When St. Paul Regional Water Services set about designing a replacement for its century-old McCarrons water treatment plant in Maplewood, it didn’t so much look to its current 450,000 customers as beyond them.

What kind of capacity will its decarbonization and disinfectant basins need as its 14 client cities grow in population and new cities sign on? How might the utility combat threats to the east metro’s water supply that might not be known for years or even decades to come?

For designers, one key answer to the latter question was “ozonation” — the process of bubbling ozone gas through water as an added disinfectant in a long line of water purifiers, clarifiers, softeners and enhancers, ranging from lime and fluoride to chlorine and ammonia. For the first time since launching as a public utility in 1882, St. Paul Regional Water is purifying its water with ozone, a tool it’s added to a growing toolbox of approaches toward drawing water from the Mississippi River and its watershed and purifying it until every drop is safe to drink.

“We don’t need ozone to operate this plant,” said civil engineer Eric Noe, who is taking over as project manager for the new McCarrons water treatment plant as remnants of the old operation are demolished or repurposed. “It’s kind of like icing on the cake. But for the next contaminant bogeyman that we don’t yet know about, ozone is already part of our treatment.”

$250M investment in water quality

After three years of planning and four years of construction, St. Paul Regional Water officials threw open the doors on Thursday to what’s being billed as the treatment plant of the future — a $250 million investment in water quality infrastructure for St. Paul and more than a dozen neighboring cities and townships. To pay for the treatment plant, St. Paul Regional Water has gradually increased rates by 25% or more since 2021.

Constructed next to the century-old McCarrons plant on Rice Street, the new water treatment plant represents the largest capital undertaking in the 143-history of St. Paul Regional Water as a public utility.

The project was led by the design-build team of Jacobs, which is based in Dallas working alongside PCL Construction and Magney Construction. Brown and Caldwell, as well as Stantec, served as the utility’s advisors.

“We’re on schedule. We’re a little bit under budget. We’re making great water,” said project manager Will Menkhaus, who is being promoted to assistant general manager for St. Paul Regional Water Services. “And at the end of the day, there were no change orders. … The key thing that jumps out has been a virtue that our society has largely forgotten or even at times labeled a vice, and that’s compromise.”

The old McCarrons water treatment plant has been the sole producer of water for the utility’s clients since 1920, producing an average of 40 million gallons per day — enough to cover a football field in 93 feet of water. The number of gallons drops to about 30 million in winter and can rise as high as 60 million in summer. The new plant will maintain many of the same established practices with additional capacity to serve future client cities and treat as many as 84 million gallons of water daily, even if one of its major basins is out of commission.

Among the new amenities: new lime-softening solids contact clarifiers, new recarbonation basins and a new ozonation treatment process for enhanced taste, odor control and disinfection.

Quality testing lab to come

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, center, is joined by St. Paul Regional Water Services general manager Racquel Vaske, to his left, and Board of Water Commissioners President Mara Humphrey, to his right, and other project leaders in a toast celebrating the newly-upgraded St. Paul Regional Water Services McCarron’s Water Treatment Plant in Maplewood on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The project opened with partial demolition of structures in 2022. Up next will be the construction of new water quality testing lab space in a building previously dedicated to flocculation, or getting particles to clump together for easier removal. Final site restoration and landscaping are expected to wrap in coming months.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, who shared remarks at the ribbon-cutting on Thursday, reminded the audience that 70% or more of their drinking water comes from the Mississippi River and virtually all of it comes from its watershed. The human body, he said he tells students, is upwards of 60% water, meaning that much of each young person’s body was, in fact, composed of the river itself.

“Our bodies are more than half Mississippi River,” Carter said, noting St. Paul Regional Water took “this water treatment plant that has provided water to our community for 100 years, and replace(d) here it with a brand new water treatment plant that will provide clean drinking water to our community for the next 100 years.”

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President Donald Trump spent several days promising Americans that “an answer to autism” was imminent. Instead, his big reveal on Monday offered families distorted science, false hope, and unproven and at times dangerous medical advice.

Flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top federal health officials, Trump linked autism to the use of acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — during pregnancy. This, despite decades of research showing that the medication is safe. He offered no evidence to the contrary.

He also repeated long-debunked claims that vaccines and the timing of the shots could be contributing to the increase in autism cases, also without presenting any evidence. And Trump and Kennedy announced that a form of folic acid called leucovorin might help treat symptoms of autism.

