“Our State Fair is a great state fair. Don’t miss it, don’t even be late. It’s dollars to donuts, that our State Fair is the best state fair in our state.”

– Title song for the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “State Fair”

This is a tale about an important late-summer mission: A mission to visit and compare the State Fairs in Minnesota and Iowa.

Fairgoers from the neighboring states are famously fiercely loyal to their State Fairs. It’s not quite Gopher/Hawkeye football level, but it can be intense.

So, which is the best?

The three retired journalists on the mission found the song from the beloved musical rings true. These annual extravaganzas of agriculture, food and competitions are, well, the best in each state.

But that’s not a Fair comparison. The trio was tasked with setting the rivalry to rest. Is Iowa the ultimate State Fair field of dreams or does its neighbor to the north hold (purple) reign? The two consistently rank in the Top 10 of State Fairs in the U.S. – usually in the Top 5.

Let me explain:

The adventure begins at a reunion of Des Moines Register newsroom alumni in October 2023, when a retired Register editor says that I must write the “ultimate comparison between the Iowa State Fair and Minnesota State Fair.”

Adell Crowe, from left, Deb Wiley and Kathy Berdan at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Aug. 18, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

I attended and covered the Iowa State Fair for 10 years and did the same for nearly 20 years in Minnesota after returning to my home state in 2000. I accepted the assignment. (Yes, beer was involved.)

Like a prize-winning State Fair pumpkin, the idea took root. Deb Wiley, a fifth-generation Iowan and many-year visitor to the Iowa fair, was on board. To give this piece of investigative journalism some perspective, we invited longtime friend and journalist Adell Crowe to travel from Washington, D.C. Crowe, who grew up in Tennessee, often told the others she had never been to a State Fair and wanted to go someday.

Logistics worked best to visit the last day of the Iowa State Fair and the first day of Minnesota’s in 2024, so it wasn’t exactly a caramel apples to apples comparison when it came to crowd excitement levels. The weather was perfect in Des Moines last Aug. 18, but in St. Paul (technically, Falcon Heights, a suburb) afternoon rain had us dashing from building to building on opening day, Aug. 22.

From giant boar competitions to intricate quilts to deep-fried eats on a stick at every turn, we intrepid investigators sampled what each State Fair offered in 2024.

We did not visit the Midway at either Fair, since the thrills and subsequent stomach spills are not our thing. We did not go to any concerts in the Grandstand; the lineup is usually similar, with both featuring Def Leppard in 2025 and country acts (Rascal Flatts in Des Moines, Old Dominion in St. Paul).

But enough preamble. Let’s get to the amble. (And amble, we did, with nearly 11,500 steps at the Iowa State Fair and too many mad scrambles through the rain in Minnesota to count.)

From dollars to donuts, here’s a look at both State Fairs, so you can make your plans for 2025.

The Fairgrounds

I’ve always thought the Iowa State Fair feels more “rural” than Minnesota’s. Iowa’s grounds are actually larger, though, at 445 acres, compared to Minnesota’s 332 acres. The Iowa Fairgrounds are mostly wooded, with attractions that spread up a large hill. (Confession: I don’t think I climbed that hill more than a few times during my decade in the Hawkeye State. Hey, the Bud Tent at the foot of the hill was the place to be in the ‘90s.)

Iowa has added newer buildings since the 1990s, giving the Fairgrounds a cleaner feel, but the lovely front porch on the Admin Building will always be the centerpiece to me. Minnesota’s octagon-shaped Art Deco Agriculture Horticulture Building is my favorite in my home state. It’s a delight, with an annual massive floral display in the light-filled atrium. The roads in both Fairgrounds have street names.

Both State Fairs have a rustic, romantic ride in a floating rowboat through “Ye Old Mill.” And each has a Giant Slide. There’s a building for the Department of Natural Resources at each Fair – Iowa’s has a new courtyard, Minnesota’s is a massive log structure.

But because the Minnesota State Fair draws from a larger metropolitan area, the streets are usually a solid swarm of bodies by early afternoon. Attendance at the 2024 Iowa State Fair set a record at 1,182,682; Minnesota State Fair attendance was 1,925,904 in 2024, with a record 2,126,551 in 2019.

Both have venerable roots. Iowa’s is slightly older, 1854. Minnesota expanded its territorial fair in 1859, a year after statehood.

Attractions

Each Fair has talent shows and live music on free stages as well as Grandstand shows.

Both have giant boar contest winners, which inspire “aww” and “eeuw” in special swine barn exhibits. At the 2024 Iowa State Fair, a new record was set in the Big Boar competition. Finnegan weighed in at a record-breaking 1,420 pounds. The Minnesota boar, Squeaky, was 1,240 pounds. Point: Iowa.

