Baytown Township is adding rooftop solar to power the township’s community center.

A crew from All Energy Solar this week installed solar panels on the roof of the Baytown Community Center, located at 4020 McDonald Dr. N.

The township board voted unanimously in September to have the solar panels installed.

The township received a grant from the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s Solar on Public Buildings Program to fund the $28,615 installation, said Avis Peters, a township board member who spearheaded the project.

The grant is covering 50 percent of the cost of the installation. Forty percent of costs will be covered by federal “direct pay” tax credits (30 percent from Investment Tax Credit and 10 percent for using domestic content materials). The remaining 10 percent – $2,862 – will be covered by the township, Peters said.

Payback, then savings

The installation of the 8.5-kW solar array will reduce the township’s energy costs and help reduce electricity-based greenhouse gas emissions, said Peters, who has had a ground-mounted solar array on her four-acre property since 2017.

“My solar array paid for itself in about four years,” she said. “There will be a two-year payback for our Baytown solar investment, and then we will have free community center electricity for 40-plus years, the life of solar panels. That amounts to $141,000 in savings.”

The township’s system is expected to be delivering power to the community center by early spring, Peters said.

“Solar produced electricity is much better for the environment because we’re not burning any fossil fuel (coal, oil or natural gas), nor using nuclear power to get our electricity,” Peters said.

Electric overproduction from the solar array will be automatically exported to the electric grid, and “Xcel Energy will pay us for that extra electricity at the rate they charge to other customers,” Peters said. “That’s another benefit of this program.”

Solar on Public Buildings program

The Solar on Public Buildings program launched in April 2024, and 187 projects – spread across 71 local units of government – have thus far received grants, said Lissa Pawlisch, assistant commissioner of the Division of Energy Resources at the Minnesota Department of Commerce.  The total amount of grants given to date: about $14.7 million, she said.

An additional 45 projects have been approved and are currently moving through the grant-contracting process, Pawlisch said. No additional funding rounds are expected, she said.

The program “is about more than clean energy — it’s about investing in our communities,” Pawlisch said. “By putting solar on fire stations, wastewater-treatment facilities, libraries and other public spaces, we’re reducing energy costs, creating local jobs and demonstrating Minnesota’s commitment to a sustainable future.”

Other east-metro projects of note: Bayport Public Works Building; Falcon Heights City Hall; Little Canada City Hall; Mahtomedi Public Works Building; Roseville Booster Station; St. Anthony Village Public Works Building; St. Paul North End Community Center; St. Paul Animal Services; St. Paul Fire Station No. 3; Hamline-Midway Library; Shoreview Water Treatment Plant; South St. Paul City Hall; Vadnais Heights City Hall, and the Washington County Emergency Housing Services Building.

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If you own a home in Minnesota, there’s a roughly 2-in-5 chance that your home has dangerous levels of radon gas.

Free or inexpensive radon gas test kits are available from many the public health departments. (Courtesy of Meeker County Public Health Department)

State and local officials are encouraging residents to test their homes for radon, a colorless and odorless radioactive gas that naturally occurs in Minnesota soils. Homes in south and southwestern counties have a higher percentage of detectable radon, Dakota County said in a news release.

The leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, radon is at elevated levels in about 40% of all Minnesota homes, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Radon can enter homes and other buildings through cracks or openings in walls or foundations.

“You can’t see or smell radon, so the only way to know how much is in the air is to test for it,” said Dan Tranter, supervisor of the MDH Indoor Air Unit, in a news release.

Radon gives off radioactive particles that can damage the lining of the lungs when breathed in, according to MDH.

Radon is a serious public health issue in Minnesota due to the state’s geology and cold climate, according to MDH. In the winter, home heating systems “tend to draw in radon gas from the soil, increasing radon levels inside the home,” MDH states.

While there is no safe level of radon, the risk from radon is largely preventable and winter is the best time to test for it.

“All homes should be tested for radon about every two to five years,” Tranter said in the release. “If tests indicate radon levels of 4.0 picocuries per liter or more, we highly recommend installing a radon mitigation system to lower those levels.”

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Dakota County residents can pick up a free radon test kit at the Northern Service Center, located at 1 Mendota Road in West St. Paul, or the Western Service Center, located at 14955 Galaxie Ave. in Apple Valley. Residents are also welcome to phone consultations with Dakota County Public Health staff.

