needed that would reinvigorate the dairy industry. He thinks being more liberal with permitting dairy facilities to encourage more dairies could be one of the ways to achieve better groundwater quality, and encouraging perennial crop production like alfalfa, which is feed for cows and also helps reduce nitrate contamination in groundwater.

Ava Kian

Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.

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University of Minnesota researchers have found that obstetrics units continue to close in rural counties in Minnesota and across the country. 

Minnesota has seen its fair share of obstetric (OB) unit closures, such as the Mayo Clinic Health System in New Prague, which closed its unit in early 2024, and Essentia Health-Fosston, which also closed in 2024. 

Mayo Clinic Health System in Fairmont reported its OB unit will close in March due to staffing shortages and other issues, including, according to a statement from the health system, “decreasing patient volumes and birth rates, and an increase in the number of patients with complex needs who need higher levels of care.”

The University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center wanted to quantify the losses and gains of obstetric care at rural and urban short-term acute care hospitals between 2010 and 2022.

“It’s hard, actually, to track obstetric unit closures on a national scale because there is no national database of obstetric unit closures or obstetric unit access across communities,” said Julia Interrante, a research fellow and statistical lead for the University of Minnesota’s Rural Health Research Center. 

The center’s prior research found that access to maternity care in rural counties continues to decline, with 49% of rural counties having had hospital-based obstetrics in 2010, a figure that fell to 41.2% in 2022. 

Interrante said 537 hospitals across the country lost obstetric units between 2010 and 2022. “Rural communities were definitely overrepresented among those losses,” Interrante said.

In 2010, 43.1% of rural hospitals and 29.7% of urban hospitals did not offer obstetric care. The research found that each subsequent year, there was a net loss of obstetric services at U.S. hospitals. While 138 hospitals gained obstetrics in these years, 112 of those were in urban hospitals, but only 26 were in rural hospitals. 

The researchers came up with an algorithm that uses data from the American Hospital Association Annual Survey and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to identify obstetric unit closures. They check for inconsistencies and validate the information based on new reports, phone calls and hospital websites. 

In 2021, about 14% of Minnesota women had no birthing hospital within 30 minutes, according to a report from the non-profit March of Dimes. Women in the counties with the highest travel times could travel up to 49.2 miles and 55 minutes on average to reach their nearest birthing hospital.

Studies have found that further distances to receive maternity care increase the risk of maternal morbidity and adverse infant outcomes, such as stillbirth and NICU admission. 

The center’s researchers have also conducted case studies on hospitals that have successfully kept their OB units to highlight potential things that struggling hospitals could do. 

Success stories

In western Wisconsin, one effort involved making services more attractive to potential patients, in turn drawing patients who would’ve otherwise gone to a different hospital. 

Through phone interviews and emails in 2020 with Western Wisconsin Health clinicians and leadership, the researchers learned about the hospital’s various maternity services often not available in rural communities. Because of this, the hospital was able to draw in a large number of clients from surrounding areas and across the Minnesota border.  

“There were some hospitals that provided a greater array of options for birthing to help even try to recruit patients to give birth there, even pulling some patients from urban centers if they were in a rural community but not that far from an urban one. Providing things like vaginal birth after Cesarean (section), water birth, access to midwives, things like that,” Interrante said. 

Resources are needed to offer services like that, and enough staff, too. She said other instances of units staying open have involved someone in leadership who really feels passionate about birthing access. 

Challenges to staying open 

The center’s other work has examined the decisions behind closures by talking with rural hospital administrators. 

Workforce shortages and the financial challenges of operating the unit were the main reasons for closures. Staff must be available at all times, for instance, fixed costs like malpractice insurance can also add strain. 

It can be challenging in rural areas that have two or three people attending to births — especially when one of them is on vacation or retires. “That’s also a big strain on that one or two individuals to be available 24/7, when you don’t really have much backup, ”  Interrante said.

By 2030, the country is expected to have a shortage of OB-GYNs, with demand exceeding the supply by over 5,000 full-time employees, according to the Department of Human Services. 

The system that pays for maternity care services is really a volume-based revenue system, she said. 

“By that fact, it really does disadvantage rural lower birth-volume hospitals who, again, if they don’t have enough births to cover those fixed costs, their hospitals losing money on that service line, which can make it really challenging,” Interrante said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a Mayo Clinic Health System statement on the closure of its Fairmont clinic.

Ava Kian

Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.

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WASHINGTON — The new Congress and Donald Trump’s return to the White House has created new opportunities for Rep. Pete Stauber when it comes to his efforts to promote copper and nickel mining on the Iron Range.

As the chairman of the panel that has jurisdiction over mining issues in the House Natural Resources Committee, Stauber, R-8^th District, is well positioned to push mining-related legislation.

“I’m excited about the work ahead,” he said.