There are even some of the same vendor booths. Peachey’s Donuts drew loooong lines at both in 2024. Iowa has Barksdale chocolate chip cookies, Minnesota has Sweet Martha’s.

The Iowa State Fair Photography Salon is one of the most popular juried Fine Arts exhibits, with 2,579 photos entered and 833 accepted for display. Minnesota’s Fine Arts competition juried show draws art entries from throughout the state. More than 300 works – sculpture, paintings and photos – are chosen from thousands of entries.

Hundreds submit marvelous cakes, crafts, quilts and other creations in competitions in both states. The work provides both inspiration (“Hey, maybe I can do that.”) and intimidation (“Oh, I guess those slippers I knitted aren’t so special.”). Iowa’s quilts have a better display area, but Minnesota incorporates quilts into display cases with other items in the Creative Activities Building.

Check out Minnesota’s kitschy and popular “Quilt On-A-Stick” entries. Themed mini-quilts are 8 inches by 9 inches and, like all good things at the Fair, on-a-stick.

There’s a parade at 2 p.m. daily through the Minnesota Fairgrounds, with marching bands and floats. The Iowa State Fair parade marches through downtown Des Moines the evening before the Fair opens, literally drumming up excitement.

A favorite moment at the Iowa State Fair was the daily morning broadcast of the “Star Spangled Banner.” At 10 a.m., fairgoers stopped, grew quiet, removed their caps and paused to listen or sing along with that day’s singer. It was sincere and moving.

Two of the biggest attractions are the butter sculptures in Iowa and the Crop Art exhibit in Minnesota.

The Crop Art competition and display at the Minnesota State Fair is the only one of its kind at this scale, according to State Fair officials. Artists create mosaic-type works meticulously placed seed by seed, using all local grains. It’s been growing since its start in 1965 and has yielded an enthusiastic fan base. The wait in the viewing line can be 45 minutes to an hour as Crop Art is visited by an estimated 200,000 fairgoers a year.

Both State Fairs feature butter sculptures. Minnesota’s are done live at the Fair, with the heads of the winners of the annual Dairy Princess contest and her court carved from 90-pound blocks of butter. The sculptor and model sit inside a chilled rotating glass booth while the work is done.

Butter sculpting draws crowds to the Dairy Building (try the ice cream while you’re there), but Minnesota’s butterheads aren’t worth a stick of margarine compared to Iowa’s. The breed of Iowa’s life-size butter cow, crafted from about 600 pounds of butter on a wood and mesh frame, varies every year. And there’s a companion full-size sculpture or two, usually a personality or celebrity with an Iowa connection. Amazing.

The 2024 creation featured Jimmy Fallon and his sidekick, Steve Higgins, (born in Des Moines and a University of Iowa grad) and Johnny Carson (born in Corning, Iowa). Higgins and Fallon are sitting on a Sky Glider seat and Fallon is looking over his shoulder at Carson.

The full-size butter Last Supper sculpture in 1999 will forever be my favorite.

Iowa’s official butter sculptor, Sarah Pratt, will create a butter bovine in Washington, D.C., this summer to be on exhibit from Aug. 13, 2025, to Aug. 13, 2026, as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Minnesota’s crop art will also be featured in the Smithsonian exhibition. And crop artist Liz Schreiber did a title piece made out of seeds for the exhibition, “State Fairs: Growing American Craft.”

Food

Food is an essential part of a trip to the annual extravaganza in each state. Heck, I’ll admit it’s my top priority. And I’m not alone; the announcement of new Fair foods is a media event before the fairs in each state.

Deep-fried and skewered on a wooden stick is the hallmark of State Fair foods, with everything from candy bars to ranch dressing getting the batter treatment.

First, a word about deep-fried hotdogs on a stick. The Minnesota State Fair does have the requisite stands selling corn dogs. Slathered in mustard, they are a fine munchable. But Minnesota also has the superior (in my opinion) Pronto Pup, a “wiener dun in a bun” as the familiar yellow logo states. The Pronto Pup has a more cakelike batter. It is a tasty thing of beauty. Wiley insists the corn dog is better. Newbies should try both, of course.

Minnesota has more ethnic foods on its menu, with a favorite deep-fried giant eggroll, momos (Tibetan dumplings), Korean corn dogs, mochi donuts and more. In 2024, Egyptian koshari and grilled purple sticky rice were crowd favorites. There are also Minnesota-inspired foods such as a wild rice burger and walleye bites. The apple growers exhibit offers sparkling apple cider, a frozen cider pop and an apple-filled puff pastry covered with a powdered sugar frosting.