In promoting these unproven causes and treatments, Trump, Kennedy and other top health officials do a disservice not just to families and people with autism, but to pregnant women and children. The information provided at a rambling and often incoherent press briefing — during which Trump admonished pregnant women not to take Tylenol — could cause real harm. And it does nothing but create confusion and distract from genuine efforts to improve the lives of autistic people and their families.

The consensus among actual experts based on decades of research is that genetics — not just one gene, but hundreds — play a major role in autism. Scientists have also spent years trying to understand which environmental factors might magnify the inherited risk of autism.

And while early studies did suggest that acetaminophen might slightly raise the risk of autism, that research also failed to account for the reasons that pregnant women take the drug, explained David Mandell, associate director of the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Fevers during pregnancy, for example, are known to increase the risk that a child will have a neurodevelopmental delay, and are also the reason someone would take Tylenol. More recent, robust studies out of Japan and Sweden that controlled for those variables found no link between Tylenol and autism.

Trump and his team dismissed those critiques. “Sure, you’ll be able to find a study to the contrary, that’s how science works,” said Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Trump, meanwhile, seemed to blame women and those who choose to take the drug.

“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said, conceding that women who can’t “tough it out” might still choose to.

Acetaminophen is considered the only safe pain reliever a woman can take during pregnancy. But to those women Trump said, that’s something “you have to work out with yourself.”

That admonishment could easily dissuade American women from treating a symptom that could endanger their child. “Everybody knows a fever is really bad for the developing brain. That’s good science,” says Robert L. Hendren, a psychiatrist who works in the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Program at the University of California, San Francisco. For Trump to “tell mothers that they’re wimps if they take Tylenol — and if their kid gets autism and they’re the cause of it — that’s just a shame.”

Just as easy answers to explain complex conditions are scarce, so, too, are miracle cures. Yet Trump and his health leaders blithely overpromised on the potential of leucovorin, which they claimed could help with speech and behavioral problems in children with autism.

But that claim isn’t supported by the kind of “gold standard” science this administration has vowed to pursue. So far, the drug, which was approved in 2002 to address side effects of chemotherapy, has undergone limited testing for the treatment of autism. The largest study enrolled just 80 children, and the other, smaller trials had design flaws that cast doubt on any hints of efficacy.

Yet the FDA is already adding information to the leucovorin label to allow its use to treat cerebral folate deficiency, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with autism.

“Suggesting that there’s something out there for families who are pretty desperate to do anything that they can to help their children is a waste of time, a waste of money, and honestly a waste of hope,” says Connie Kasari, a founding member of UCLA’s Center for Autism Research and Treatment. “Jumping to this kind of conclusion is really dangerous.”

That doesn’t mean leucovorin isn’t worth investigating. But families of children with autism deserve the kind of large, placebo-controlled studies that can definitively prove (or disprove) the drug’s efficacy and define who it might help. Parents have already suffered through too many fake treatments that have been, at best, expensive but benign, and at worst, horrifyingly harmful. That terrible history should be a reason for the administration to exercise caution when discussing any potential therapy — not contribute to the hype.

But Trump also went beyond the already troubling repositioning of autism priorities to riff on the childhood vaccine schedule, which he implied could be linked to the disorder. “Don’t let them pump your baby up with the largest pile of stuff you’ve ever seen in your life,” he said, suggesting the shots should be spread out over several years.

The president also opined that children shouldn’t receive the Hepatitis B shot until they are 12 (it is currently given at birth), and that the measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox shots should be administered separately. Pediatricians note that shots for those individual infections do not exist in the US, where children get a combination vaccine.

That the nation’s president used his platform to promote theories that have been thoroughly debunked across hundreds of studies endangers all children. Confidence in vaccines is already declining, a situation that has real consequences for public health — as was made clear by this year’s measles outbreak.

All of this seemed designed to stoke fears rather than calm them — and suggests the administration is more interested in easy “wins” than real solutions. As they sift through the raft of misleading and false information from their president, parents would do well to remember that the person with the best medical advice is their doctor.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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Today is Friday, Sept. 26, the 269th day of 2025. There are 96 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Sept. 26, 1991, four men and four women began a two-year stay inside a sealed-off structure in Oracle, Arizona, called Biosphere 2; they emerged from Biosphere 2 on this date in 1993.

Also on this date:

In 1777, British troops occupied Philadelphia during the American Revolution.

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In 1954, the Japanese commercial ferry Toya Maru sank during a typhoon in the Tsugaru Strait, claiming more than 1,150 lives.

In 1960, the first nationally televised debate between presidential candidates took place as Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon faced off in Chicago.

