Good morning, and happy Friday, the last day of September.
Brian O'Hara, deputy mayor of Newark, N.J., who oversees policing strategy in that city, is Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's choice to be the next Minneapolis police chief. "The problem of serious street crime is urgent, and our communities demand and deserve good police to deal with that urgently," O'Hara said at a news conference Thursday. "At the same time, I commit to hold all police officers accountable to the values of our community and I invite the community to hold us all accountable as well." MPR's Jon Collins reports Frey said O'Hara had success in driving down shootings in Newark. He also noted O'Hara's experience in Newark handling a consent decree was important. Minneapolis is under U.S. Justice Department investigation for its police practices and patterns, and those investigations tend to result in a consent decree, a formal agreement on changes the department must make. The Minneapolis City Council must still approve O'Hara. The nomination is likely to go to the City Council Thursday next week. The mayor's office is hoping the new chief will be confirmed by early November. And a program note: I'll talk to Mayor Frey about his choice at noon today on MPR News.
Republican candidate for governor Scott Jensen proposed Thursday that the state add an independent, non-partisan inspector general position to uncover fraud and waste in government. MPR's Dana Ferguson reports Jensen said Minnesota hasn't done a good enough job at detecting fraud in state and federal programs. And he pitched a plan to allow the governor to appoint an inspector general to oversee all of state government. Still he said the inspector would not have a staff or an office. "So are we going to be creating a whole new behemoth layer of new government? I don't think so," Jensen said. "I think we're talking about someone who's going to be able to function independently in a nonpartisan fashion. And I think it'll be that person, that you might well create an avenue upwards from whistleblowers to this person." Jensen also proposed beefing up whistleblower protections for state workers that report possible waste or fraud and using web tools that detect questionable spending. The proposal came after 49 people were charged in connection with an alleged $250 million fraud ring working through the group Feeding Our Future. Jensen and other Republicans have said the Walz administration didn't do enough to prevent the fraud. Gov. Tim Walz and state education officials said they're the ones who found the fraud and alerted the FBI.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and State Sen. Omar Fateh got the most in campaign contributions from people who were charged in the Feeding Our Future case,reports KARE 11 : Fateh in February returned 11 donations worth $11,000 after news broke of the FBI's investigation into the federal meal program fraud. The contributions came from people named in the January search warrants who are now defendants charged in the federal case, as well as some of their associates. Omar received a total of $7,400 in donations from three defendants, including two associated with Safari Restaurant, which allegedly received $16 million in fraudulent funds. Omar donated the money in February as well. Not all the campaign contributions from Feeding our Future defendants stayed in Minnesota. Eight defendants gave money totaling $8,750 to Washington State Representative candidate Shukri Olow.
How will the vote from outside the metro area factor into who is election governor?Walker Orenstein at MinnPost has a look : "If we can capture Greater Minnesota not at 60-40, but at 70-30, the world changes," Jensen said in an interview. In 2018, Walz won 44.6 percent of the vote outside of the seven-county metro area. That compares to just 35 percent support in Greater Minnesota for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 39.5 percent for Joe Biden in 2020. Those numbers illustrate the challenge and opportunity for Jensen – challenge because Clinton and Biden still won the state, and opportunity because there is likely room for improvement for Jensen over Republican Jeff Johnson's performance in 2018. The seven-county Twin Cities metro has roughly 405,000 more registered voters than Greater Minnesota, according to data from the Secretary of State.
And Jensen is taking some heat for where he filmed a campaign ad.The Star Tribune reports: Jensen featured Mercado Central in recent campaign videos, prompting Mercado's board to demand he remove any images of the Latino marketplace from his ads. The campaign did not have permission to film a political ad inside the Minneapolis cultural mall, Mercado's board of directors said in a letter Wednesday to Jensen's campaign. "It is troubling that a political campaign would blithely appropriate and exploit Mercado Central's iconic image without the minimum courtesy of consulting with the leadership or tenants of our cultural mall," the board wrote, asking Jensen's campaign to respond by Friday with confirmation that they had followed the board's request. Attorneys for the Jensen campaign and Mercado Central are in touch and are working on "a mutually acceptable agreement," said Jensen's spokesman Joel Hanson. He said he is hopeful they will be able to reach an agreement by the deadline Mercado Central set, and declined to comment further on the ads.
The number, size and distribution timeline of checks from Minnesota's frontline pandemic worker program are due to be announced next week, reports MPR's Brian Bakst. The state agency managing the $500 million award program says it is finishing its review of applications and appeals for inclusion. The frontline bonuses will go to health care, retail, child care, first responders and other workers who couldn't do their jobs from home during risky points of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are income limits and other eligibility criteria. One million or more people could qualify based on the number of applications. The checks will be equal in size, so the final number of recipients is key. | 
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