Stauber was also chairman of that key panel in the last Congress and was able to get several mining-related bills approved in the U.S. House. But the legislation stalled in the U.S. Senate because the chamber was controlled by Democrats who ignored Stauber’s bills.  

After November’s elections, control of the Senate shifted to the GOP, which could help Stauber’s efforts, and he has an ally in Trump, who said he supports efforts to expand mining on the Iron Range.

On Monday, one of the many executive orders Trump signed directed the Interior and Agriculture Departments to “reassess any public lands withdrawals for potential revision.” That could affect a moratorium the Biden Administration placed on sulfide ore mining on 225,504 acres of federal land and waters within the Superior National Forest.

Stauber said he plans to reintroduce his marquee bill, the Superior National Forest Restoration Act, this week. But even on a more favorable political playing field, the lawmaker still faces hurdles.

Stauber’s wide-ranging bill would reverse the Biden administration’s 20-year ban on copper and nickel mining in Superior National Forest and reissue key federal mineral leases to Twin Metals, a mining concern that has for decades tried to establish an underground copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum mine about nine miles southeast of Ely.

Stauber’s legislation would limit environmental and regulatory review of mine plans of operations within the Superior National Forest to 18 months and block judicial review of reissued leases or permits.

Environmentalists who oppose the expansion of mining also have their allies in Congress.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-4th District, plans to introduce a bill Tuesday that would permanently establish the moratorium in Superior National Forest. Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-5th District, and Kelly Morrison, D-3rd District, are among the 17 Democratic co-sponsors of the bill. 

McCollum’s legislation, called the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, would not restrict taconite or iron-ore mining anywhere else in Minnesota. But the legislation faces strong political headwinds in the GOP-controlled House and Senate. 

Currently, the revocation of two Twin Metals leases are under consideration by a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

The leases were renewed by the previous Trump administration and canceled in January 2022 under the Biden administration. A coalition of environmental groups, including Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness and the Wilderness Society, joined the Biden Interior Department in seeking to uphold the cancellation of those leases.

Some of the things Stauber’s legislation aims to accomplish can be done by Trump with a stroke of a pen. He campaigned on reversing the 20-year moratorium on mining in the Superior National Forest and there is speculation he will also try to reinstate Twin Metals’ leases.

Ingrid Lyons, executive director of Save the Boundary Waters, one of the environmental groups battling mining companies on the Iron Range, said Trump’s inauguration “kicks off the countdown to an all-but-certain and unprecedented revocation of Biden’s historic mining ban in the Boundary Waters watershed.”

“The robust record of science, law, public opinion, and economics is clear — copper mining does not belong on the doorstep of America’s most iconic landscapes,” Lyons said in a statement.

Those who oppose the introduction of copper and nickel mining in Minnesota say copper, nickel and other ores are in rock that contain sulfides, and when exposed to air and water those sulfides could generate acids that leach toxic metals into the water that feeds into the Boundary Waters.

Meanwhile, Twin Metals and other mining companies that have proposed projects in the state say they have the technology to protect the watershed.

Senate could be a challenge

Stauber said “he doesn’t want to get in front of President Trump’s executive orders” that could affect Twin Metals, but wants to move forward with his legislation anyway.

Stauber is also confident that another bill that would impact mining in Minnesota that passed the House but not the Senate last year will also be considered this year. That bill would streamline the federal permitting process and limit federal environmental review of proposed mining operations.  

Stauber said that holding a Senate vote on the legislation could put Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, both Democrats, on the spot. “Our two Minnesota senators will get a chance to vote on these mining bills,” he said.

Even with a GOP-majority Senate, Stauber would need the support of at least seven Democratic senators to reach the goal of 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

Yet Smith opposes the legislation, a spokeswoman for the senator said. Klobuchar’s office did not have an immediate response.

“We don’t think he has the support in the Senate to withstand a filibuster,” said Becky Rom, chair of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters.

A key Stauber ally, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, told reporters last week that legislation that would clear the path for the Twin Metal project in Minnesota — as well as a copper mine in Arizona and another project in Alaska — could be attached to a budget reconciliation bill that, under Senate rules, is not subject to a filibuster.

Westerman said the Twin Metals project has been a “political ping pong ball” and that it’s up to Congress “to step up and say, ‘Quit the political ping pong and build the mine.’”

But Senate rules for a reconciliation bill says all items in the legislation should have budgetary impact, that is they must either cost or raise money, and it may be difficult for the proposed mining legislation to meet that requirement.  

In any case, Twin Metals says it’s grateful for its support on Capitol Hill.

“Twin Metals Minnesota appreciates the champions in Congress that recognize the significance of the domestic mineral resources that are available in northeast Minnesota, which are urgently needed to accomplish our nation’s energy transition, job creation and national security goals,” the company said in a statement.