Confession: It’s difficult for me to get beyond stuffing my belly with Pronto Pups.

Iowa faves? You have to start with a pork chop on a stick, grilled in the open air by folks from the Iowa Pork Producers Association. We were nearly first in line on our visit in 2024 and the chops could have used a little more time on the grill, but Iowans know their pork.

Another favorite on our Des Moines adventure was the sweet corn in a cup; look for the ones with cotija cheese, chorizo and chips. Minnesota’s giant and popular corn roast vendor has fairgoers chomping the kernels directly from a butter-drenched cob.

The pork belly corn dog bites at a Bubbly Bar & Bistro at the Iowa fair were yummy and served in a lovely, airy new bistro setting at the top of the aforementioned hill. It’s near Grandfather’s Barn (the only building remaining from the farmstead where the Fair located in 1886). The Iowa Wine Experience is set up in the barn, and the wine slushies were slurpily refreshing.

Speaking of beverages, Minnesota’s craft beer breweries have made the North Star State Fair a foamy expedition, with new brews crafted each year. The beers and other beverages can be found at food vendors throughout the Fairgrounds, with such sips as mini-donut beer (sugar on the glass rim) and dill pickle kolsch. Last year, there were 63 new beverages and 46 returning favorites on the menu. The Iowa Craft Beer Tent keeps it all in one location, and had close to 250 drinks from 60 Iowa breweries in 2024.

By the numbers (according to each State Fair’s most recent info): Minnesota had 1,600 different foods available at 300 food concessions, with more than 80 foods on a stick. Iowa had nearly 200 food stands and more than 50 items available on a stick.

The verdict

Our resolve to name the best of the two State Fairs melted like a butter sculpture on an asphalt parking lot in August. There’s so much to love about each.

The best State Fair? Like the song says: It’s the one in your state.

Reflections of a first-time fairgoer

By Adell Crowe

Embrace the crowd! Unlike cranky airport crowds or rowdy, often-too-exuberant/intoxicated seated baseball crowds, the Fair throng is a sea of moving happiness. It parts and smiles as you make your way through and is happy to make room for a few more.

The crowds can even guide you to the best food: See the long line at the donuts? That is a good sign. (Yes, you’ll have to wait but do you have a better place to be than the Fair?) The crowded beer garden always has one more table for you, so just stand and sip until someone leaves.

The crowd will also indicate which corner of a crowded pavilion has a main attraction and which vendor is handing out good freebies.

Speaking of freebies, you’ll never need another tote bag or crown of paper pig ears. If it rains, the crowd transforms into a rainbow of free ponchos. Don’t let a little rain dampen your experience, it only helps to cool the sweat and wash away the first layer of stickiness from the cotton candy, gooey donuts, bacon on a stick and the Pronto Pup you had for breakfast.

Similarly, follow your nose! Fair smells are a conglomeration of fried happiness. Indulge. Let your nose overrule your stomach on the quantity and digestibility of food types. You are only going to get deep-fried Oreos and pork belly bites with hot honey sauce at the Fair.

Should you feel guilty about your choices in Des Moines, head to the Ag Building for the Iowa Egg Council’s free hard-boiled egg on a stick or check out the “Healthy Food Choices” listed on the Iowa State Fair website.

At the Iowa fair, the gardens outside the horticulture building provide another good sniffing stop. There’s a mini maze for kiddos and a variety of flowers that never quite achieve the same exuberance in your own backyard (but again, they ARE at the Fair!).

“City girl” Adell Crowe visits the giant boar at the Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights on Aug. 22, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

Don’t let your nose stand in the way of the livestock barns. These show animals are not stinky. They are groomed to keep them runway ready. Should nature call, there are shovel-ready handlers to remove the detritus. OK, maybe one or two of the big animals are a little stinky, but the lines by those pens move pretty quickly.

Animals from the massive to the wobbly newborn goats and lambs to the plume-headed chickens are available for oohing and ahhing. (But I did draw the line at the Minnesota animal Miracle of Birth Center. Yes, I’m a squeamish city girl.)

Sticks: Let’s take a moment to appreciate the genius of Fair vendors. Prior to my first Fair visit my experience with hand-held cuisine was limited to cocktail weenies and toothpicks. My horizons have been exploded! Deep-fried olives, pork chops, hot dish, Greek salad, and dozens more, all on a stick — and later down the front of my shirt.

Attire: Tattoos are the new tube tops. Used to be that skimpy tops and Daisy Dukes drew attention to midriffs and legs. Now it’s a fantastical array of ink-on-skin artistry that ranges from fanciful to fearsome. It adds another element to the required people-watching.

In the they-thought-of-everything department:

— Hog-ears off to Fair planners who made getting to each Fair easy, sometimes free and almost always quick via shuttle bus.

