Two east metro sites known to be tainted with petroleum and other contaminants will soon be on the mend thanks to grant funding.

More than $1.6 million in Contamination Cleanup and Investigation grants were awarded to eight communities across the state last week, including one in St. Paul and one in South St. Paul, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

The grant program, which started in 1993, helps fund the assessment and cleanup of contaminated sites for private redevelopment, according to a news release from DEED.

“Cleaning up contaminated sites helps attract private investments, increase local tax bases, support job growth, address housing needs and promote community growth and vitality,” said DEED Commissioner Matt Varilek in the release.

This grant round is expected to support the investigation or cleanup of over 184 acres of contaminated land, adding nearly $2.2 million to local tax bases and leveraging more than $50 million in private investment, according to DEED.

St. Paul

Undated courtesy rendering, circa Aug. 2025, of The Beasley, a planned 20-unit affordable condominium development from the Rondo Community Land Trust. The Beasley site at 642 Selby Ave. received a cleanup grant from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development for nearly $103,000 on Aug. 12, 2025. (Courtesy of Rondo Community Land Trust)

The city of St. Paul was awarded nearly $103,000 for the cleanup of the Beasley site, a 0.3-acre property near the intersection of Selby Avenue and Dale Street.

Historically developed for residential and commercial uses, including the longtime neighborhood service E&J Drycleaners, the site at 642 Selby Ave., next to Mississippi Market, is planned to be redeveloped into 20 affordable condominium units with ground floor retail and will be known as The Beasley.

Leading the project is the Rondo Community Land Trust, a Selby Avenue organization that has sought to preserve affordable housing and local ownership in the historically Black Rondo neighborhood. The name of the housing complex is a nod to James Beasley, the longtime owner of E&J Drycleaners, according to the land trust.

The condos will be affordable to households earning 80% of the area’s median income, which equates to $104,200 annually, Finance and Commerce reported. Designed by LSE Architects, the new building is planned to include a rooftop garden, a community room, electric vehicle charging stations and an outdoor patio with a fireplace.

Construction of the housing complex, which still hinges on a successful funding application to the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, is planned for next spring.

If all goes according to plan, the project is anticipated to create nine new jobs, increase the local tax base by nearly $142,000 and leverage $6.5 million of private investment, according to DEED.

South St. Paul

South St. Paul took home the lion’s share of the funding – approximately $660,000 – for the clean up of the 36-acre Wakota Crossing site.

The site, formerly home to the South St. Paul Municipal Wastewater Treatment Works and used as an uncontrolled dump, will be redeveloped to add over 180,000 square feet of light industrial space with two stormwater ponds.

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Awarded to the South St. Paul Economic Development Authority, the project is expected to create 89 new jobs and retain 15 existing jobs, increase the local tax base by nearly $88,000 and leverage $8.4 million of private investment, according to DEED.

The other six grants were awarded to the cities of Duluth, Mankato, Virginia, Wabasha, Floodwood and Two Harbors, according to grant size in descending order.

“This grant program helps Minnesota communities explore and pursue ways to convert contaminated properties into functional sites for business or housing development,” Varilek said in the release.

Since 1993, the grant program has awarded more than $212 million in grants that has helped assess and clean up over 4,300 acres of land, resulting in over 26,000 new housing units and the creation or retention of more than 52,000 jobs, per the release.

If President Donald Trump were to issue an executive order to abolish mail-in voting, as he announced he would on social media on Monday, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. It would also be baffling — because eliminating vote-by-mail would probably hurt Republicans more than it would help them in next year’s midterm elections.

Trump has been thrashing about for months looking for ways to manipulate the midterms. He is so afraid that Republicans could lose Congress that he persuaded Texas Republicans to conduct a mid-decade redistricting to carve out five additional GOP congressional districts. He ordered the Department of Justice to create a federal database of information on voters, presumably to hunt for illegal voting and serve as a precursor to federal control of state elections. And now he’s attacking the mail-in ballot, which Trump has long claimed, without evidence, cost him the 2020 presidential election.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote in an error-filled post on Truth Social. Not according to Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which says that election rules “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” What’s more, the US Supreme Court has ruled that statewide vote-by-mail systems are constitutional, upholding a 1998 ballot initiative that adopted the practice in Oregon.

