The Minnesota Vikings fired head coach Mike Zimmer and general manager Rick Spielman. “We appreciate Rick and Mike’s commitment to the team’s on-field success, their passion for making a positive impact in our community and their dedication to players, coaches and staff,” said Vikings co-owners Zygi and Mark Wilf in a statement.
Minnesota’s COVID-19 test positivity rate hit 16.6 percent. University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy Director Michael Osterholm said Minnesota is in a “viral blizzard.” Visitors to Centracare facilities will now be required to wear medical-grade masks.
U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber issued a press release announcing 29 airports across the Eighth Congressional District would receive federal grants. The grants are part of the federal infrastructure bill, which Stauber voted against.
A fire was burning in Duluth’s Esmond Building, the former home of the Seaway Hotel which was condemned and scheduled to be torn down.
Republican state Rep. Tim Miller, from Prinsburg, will not seek re-election.
The Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder’s RB King spoke to Minneapolis Ward 10 Council Member Aisha Chughtai. On her priority for the upcoming term, she said, “I want to spend the next couple of years working to advance a strong anti-displacement and pro-tenant agenda. Making sure that we have strong rent control that is effective, that is centered in the needs of renters, and that prioritizes keeping people in their homes and in the communities that they love.”
The City of Shakopee unveiled its firetruck-themed Zamboni.
Nice to see these little airports that are nothing more than a recreational activity for a select few are at the trough.
Smaller airports are used for medical and law enforcement flights, although recreational flying is a big part of what they do, too.
Veery little for most
The odd med chopper refuel, other than that isn’t 150K a lot for a few hobbyist
I live in a small town in SW Minnesota and grew up across the road from our airport. We have a small hospital, but any emergency procedures requiring specialists are 80 miles away in Sioux Falls. When people in our county suffer a heart attack or stroke, farm or car accident, require emergency surgery, or countless other health crises where time is of the essence, transport by helicopter or plane has saved a lot of lives. In addition to medical aircraft and those belonging to private owners, the runway is used from sunrise until sundown during the months of July and August by crop dusting planes, as, I would imagine, are most small airports in farming communities. Small town airports might seem wasteful to you, but for those of us who actually live out here they are absolutely essential infrastructure.
40 years Buya small-town airport. Granted not as remote as some, but other than medical choppers not much more than a plaything. No discerning how money is spent. To plunk millions willy nilly multiplied over 50states and countless programs nives us trillions of debt.
By the way, I hold a private pilot license
Sadly, this is a profoundly ignorant comment. I lived in one of those small towns and though we hated the prices the airlines charged and bitched about them constantly, those airports were a lifeline, both economic and personal, for the communities. Any business that was more than a mom-and-pop “scotch tape and puppy” shop that needed people to come in from the outside for meetings, etc., needed the ports. The hospitals, often staffed with traveling doctors, needed the ports. People needing to travel to larger cities for business or families needed these ports. If you don’t want the small towns to die — and we should not — you need goods and people to be able to get in and out without having to drive 250 miles through the snow in the winter to do so.
There is a Minnesota beyond the Twin Cities, Duluth, Mankato, St. Cloud, and Rochester, and it is woefully inaccessible for expeditious travel. Either Mister Smith thinks that the outstate areas are not needed, that the internet solves all problems, that rural Minnesota is still “farmer in the dell” land, or that the world of meaningful human interaction and enterprise ends where our Twin Cities urban sprawl ends.
I would counsel Mister Smith to think of it this way: suppose the powers that be determined that Minneapolis and St. Paul would no longer have air service. Think of how that would impact their viability. Pissing on the small town airports does the same thing to those communities. It’s just a matter of scale.
Not a great deal of airline traffic. In Rush City or Cambridge
Toys nothing more
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I would note that this is yet another example of the subsidies given to outstate Minnesota.
And as always, I am happy to have to metro subsidize our outstate friends so long as the don’t falsely all their problems on the Metro.
The federal infrastructure aid to upgrade the airports of smaller cities (even towns) strikes me as precisely the sort of efforts that need to be undertaken to aid the economic and population difficulties that rural areas face. To worry about “trillions in debt” (a totally misleading phrase given the structure of the bill) arising from such domestic investment when the (truly wasteful) US “defense” budget is $750 billion per annum is quite misguided. If the concern is the unfair aiding of Toys for Plutocrat Pilots, then surely the answer is to levy user fees on the private planes flying Mr Plutocrat around.
I would only observe to the folks of the rural areas (whose airports are now receiving long deferred investment) that the bill that is accomplishing this was advanced by the Dem party and Dem president, and that a Dem Congress and WH are the reason the investment in rural infrastructure is occurring. Yes, a few Repubs (who likely will now lose their seats to Lauren Boobert clones) voted for the bill. But the vast majority of Repub hypocrites and bamboozlers like the noble Stauber voted against the bill, and are now cravenly taking credit for it.
You want actual effective government, rural Americans? Then vote for Dems, not nihilist and mendacious Repubs. In addition, you will actually be helping to save the country from an anti-democratic party and movement. Win/Win!