— If you prefer pedaling, Minnesota planners provide a bike concierge/corral (don’t lose your ticket, if you want your bike back at the end of your visit).

— Thank you, Iowa, for the permanent water art that’s big enough to dance through on a hot day.

— Minnesota’s wealth of memorial benches made room for much-needed respites and sweet reminders of how much the Fair has meant to many generations.

— Iowa shows off the beauty of its golden state Capitol with a breathtaking view from the top of the hill at Grandfather’s Barn. And the lovely new wine-and-more cafe at the top is a great place to take it all in.

— Both provided ample selfie opportunities. There were posing frames with the biggest pumpkin, a bragging-sized giant cotton rainbow bass and a cutout and directions for posing with a giant heifer. All were magnets for comments and likes on my jealous social media.

Things I didn’t expect to love:

Coffee: I’m a caffeine snob so I wasn’t expecting much from a cuppa at the Minnesota State Fair. But the Maple Nitro coffee at the Farmers Union Coffee Shop was yummy.

Seed art: I did some private eye-rolling every time I heard the words “crop art” before I saw the amazing talent and patience that goes into these masterpieces. My frame of reference was pinto beans pasted on cardboard that we made in Scouts. Who knew the cleverness that can sprout from Minnesota minds and homegrown seeds?

Butter: While I had heard of butter sculpture at the Iowa fair, seeing life-sized sculptures of Jimmy Fallon and Iowa native Steve Higgins – with a sweet over-the-shoulder nod from Iowa-born Johnny Carson – forever changed my appreciation of artists willing to work in frosty conditions wielding butter knives. It was cool, as was the annual big butter cow, which was so realistic it looked desperately in need of milking.

Arts and crafts: All states can boast amazing artists. But as these were my first two Fairs, I’m convinced that there’s a unique concentration of gifted photographers, painters, sculptures, knitters and quilters in Iowa and Minnesota. Wow, I said, maybe a couple hundred times. And as a wannabe quilter I left more intimidated than inspired. I may go back to jigsaw puzzles.

Crowd-sourcing: Not two hours into my first Fair, a woman spied my half-empty cup of lemonade to ask me where to buy the best lemonade. (Wow, I felt like an expert!) Later, I stopped a couple with a serving of sticky blue rice so I could get an eyeful. Everyone is happy to share their experiences.

Cheese curds: They need a better name. They are delicious. Especially the dill pickle variety.

Beer flavors: Hats off and head-scratching for those brewers who have made a multitude of brewskis possible. And, thanks for the yummy wine slushies.

​​What the Minnesotan gets wrong — and right

By Deb Wiley

The year was 1970, and comedian Red Skelton was scheduled to perform at the Iowa State Fair Grandstand. I was a lowly freshman clarinet player in my high school band, and our director penned an ode to one of Skelton’s comedic personas called “The Clem Kadiddlehopper March” that snagged us a spot at the Fair.

I don’t remember much about the experience of performing this masterpiece or the long bus ride to and from New Hampton, Iowa. What I remember is that my friend Rachel and I snagged something called a corn dog on our way back to the bus. And that we were roundly scolded as the bus started moving while we scrambled to find our seats because we were SO LATE. What I remember most vividly was that ambrosial new flavor sensation! Salty, a tiny bit sweet, savory and crunchy on the outside. On a stick! It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. I wanted more.

Thus, every Iowa State Fair involves a personal quest for a corn dog. I evolved from ketchup on the dog to mustard only. I close my eyes when I chew, savoring every nibble. It’s a once-a-year treat.

Adell Crowe, from left, Kathy Berdan and Deb Wiley give a Pronto Pup salute at the Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights on Aug. 22, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

Which is why, when my Minnesota friend Kathy claimed Pronto Pups were better, I scoffed. Oh sure, I’ll try them. But who wants a pancake wrapped around a hot dog? It’s too sweet. There’s no nubbly corn flavor. It’s … boring.

But talk about corny, that Fair motto, “The Great Minnesota Get-Together”? I thought little of it until Kathy, Adell and I had to duck inside the Fine Arts Center last year to escape a persistent downpour. I rounded the corner, and there, to my great delight, were two Minnesota friends that I had no expectation of seeing. It was a fun get-together. And the rest of the day was just as fine, rain or shine. After all, every day at the Iowa OR Minnesota State Fair is a good day.

Well played, Minnesota.

If you go

Iowa State Fair: Aug. 7-17, 2025. Advance tickets online. $11 for ages 12 and up and $7 for ages 6-11 until Aug. 6. Beginning August 7, $16 for ages 12 and up, $10 for ages 6-11. Parking on site (fee), along nearby streets (some homeowners charge for parking on their property), or by bus with DART Park & Ride (park free).