Trump’s lengthy post also claimed that “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

Trump is likely responding to the shift in behavior he engineered by denigrating voting by mail after his 2020 loss. For decades, Republicans were the beneficiaries of mail-in balloting, and they encouraged their high-propensity voters to bank their votes early and avoid the risk of bad weather, power outages, technology failures or other major disruptions on Election Day.

The practice began after George W. Bush’s narrow victory over Al Gore in 2000. Republican legislators across the country passed no-excuse absentee voting laws to encourage their voters to cast their votes early. The effort was so successful that when red states were attempting to crack down on alleged voter fraud in the last decade with more stringent voter identification laws, their focus was on in-person and early voting. Republican legislators explicitly exempted mail voters “because they understood that their voters were casting mail ballots more frequently than Democrats and they didn’t want to disadvantage themselves,’’ said Michael P. McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida.

But Trump has been obsessed with mail-in voting since 2016, when he lost Colorado to Hillary Clinton as that state launched its first all-mail election. State officials delivered a ballot to every registered voter and implemented elaborate safety protocols before votes were tabulated. But Trump concocted a host of conspiracy theories about widespread vote fraud. He amplified those claims across the country when he lost in 2020, and they are now part of Trump’s brand.

In his book on the 2020 election, McDonald breaks down how the Republican mail-in balloting advantage shifted during the pandemic to benefit Democrats. As Democratic-run states were moving to provide safe mail-ballot options, Trump resisted: He didn’t want to admit that the pandemic required such safety precautions. But voters had their own preferences when it came to their own personal safety and, in 2020, a record 43% of all ballots were cast by mail. While the numbers dropped to 30% in 2024, that was still higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to the US Election Assistance Commission.

It’s hard to know exactly what Trump intends with his post. Maybe it is directed at blue states such as Colorado, California, Vermont and Washington, where officials deliver ballots to every eligible voter even if they haven’t requested to vote by mail. That would at least make logical sense. At the same time, it doesn’t — a quick look at recent voting history shows how it might backfire.

Republicans benefitted from mail-in voting prior to 2020 because many of their voters were in the military, were business travelers who couldn’t be home to cast in-person ballots, were older white voters, or were voters who lived rural areas where in-person voting was inconvenient, McDonald explained. “If you really wipe out those mail ballots, then you can actually hurt Republicans.”

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And while Trump may think that Democrats are voting by mail in higher numbers than Republicans, a data analysis by The New York Times found that despite Trump’s attempt to disparage the practice, Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election — including, the report notes, in “battleground states like Pennsylvania, red states like Florida and blue states like Connecticut.”

In his post, Trump says he will “lead a movement” to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines that don’t use paper ballots. Those are suggestions worth debating. But if he plans to make it happen by violating the Constitution to interfere with the midterm elections, Republicans should see it as a red flag — as Democrats do. The president isn’t trying to eliminate fraud, or defeat only Democrats. His goal is to consolidate his power.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

In 1874, during the brief era of Reconstruction, white people staged a racist uprising in New Orleans. Angered by the presence of African Americans in law enforcement and other government posts, members of the Crescent City White League stormed the local customs house and killed 11 police officers.

Two years later, a contested presidential election led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction. In 1891, New Orleans erected a memorial to White League members who died in the 1874 riot. And in 1932, the city affixed a plaque to the memorial stating that the 1876 election “recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.”

But you can’t see the memorial — or its plaque — in New Orleans any longer. It was taken down in 2017, following years of protest by civil rights advocates.

I’ve been thinking about that episode over the last few months, as President Donald Trump’s administration steps up its efforts to purge our historical landscape of anything remotely negative about the United States. In March, it ordered the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its museums. And in my hometown of Philadelphia, over a dozen displays about slavery at Independence National Park — including an exhibit describing George Washington as an enslaver — have been flagged for review.

Like other liberal historians, I’m outraged by Trump’s cowardly attacks on our guild. A nation that really believed in its “greatness” — a term the president loves to use — wouldn’t be afraid to confront its worst chapters.