While environmentalists are lobbying lawmakers and taking mining companies to court to stop the development of copper and nickel  production in Minnesota, there are those who want the expansion of an industry that is now largely limited to mining taconite, a sedimentary rock containing low-grade iron ore.

Virginia, Minn.-based Iron Range Engineering — a joint project of the Minnesota State system, Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Minnesota North College — teaches engineering to students who are employed by the mining industry. Its director, Ron Ulseth, said he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the political change wrought by November’s election.

“From my point of view, I’m excited for the opportunity for mining expansion,” he said. “We have something to offer the mining companies and look forward to serving them.”

But Ulseth is also skeptical that the new Trump administration can remove all obstacles, which include the requirement the state sign off on the new proposed operations, too.

“Why didn’t it happen between 2016 and 2020?” he asked, referring to the first time Trump was in the White House.

Ana Radelat

Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.

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Disappointed in a 2024 legislative session that ended with no bonding bill, Greater Minnesota organizations are encouraging the Legislature to focus on funds for infrastructure projects as this year’s session gets underway. 

The Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities and the League of Minnesota Cities, whose requests often overlap, plan to push lawmakers to pass a bonding bill, which would allow the state to borrow funds for local projects, early in the session. 

Ideally, that legislation would pass early in the session, said Bradley Peterson, executive director of the CGMC. “This is unfinished business from last year,” he said. 

“Front and center for us is the bonding bill,” said Anne Finn, the LMC’s intergovernmental relations director. “Cities really depend on capital investment by the state to complete projects that local taxpayers can’t always foot the bill for. And those include pots of money for things like roads, bridges, water and wastewater infrastructure, housing and the local road wetland replacement fund.” 

State economists forecast the surplus for the next state budget to be $616 million, which would be $1.1 billion less than what was projected for the 2025-26 budget period at the end of the 2024 legislative session. 

Peterson said he fears people will view bonding as “dessert” rather than, as the coalition believes, one of the larger needs for many Greater Minnesota communities. 

“They didn’t get to dessert last year,” he said. “We challenge the premise that dessert implies that it’s …  a cherry on top where we know that it funds core infrastructure in terms of water, wastewater, transportation.” 

He said things like water and wastewater projects would be a priority if funding was limited. The coalition is asking for $299 million to be put toward public facilities programs that fund water and wastewater grants and loans. 

There’s an added layer of uncertainty as the legislative session began without a clear partisan majority in both the House and Senate. In the Senate, DFL leaders on Monday announced an agreement to share power until a special election is held for one of the seats. But it was unclear if House members would come together in a bipartisan manner. 

Emergency medical service

Last year, both organizations pressed the Legislature to approve funding for Emergency Medical Service delivery in Greater Minnesota. The Legislature granted $24 million — around $100 million less than had been originally asked for.

The pressure is still on, Peterson said. 

“The issue has not gone away. I don’t know that it’s changed a lot, but last year’s injection of money definitely helped. But again, that was just one time. And so we need to try to figure out, ‘What can we do here over the long term to sustain and stabilize these systems?’” Peterson said.

Finn said LMC has identified other issues with EMS service delivery around the state, including staffing and response-time challenges. She said she will be looking toward the new Minnesota EMS agency that replaced the prior regulatory board to see how the agency helps with the persisting difficulties for EMS systems.

Local Government Aid

The groups are also looking for an increase in the amount of aid that goes to local governments. 

The Local Government Aid program, which has existed since 1972, distributes state funds to cities annually based on a formula, which has changed throughout the years. In 2023, the Legislature increased the total LGA appropriation by $80 million to $644.4 million. A similar program exists for counties. 

Peterson and Finn said local governments are feeling the impacts of higher costs for employees and operations, so they would push for an inflationary increase in LGA built in over time rather than a set amount per year. 

“There were significant levy increases around the state during the past budget cycle, and there are a lot of pressures on local budgets, the biggest one being that local governments are employers,” Finn said. “The cost of staffing our cities is growing because of demand and labor market, along with the cost of things like health insurance.” 

Local housing control

The groups are also keeping their eye on zoning issues. Last year, a proposal referred to as the “missing middle” that sought to promote the construction of more types of housing in traditional single-family neighborhoods did not move forward. 

That proposal — backed by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as social justice organizations and chambers of commerce — aimed to provide more housing and density in urban areas by requiring cities and suburbs to allow duplexes, triplexes and other housing options in single-family zones. 

It would have made it more difficult for local governments to block or delay apartment construction in commercially zoned areas. The LMC and CGMC were among the groups that objected to that bill, worrying that it would infringe on local control of zoning decisions.

“We very much acknowledge that there is a shortage of housing in our state and cities want to be part of the solution. What cities don’t want is for the Legislature to impose one-size-fits-all all policies on local governments,” Finn said. “Specifically, we’re concerned about removal of local decision-making authority related to land use and zoning.”

Ava Kian

Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.

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