Minnesota State Fair: Aug. 21-Sept. 1, 2025. Ticket prices are $20 at the gate for adults. Discount tickets are available through Aug. 20. On-site parking $25. Free buses from more than 30 park-n-ride locations. Two free and secure bike corrals are available.

What to bring: Comfortable shoes, cash or credit card, sunscreen, water bottle, sunglasses.

Must see at the Iowa State Fair: The butter cow and special butter sculptures inside the Ag Building. Stare down the biggest farm animals of their kinds in the Avenue of Breeds.

Must see at the Minnesota State Fair: Crop Art entries in the Ag-Hort Building, live butter sculpting in a rotating glass cooler of Princess Kay of the Milky Way and her court in the Dairy Building.

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I grew up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear with my dad, but have only returned to the sport recently thanks to another family superfan, my wife. So perhaps it’s understandable that to my adult eyes, it seemed like the current crop of stars, as awe-inspiring as they are, don’t serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved!

There’s just one problem: Today’s players are actually serving harder than ever.

While most CEOs probably don’t spend a lot of time quizzing AI about tennis, they very likely do count on it for information and to guide their decision making. And the tendency of large language models to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biased or incorrect beliefs poses a real danger to leaders.

ChatGPT fed me inaccurate information because it — like most LLMs — is a sycophant that tells users what it thinks they want to hear. Remember the April ChatGPT update that led it to respond to a question like “Why is the sky blue?” with “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.” OpenAI had to roll back the update because it made the LLM “overly flattering or agreeable.” But while that toned down ChatGPT’s sycophancy, it didn’t eliminate it.

That’s because LLMs’ desire to please is endemic, rooted in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the way many models are “aligned” or trained. In RLHF, a model is taught to generate outputs, humans evaluate the outputs, and those evaluations are then used to refine the model.

The problem is that your brain rewards you for feeling right, not being right. So people give higher scores to answers they agree with. Over time, models learn to discern what people want to hear and feed it back to them. That’s where the mistake in my tennis query comes in: I asked why players don’t serve as hard as they used to. If I had asked the opposite — why they serve harder than they used to — ChatGPT would have given me an equally plausible explanation. (That’s not a hypothetical — I tried, and it did.)

Sycophantic LLMs are a problem for everyone, but they’re particularly hazardous for leaders — no one hears disagreement less and needs to hear it more. CEOs today are already minimizing their exposure to conflicting views by cracking down on dissent everywhere from Meta Platforms Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Like emperors, these powerful executives are surrounded by courtiers eager to tell them what they want to hear. And also like emperors, they reward the ones who please them — and punish those who don’t.

Rewarding sycophants and punishing truth tellers, though, is one of the biggest mistakes leaders can make. Bosses need to hear when they’re wrong. Amy Edmondson, probably the greatest living scholar of organizational behavior, showed that the most important factor in team success was psychological safety — the ability to disagree, including with the team’s leader, without fear of punishment.

This finding was verified by Google’s own Project Aristotle, which looked at teams across the company and found that “psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.” My own research shows that a hallmark of the very best leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Stanley McChrystal, is their ability to listen to people who disagreed with them.

LLMs’ sycophancy can harm leaders in two closely related ways. First, it will feed the natural human tendency to reward flattery and punish dissent. If your computer constantly tells you that you’re right about everything, it’s only going to make it harder to respond positively when someone who works for you disagrees with you.

Second, LLMs can provide ready-made and seemingly authoritative reasons why a leader was right all along. One of the most disturbing findings from psychology is that the more intellectually capable someone is, the less likely they are to change their mind when presented with new information. Why? Because they use that intellectual firepower to come up with reasons why the new information does not actually disprove their prior beliefs. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning.

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LLMs threaten to turbocharge that phenomenon. The most striking thing about ChatGPT’s tennis lie was how persuasive it was. It included six separate plausible reasons. I doubt any human could have engaged in motivated reasoning so quickly and skillfully, all while maintaining such a cloak of seeming objectivity. Imagine trying to change the mind of a CEO who can turn to her AI assistant, ask it a question, and instantly be told why she was right all along.

The best leaders have always gone to great lengths to remember their own fallibility. Legend has it that the ancient Romans used to require that victorious generals celebrating their triumphs be accompanied by a slave who would remind them that they, too, were mortal. Apocryphal or not, the sentiment is wise.

Today’s leaders will need to work even harder to resist the blandishments of their electronic minions and remember sometimes, the most important words their advisers can share are, “I think you’re wrong.”