But I think my fellow liberals have been complicit — to borrow the term du jour — in historical censorship too. Nobody on my side of the political aisle objected when the New Orleans monument came down. Instead, we celebrated a victory over hate and bigotry.

I’m not saying that racist memorials should remain on their pedestals. But when they’re pulled down, they should be placed somewhere else where we can see them. Otherwise, we won’t learn the awful history they embody.

Consider the fate of Silent Sam, the Confederate statue that stood for over a century on the campus of the University of North Carolina. It, too, was built to extol white supremacy: At its unveiling in 1913, a UNC trustee said that Confederate soldiers had “saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.”

But in 2018, demonstrators pulled down Silent Sam. And when UNC Chancellor Carol Folt proposed that the statue be displayed in a museum, the university erupted in yet more protest.

In a statement, the university’s psychology department said that preserving Silent Sam in any form on campus would “create a hostile learning environment for black students.” The monument “undermines our shared community values of equality, respect, and acceptance of all people,” the department added.

A few months later, Folt caved and declared that Silent Sam would be removed from campus. Its presence at UNC — even in a museum — posed a threat to the “well-being of our community,” she said.

Sound like anyone you know? In his fulminations against allegedly “divisive” history, Trump insists that it threatens the entire American community. By casting the United States “in a negative light,” Trump warns, historians are promoting “a sense of national shame.” Instead, we should be “instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”

In other words: smiley faces only, please. Some things are just too troubling to see. So let’s take them down, or blot them out, so we can all feel better.

False equivalence alert: Trump is clearly seeking to suppress knowledge of white racism, while the statue protesters were trying — in good faith — to protect nonwhite races from hateful symbols. And he’s the president, of course, so he has vastly more power than anybody else.

But the upshot is exactly the same: History gets censored. And we condescend to Americans when we imagine they can’t handle it.

We see a similar dynamic in the ongoing debate over book bans in schools and libraries. I am appalled by recent efforts by right-wing ideologues to remove works by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and many others. But where were my fellow liberals when schools were dropping “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“ because it uses the N-word 200 times? Sitting on their hands or cheering from the sidelines, as another reminder of racism bit the dust.

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That was the “good” kind of censorship, because we did it. And we are good.

But every act of historical suppression is bad news, for all of us. That’s why I was glad to read that the New Orleans monument will be part of forthcoming exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibit “reflects on the histories and legacies of post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today” by displaying“monuments in the exhibition will be shown in their varying states of transformation,” a museum news release declares.

That’s precisely why we need to see these symbols: to understand who we are, how we got here and where we need to go. We are in a state of transformation, too, and we must not look away. That’s what Trump wants us to do.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

Dan Rusoff and Joe Kaplan won’t name names, but one of the big-time musicians performing at the State Fair this year will be served local pork chops with peach cobbler for dinner before they take the Grandstand stage. Another is getting a shore lunch-style meal with Minnesota walleye.

As the owners of Eat Your Heart Out Backstage Catering, the duo feeds some of the biggest stars passing through the State Fair and other stages including the Armory in Minneapolis and the Somerset Amphitheater in Wisconsin.

They’ve cooked for Bob Dylan, Ludacris and Blake Shelton; they’ve made Cajun chicken and rice soup for Willie Nelson, jerk chicken sandwiches for Big Boi from Outkast and lavender panna cotta for Halsey.

“It’s the biggest gamble, meeting someone you admire, but so far it’s been good,” Rusoff said. “And in your own world, you get into the genres you like, but when you’re hired to give all these bands food, I’ve found a couple bands I didn’t know and liked or that I’d heard of but like more now, so that’s the coolest part.”

Eat Your Heart Out was founded in 1986 and has been catering State Fair shows since the early 2000s. Rusoff and Kaplan bought the company from founder Kathy Westbrook in early 2023.

The two met a little under a decade ago as cooks at Tilia, an acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant. Rusoff, who grew up in Apple Valley and had worked his way up from line cook to sous chef at Tilia, previously worked at Forepaugh’s in St. Paul and helped the food truck Chef Shack open its brick-and-mortar restaurant in Bay City, Wis. Kaplan’s culinary career began as a dishwasher in his native Hudson while he was home from business school, and he later cooked at Tilia and south Minneapolis French spot Grand Cafe. Meanwhile, he worked as a research tech in a University of Minnesota lab studying Kernza, a type of perennial wheatgrass, and led research and development at a food startup dedicated to the grain and other sustainable foods.