Washington County residents can pick up a free radon test kit during operating hours at the Cottage Grove Service Center, Forest Lake Service Center, North Environmental Center, South Environmental Center and the Stillwater Government Center.

Ramsey County residents can order a radon test kit for $2 at http://pipr.es/VIHgGys.

Homeowners from other Minnesota counties can also order radon test kits from Air Chek, which is partnering with MDH to offer the kits for $12.95 at mn.radon.com.

One unintended consequence of President Donald Trump’s militarized mass deportation campaign may be to demonstrate that the iron fist alone can never resolve America’s immigration challenges. And that, ironically, may open the door to a more balanced alternative.

One proposal is already quietly attracting bipartisan support in Congress.

Trump’s hardline approach to undocumented immigrants suffers from a fundamental mismatch between costs and benefits. The surge of masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities nationwide has already generated enormous economic, political and social disruption.

Businesses are complaining about a shortage of workers — or, in heavily Hispanic areas, customers, as families curtail their time in public. Polls show that although most Americans still support Trump’s moves to regain control of the border, majorities now consistently disapprove of his handling of immigration overall and believe he is going too far in removing undocumented immigrants.

Last week’s killing by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis, underscored how frequently the agency’s operations are now escalating into violence — not only against undocumented immigrants, but against U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Mayors and local law enforcement have decried the lack of coordination and cooperation from federal immigration agents.

Despite the crackdown, Trump’s efforts have produced surprisingly modest results. Using ICE figures, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, calculates that the agency so far has arrested about 360,000–370,000 people (very few of whom have been convicted or arrested for violent crimes). The best estimate, from the non-partisan Pew Research Center, is that by the end of President Joe Biden’s administration about 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. As ICE accelerates its efforts to reduce that population — aided by an extra 10,000 agents and $75 billion in funding provided by Republicans in Congress — how much more tension and violence loom ahead?

“Every American needs to be asking themselves: Can we tolerate, can communities withstand, three more years of what we have been seeing under the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller approach to immigration?” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, told me, referring to the president’s unusually powerful deputy chief of staff.

Escobar is the lead Democratic co-sponsor, with Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican, of legislation that offers an off-ramp from Trump’s inflammatory course. The bill, known as the Dignity Act, has attracted about a dozen co-sponsors in each party, the most bipartisan support for a comprehensive immigration plan in years.

The bill would strengthen immigration enforcement in multiple ways. It would mandate that employers nationwide verify the immigration status of employees. And it would significantly restrict the process of applying for asylum. But it would also create a long-term legal status that would allow most undocumented immigrants without a criminal record to remain in the U.S. (a position that a preponderance of Americans consistently support in polls).

By coupling tougher enforcement to deter future illegal immigration with legal status for much of the existing undocumented population, the Dignity Act recreates the basic tradeoff in the bipartisan immigration reform bills that passed the Senate with substantial GOP support in 2006 and 2013. (Each of those bills died in the Republican-controlled House.) But in two important ways, the new legislation bends further toward conservative concerns.

First, it excludes from eligibility all the undocumented immigrants who entered the country under Biden (about 3.5 million people, Pew estimates). Even more important, the bill only provides undocumented immigrants with a legal status that would allow them to work, study and travel — and not a pathway to citizenship. That’s a big change from previous bills. (Only the so-called Dreamers brought to the U.S. illegally as children by their parents would be eligible for eventual citizenship under the new bill.)

Escobar told me “I had to do a lot of soul searching” before agreeing to drop a pathway to citizenship from the legislation. But she said she concluded both that it was necessary to secure meaningful Republican support and that citizenship mattered less to the undocumented than security and predictability — especially amid Trump’s enforcement offensive. “I would much rather move forward in a positive direction than wait for someday … when we might be able to get everything we want,” Escobar said.

Despite abandoning the pathway to citizenship, the bill has received a respectful response from immigrant advocacy groups. Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrant rights group, told me that while she believes Democrats should still pursue eventual citizenship, she detects “more willingness to talk about” legal status short of that among advocates and the undocumented themselves.

There’s virtually no chance Congress will advance serious immigration reform while Trump (and even more so, Miller) is in the White House. But, just as Biden’s failures at the border increased public support for tougher enforcement, Trump and Miller may inadvertently prove that it is implausible to address the problem of undocumented immigration through enforcement alone.