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.” He wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Democratic-Farmer-Labor Sen. Nicole Mitchell has resigned after her felony burglary conviction, and the special election to choose her replacement could shake up the balance of power at the state Capitol.

The race for Mitchell’s Woodbury seat is one of at least six special elections likely to take place this year, matching a record high for the state Legislature. And it figures to attract the most money and attention as the most competitive seat up for grabs so far this year, political observers and former elected officials say.

Last year’s election gave the state its most closely divided government ever: a House tied 67-67 between Republicans and DFLers and a Senate split 34-33 with the DFL holding the advantage.

That already tight political balance at the Capitol has been further complicated by an unusual number of vacancies this year due to deaths, criminal cases and a candidate residency dispute. Each time a House or Senate seat is vacated, control of either chamber is thrown into question.

There have been three special elections so far this year, and it’s likely there will be three more, including for Mitchell’s seat. Gov. Tim Walz has said he hopes those special elections will take place before the Legislature convenes in February.

Mitchell’s Senate District 47 and an earlier district that shared a similar footprint have favored Democratic Farmer-Labor candidates in recent years, though the East Metro suburbs are not as historically Democratic as the urban center.

Mitchell won the district in 2022 with nearly 59% of the vote. But former Woodbury lawmakers and others say Republicans might be able to play the unique circumstances of the race to their advantage.

Representation argument

Woodbury DFLer Kathy Saltzman, who represented parts of Washington County in the state Senate from 2007 to 2011, said some in the area are frustrated with what she called a lack of representation since Mitchell’s April 2024 arrest for breaking into her estranged stepmother’s home.

Some DFLers called for Mitchell to step down immediately, but the Senate majority instead stripped Mitchell of her committee assignments, removed her from caucus meetings and blocked GOP-led efforts to hold expulsion votes.

“The DFL wanted her 34th vote, and yet they really, in some ways, did not honor and respect our community having full representation,” she said.

Mitchell introduced eight bills this year, Saltzman said. That’s fewer than any other member of the Senate, according to the Revisor of Statutes office. In her first two years in office, she sponsored 87.

Amy Koch, a political strategist and former Republican Senate majority leader, said most special elections so far have been fairly one-sided as they’ve been in solidly partisan districts, but Mitchell’s seat could be different because of the representation issue.

“If you make it about that in a special, lots can happen,” she said of Mitchell remaining in office 15 months after her arrest. “I think there’s going to be a lot of money poured into Woodbury. …This is for all the marbles.”

DFL path to victory

DFL Chair Richard Carlbom called the representation argument “foolish,” noting the senator was taking her remaining days in office to, among other things, complete legislative projects and address constituent services.

But beyond that, Woodbury heavily favors Democrats these days, and the two DFL candidates vying for the nomination so far — Woodbury DFL Reps. Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger and Ethan Cha — are current DFL House members who each handily won their districts in 2022 and 2024.

“They’re wildly popular with their constituents, and I think the entire Senate district is going to be excited about the next senator that they have — who is a Democrat,” Carlbom said.

In the race, DFL candidates will focus on their achievements in 2023 and 2024 when they still had control of state government, such as universal free school meals and a new child tax credit, Carlbom said.

While no Republican candidates have announced their intention to run as of Friday, former Woodbury Republican Rep. Kelly Fenton said the ideal candidate would be a moderate. Besides questions about Mitchell, Fenton hopes Republicans will offer solutions to a looming $6 billion state deficit and fraud that’s taken hundreds of millions of dollars in government money.

Saltzman said voters also will want candidates who focus on local issues, such as addressing chemical contamination in the water supply linked to 3M manufacturing, which will require state funding for water treatment. Passing a bonding bill would be key to funding those projects.

Record-setting year

Criminal cases, lawmaker deaths and a residency dispute have led to an unusually high number of special elections in the Minnesota Legislature this year. 1994 was the only other year with six, according to Minnesota’s Legislative Reference Library.

If a DFL House member wins in the Woodbury Senate race, that could open the door to a seventh special election this year, depending on when Walz decides to call it.

Each vacancy has shifted the partisan balance at the Capitol.

The current makeup of the legislature, which is not scheduled to convene again until February, is 34 DFLers and 32 Republicans in the Senate and 67 Republicans and 66 DFLers in the House.

Here’s a look at special elections so far and what could happen next:

The December death of Minneapolis DFL Sen. Kari Dziedzic led to a special election to fill that seat in January.

A House district in Roseville and Shoreview had a special election in March after winning DFL candidate Curtis Johnson was disqualified for living outside the district.

Neither race was particularly competitive as they were safe DFL strongholds.

Likewise, Republicans comfortably reclaimed a northern Minnesota Senate seat in April after the resignation of Sen. Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids, who is accused of trying to hire an underage girl for sex.