In 1986, William H. Rehnquist was sworn in as the 16th chief justice of the United States, while Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court as its 103rd member. Rehnquist died in 2005 and Scalia in 2016.

In 1990, the Motion Picture Association of America announced it had created a new rating, NC-17, to replace the X rating.

In 2000, thousands of anti-globalization protesters clashed with police in demonstrations during a summit of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Prague.

In 2005, Army Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted by a military jury in Fort Hood, Texas, on six of seven counts stemming from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

In 2020, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Barrett would be confirmed the following month.)

In 2022, NASA’s Dart mission became the first spacecraft to ram an asteroid in a dress rehearsal for deflecting a space object’s trajectory.

In 2024, Helene, a major Category 4 hurricane, made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region. It went on to cut a swath across Georgia and South Carolina before triggering historic flooding in North Carolina and Tennessee, causing an estimated $78 billion in damage and 219 deaths.

Today’s Birthdays:

Country singer David Frizzell is 84.
Television host Anne Robinson is 81.
Singer Bryan Ferry is 80.
Author Jane Smiley is 76.
Singer-guitarist Cesar Rosas (Los Lobos) is 71.
Actor Linda Hamilton is 69.
Actor Melissa Sue Anderson is 63.
Actor Jim Caviezel (kuh-VEE’-zuhl) is 57.
Singer Shawn Stockman (Boyz II Men) is 53.
Hockey Hall of Famers Daniel and Henrik Sedin are 45.
Tennis player Serena Williams is 44.
Singer-actor Christina Milian (MIHL’-ee-ahn) is 44.
Actor Zoe Perry is 42.

In motion on the first snap of the game, Dominic Baez took the handoff and sprinted through the secondary for an 80-yard touchdown.

The star running back accounted for 201 combined yards and a total of 3 touchdowns in St. Thomas Academy‘s 36-14 win over Apple Valley on Thursday at Rosemount High School. But he insisted the praise should go to his teammates, especially on his long touchdown run.

“I got out there, and I see [wide receiver] Manny Sims making one of the best touchdown blocks I’ve ever seen,” Baez said. “I look behind me, I see [offensive lineman] Andrew Nelson box a guy out and slow him down. That was all them.”

The Cadets, ranked No. 1 in Class 5A, stalled out offensively for much of the first half after Baez’s long run, until they inserted Ethan Ruiz at quarterback for their final drive of the first half. St Thomas Academy (5-0) proceeded to mount a 10-play, 78-yard drive to end the half. Ruiz connected with Sims for a 26-yard completion on the drive before Baez, who had seven carries for  36 yards on the drive, punched the ball in at the goal line for a 2-yard touchdown.

St. Thomas head coach Travis Walch said all elements of Baez’s game stand out.

“His balance, his vision, he can catch the ball,” Walch said. “We had him punting tonight because our kicker (Toren Plitingsrud) is our best soccer player, and he was at a soccer game tonight.”

The score gave St. Thomas a 15-0 lead with 15 seconds to play before halftime.

Baez gashed the Eagles’ defense for 139 yards on 16 carries in the first half alone. In what was a one-sided ballgame, St. Thomas outgained Apple Valley 198 to 94 over the first 24 minutes of play.

After back-to-back three-and-outs to open the second half, Apple Valley (2-3) methodically moved down the field to dent the scoreboard for the first time. An 11-play, 94-yard drive that was capped off with a 30-yard touchdown pass from senior
quarterback Q Barnslater to junior wide receiver Tyson Johnson to cut the Eagles’ deficit to 15-7.

But St. Thomas Academy responded on its ensuing possession with a quick five-play, 69-yard scoring drive. The Cadets went back to junior quarterback Tristan Karl under center in the second half, who finished off the possession by finding Grant English in the endzone for an 18-yard touchdown to extend the lead back to 15 points.

Apple Valley head coach Pete Usset said penalties plagued the Eagles in the second half, including a late hit that extended the Cadets’ third touchdown drive.

“It takes a full team effort to beat those guys,” Usset said. “And part of that team effort is being disciplined.”

St. Thomas’ offense motored on in the final quarter, scoring on the opening play of the frame. Baez, in motion on the snap, took the handoff then turned around and threw it back to Karl, who caught the ball in space and scored. Baez’s third total  touchdown gave St. Thomas a 29-7 lead, which put the game out of reach.

Senior defensive back Matthew Wagner put the exclamation point on the victory with an interception on a deep pass from Barnslater on the next possession.

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