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The tolerance among the public and even among Republican members of Congress for ICE agents killing middle-class, middle-aged white people on the streets of American cities is probably much lower than Miller would predict or prefer. “This is an eye-opening moment for the people who maybe (thought) mass deportation was a good slogan, but now they are seeing in real life what it looks like,” Cardenas says.

After Good’s death, the immediate priority for Congress, the media and the public should be closer scrutiny of ICE’s tactics and culture. But demonstrating the political viability of an alternative strategy is an important way to expand the audience for reconsidering the current one.

The Dignity Act may provide the foundation for a more durable approach to the undocumented population once Trump’s ICE storm blows past.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

To the rest of the United States:

Joe Soucheray

Most of us in Minnesota didn’t want this notoriety. That isn’t us. We’ve managed to keep our head down, shun attention and remain ignored. We are comfortable with that. We never took the term flyover land as a slight. You just go off to wherever you’re off to on those big shiny planes. We’re fine.

We were founded and governed by guys named Horace and Lucius and Knute and Hjalmar and Luther and Orville. Do you think a guy named Hjalmar ever wanted flashing light bulbs and headlines? Hell no. Oh, every once in a while, one of us got loose. One of our Anderson governors, Wendy, appeared on the cover of Time magazine, back in 1973. He wore a flannel shirt and was holding up a northern pike. The headline said “The Good Life in Minnesota.” Well, we just scuffed at the dirt with our boots and said, “A northern? Too bony. Bet he threw it back.”

We also had, as governors, C. Elmer Anderson and Elmer L. Andersen, distinguished by the o and e. You’ve never heard of them and that was OK with them and us. Just keep flying over us.

Garrison Keillor got loose, too, but he kept his national celebrity ironic, writing about Lake Wobegon and biscuits and kids in school just a bit above average.

I suppose you’d have to throw in Prince and Bob Dylan and way back when Charles Lindbergh, but that’s about it. We always survived our brushes with fame by not giving it any more notice than eyeing the neighbor’s new Chevrolet.

“That’s a pretty loud color scheme on that Chev next door, that yellow and black.”

“To each his own.”

It wasn’t that we didn’t want any trouble. We just grew up with the humble belief that we didn’t deserve any recognition.

Even in sports, we’ve shunned the limelight. In graciously losing four Super Bowls, the Vikings never scored a point in the first half of those four games. That’s dedication. We haven’t caused a stir since 1991, when the Twins won the World Series. That was pretty fun, but we didn’t toot our horn the way they do in New York or Los Angeles, where they have those paparazzi people.

But now it’s like a plague of locusts has descended on us. We’re in the national news every day and don’t want to be. Fraud got the ball rolling, mostly because it turned out that we’re better at fraud than anybody else. It tends to get your attention when billions of dollars of taxpayer money is stolen and your own governor claims he didn’t know a thing about it. Why, I imagine the rest of you are at a loss and wondering how such a thing could happen. That’s what we want to know. Autism fraud, day care fraud, Medicaid fraud, food fraud. To pay for it, we’ll probably have to fork over even higher taxes.

We cruised along avoiding national attention until Memorial Day weekend in 2020 when the city damn near burned down after George Floyd succumbed. It was a one-two punch to the gut, fraud and alleged police brutality.

We’ve been going downhill ever since. In the network newsrooms, they are saying, “Well, there’s always Minnesota.”

Minnesota! Land of ice and cold and about 15,000 lakes. You fly over us. We never wanted to be found.

So, what happens next puts Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the Minnesota watch. ICE agents swooped in, ostensibly to round up illegal criminals related to fraud, and practically right off the bat, a woman was shot and killed by an ICE agent. And the two problems are unrelated. The fraud was committed mostly by Somalis, many of whom are citizens, leaving ICE trying to find and arrest just ordinary criminals here illegally, not the illicitly wealthy ones.

Controversy remains as to whether local law enforcement informs ICE of inmates who are flagged for a federal hold. Otherwise, the people who are let go return to their neighborhoods and ICE has to find them, and this bothers Minnesotans and that’s why there is chaos in the streets that makes the national news.

I don’t blame you if you are sick and tired of us. So are we.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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