Two seats opened up by lawmaker deaths are also unlikely to change party hands later this year. Northern Hennepin County voters in September will elect a successor for Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, the former House speaker assassinated in June. And Walz is expected to call a special election in the solidly-red District 29 after Sen. Bruce Anderson, R-Buffalo, died unexpectedly last week.

There could be a record seventh special election this year if one of the Woodbury DFL state representatives wins Mitchell’s seat. Both candidates’ House districts fall within the Senate district. Each in their second terms in office, Hemmingsen-Jaeger won reelection last year with 61% of the vote and Cha with 54%.

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The patients at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center’s new campus in Washington County certainly seem to like their accommodations.

On a recent weekday afternoon, young raccoons played with large plastic toys and caught minnows, a litter of orphaned opossums napped in the shade in tiny hammocks, and ducks splashed in blue plastic pools.

All are housed in species-specific outdoor cages, designed to reduce the stress of human interaction, on a 22-acre farm in Grant.

Center officials bought the property in 2019, and plans call for ground to be broken in September on the first phase of a $3 million waterfowl and aquatic-mammal facility that will house 20 runs with indoor pools and 10 animal wards.

Eventually, center officials plan to build a $15 million, 25,000-square-foot final-stage rehabilitation building on the site in Grant.

“It’s critically important to provide sufficient space for injured and orphan wild animals when they need less human contact and more space and quiet,” said Phil Jenni, the center’s former executive director, who now serves as director of special projects. “We know firsthand that our release rates improve when nursery patients are removed from the hustle and bustle, have room to run, jump, fly, and are put in a position for their natural instincts to thrive.”

The center’s existing veterinary hospital in Roseville has been providing care to injured animals and training the next generation of wildlife veterinarians since it started in 1979 as a student organization at the University of Minnesota.

The center has experienced extraordinary growth over the past few years, said Tami Vogel, executive director. More than 21,600 animal patients were treated at the center last year, up from 13,276 in 2018.

“Most of that growth was from orphaned animals, and we are out of room at our Roseville hospital,” Jenni said. “The hospital should be used as just that — a hospital. It’s not the appropriate habitat for nearly 70 percent of our patients. That’s why we started looking for additional land.”

Sustainable and bio-secure

Phil Jenni, director for special projects at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Grant, talks about pools for waterfowl the organization plans to build on the 22-acre site. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Criteria for the new space included easy transport to and from Roseville, he said.

“We didn’t want to be more than 20 miles away,” he said. “We wanted to be able to get there in 15 to 20 minutes. Our preference was Washington County, and we found it for sale online.”

Minneapolis-based AWH Architects, which specializes in sustainable and historic-preservation projects, is designing the new energy-efficient building, which center officials expect to earn silver certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system.

Grant does not have city water or sewer, so the building will be outfitted with a highly specialized “first-of-its-kind filtration system designed to protect the county’s aquifers and watersheds,” Jenni said. The system will recycle and filter water daily, conserving 37 million gallons of water annually.

The building will feature a geothermal heating and cooling system and solar panels, bringing it to almost net zero energy consumption, according to Jenni.

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“Conserving natural resources and being stewards of the environment means helping all wildlife, not just our patients,” he said.

Once the system is up and running, more than 3,000 ducklings annually will grow up in filtered, clean water, Jenni said. One major bonus: The smell will be much improved.

“If you’ve ever been somewhere where there’s even six ducks in a room, the humidity and the smell is overwhelming,” Jenni said. “It’s overwhelming and unhealthy — both for humans and the animals.”

The new multi-purpose facility will feature bio-secure space for food prep and storage, and isolation wards. There also will be space for support functions, such as cleaning facilities, a cage-wash area and laundry, and a space for volunteers that includes a break room and restroom.

Escape artists

The farm’s horse barn has already been converted into a pigeon coop. “What a great place to raise pigeons, right?” Jenni said. “I mean, we have nothing like this in Roseville. These kinds of birds need space and need quite a bit of time, frankly, to be able to be on their own.”

Just around the corner from the pigeon coop is a cage containing 12 baby opossums sleeping in those baby-opossum hammocks. Five are siblings, and five were transferred from a private rehabilitation facility. Most were found after their mothers were hit by cars, said Noah Zerull, an adult-animal-care manager.

Each species is separated into shiny stainless-steel cages specially designed for wild animals. Staff enter into an entryway vestibule, latch the door, and then open the door to the primary cage.

“Everything that we have doesn’t want to be here,” Jenni said. “They want to be out of there, and there are a lot of escape artists. If you open a door, and it’s just a single door, your animal will rush or fly out at you, so all these cages have to have these little antechambers. That way, if it does get out, it’s still in the cage.”

A sign shows the locations of the 101 raccoons currently being cared for. Of the animals recovering at the center, the most impressive escape artists are the raccoons. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The most impressive escape artists are the raccoons, Jenni said. Around 100 of them are rehabbing in Grant.

“They are as cute as all get out, and they can get out of anything,” he said. “They’re very tactile. They’re always using their paws and exploring. Anything that is the least bit flawed on a gate or something, they’ll get out of, so having this space has been just a lifesaver.”

The space for juvenile raccoons in Grant is almost eight times the size of their space in Roseville. Each worker must don personal protective equipment and put on special boots before entering the area.

Power washers are used to clean cages because “when you have this many animals, if one gets a contagious disease, they’ll all get it,” Jenni said.

Service in demand

The center treats all animals, including those that some might see as “nuisance animals,” Jenni said.

“We feel strongly that we’re a hospital,” he said. “Our goal is to treat every patient the same and put the same amount of time, energy and money into getting that animal ready to release as we would the charismatic animals.”

“It’s like I tell people, ‘If something happened to me, and I went down to Regions Hospital, I wouldn’t want them to say, ‘Well, there’s too many old white guys, so let’s let him go.’ We do not make a judgment on an individual animal.”

More than half of the center’s patients are orphans; the rest are sick or injured adults brought to the hospital by those who come across them. People from more than half of Minnesota’s 87 counties brought patients to the center in 2023.

“The most awe-inspiring part of our existence is that Minnesotans have made us one of the busiest wildlife hospitals in the world — the busiest in North America,” Vogel said. “It’s just mind-blowing. We do not pick up animals — every single patient that comes to us is because a compassionate person has made time in their busy day to help the animal. That, to me, speaks volumes about the kindness of Minnesotans and how much respect they have for wildlife.”

The center’s services are free; it relies 100% on donations, Vogel said.

There were 201 species admitted in 2024, including the second vesper sparrow in the center’s history and the first red-backed voles, Vogel said.

The species brought to the center change with the season; May and June are the busiest months, she said. Six of the 10 busiest days in the center’s history were recorded this year in May and June; the busiest day on record was recorded on June 7, when 280 patients were admitted, she said.

“People were lined up down the sidewalk waiting to bring in their patients,” she said.

Patient release

A blue jay sits on a branch as it recovers at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center’s Grant Township location on Tuesday July, 22, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Vogel said center staff members do an initial health check when a patient arrives. If the animal is deemed healthy, center staff ask that the person who brought the animal in return it to the wild, she said.

“A big portion of our mission is keeping wild families together, and we need to keep space available in the hospital for those patients that really need it,” she said.

Anyone who finds a wild juvenile animal that looks abandoned should call the center, and “we will help them evaluate the situation,” she said.

The center relies on almost 600 volunteers to feed and care for the animals. The center operates on a $2.8 million annual budget, most of it coming from individual donors, including $190,000 each year collected from a small wooden box in the center’s lobby.

“The only reason we exist is because people want us here,” she said. “They fund our services. They demand our services, and that’s the only reason we’re here. It truly is remarkable.”

Adult patients are always released by volunteers where they were found because “we don’t relocate,” Vogel said. “Juvenile animals are released to a suitable habitat. We try to release them as close to where they were found as possible.”

There is one exception. During migration, migratory birds are often released directly from the Roseville hospital, she said. “They just take off and go,” she said.

A ‘nice match’ in Grant

The Grant City Council in April 2020 approved a conditional-use permit allowing the center to operate on site, noting that the center’s proposed use conforms to the city’s comprehensive plan for rural-residential and agricultural uses.

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“We were keen at the time in making sure that the provisions in the (permit) were protective of the neighbors and preserved the rural heritage of Grant,” said Mayor Jeff Giefer. “There’s a nice match there with the wildlife and our rural heritage. We’re very excited to see it come to life.”

Center officials also have obtained necessary permits from Washington County and the Rice Creek Watershed District.

Center officials are working to raise $10 million for the project. A capital campaign for the project was launched with a $5 million gift from a longtime donor, Vogel said.

“We’ve had people leave whatever change they have in the cupholder of their car,” she said. “Every donation — regardless of the amount — helps us secure the future health of Minnesota’s wildlife.”

Wildlife Rehabilitation Center

The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota is raising money for its new late-stage rehabilitation program in Grant. For donation information, go to wrcmn.org/donate.

Anyone who finds a wild animal that looks injured or abandoned should go to wrcmn.org and read their “What to do” guidelines. If you still have questions, leave a message at 651-486-9453 and they’ll get back to you.