Besides backstage gigs, Eat Your Heart Out offers party catering and corporate packages year-round, with recipes pulled from bands’ favorite backstage meals. But the highlight of the year — and, frankly, the reason they agreed to buy the company, Kaplan said — is the State Fair.

“I love it,” Kaplan said. “I grew up going to the Fair at least once a year. I don’t get to see inside the Fair as much as I used to; this is kind of separate, removed. But I remember seeing shows at the Grandstand, so seeing it from the back is kind of surreal.”

Dan Rusoff, co owner of Eat Your Heart Out backstage caterers, gathers some fresh ingredients from the companies garden near their kitchen behind the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand in Falcon Heights on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

‘Keeps us on our toes’

Next time you’re at the Grandstand, peek over the top of the concert merch shack on the lefthand side of the stage (stage right, to be technical about it), and you’ll see a beige A-frame shed.

That’s where the magic happens.

Inside, there’s a fairly snug commercial kitchen and walk-in cooler, a couple restrooms with showers and a large dining room with a hot bar, cold food bar, ice cream machine and pizza oven. On a small patch of mulch just outside, Rusoff and Kaplan maintain a raised-bed vegetable garden, where they’re growing cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and lots of herbs and edible flowers.

Unlike traditional catering companies that let clients select dishes from a pre-set menu, everything Rusoff, Kaplan and their team prepare is fully customized to each artist’s preferences with very little repetition. For every show they cater, they’re creating a new breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert menu from the ground up — and, given celebrities’ chaotic tour schedules, often with just a few days’ notice.

“It’s a regular occurrence that our menus are approved the day we need to start acquiring food,” Rusoff said. “You’ve got to be pretty versatile. Even if we have back-to-back shows (like at the State Fair), you can’t have the same menu two days in a row even if it’s different bands, because we don’t want the local crew to get burnt out eating the same thing. So it keeps us on our toes.”

Dan Rusoff, left, and Joe Kaplan, co owners of Eat Your Heart Out backstage caterers, in their kitchen behind the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand in Falcon Heights on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

‘Some just ask for the moon’

The process of cooking for bands begins with a document called a rider, which establishes an artist’s technical requirements, stage setup and backstage hospitality requests — like dressing room amenities and meals for both artists and crew — for the venue to arrange.

Many venues contract out catering to third-party companies like Eat Your Heart Out, which is where Rusoff and Kaplan come in: They’ll review the rider and prepare a budget estimate and sample menus to fulfill the artist’s food and beverage requests, which the artist’s tour manager can either agree to pay or offer to modify.

Riders vary wildly in their level of detail, Rusoff said. There’s not a template every band fills out, he said, and some artists are more flexible than others. But generally speaking, if the artists are willing to foot the bill, Rusoff and Kaplan will say yes.

“Catering requirements can be anything from a sentence like, ‘Hey, we just like healthy food’ to two pages of, “Mondays we eat this. Tuesdays we eat this. Wednesdays we eat this,’” Kaplan said. “Some just ask for the moon and beyond.”

Some riders are brief. At the 2023 Fair, for example, a folk-Americana singer (again, not to name names… but it was Brandi Carlile, who Rusoff reported was delightful in person and brought her family to hang out with the chefs in the dining room during the day) asked for grain bowls and left the specific details up to Rusoff and Kaplan’s creativity.

And others get much more specific, sometimes mind-bendingly so. One band’s rider called for Crystal Pepsi, which no longer exists. A heavy metal band at the 2024 Fair requested that, as soon as they came offstage, a large deluxe pepperoni pizza from Domino’s awaited them in their dressing room. An ’80s group playing the 2023 Fair stipulated that Rusoff and Kaplan could feed the crew but band members would only eat food prepared by a chef the group had hired to tour with them.

Another artist last year requested his dressing room contain two mood lamps, one bluetooth speaker, fresh hand towels, an iron, one bottle of honey, four fresh lemons, a hot-water kettle, two dozen large Solo cups, several very expensive ceramic bottles of reposado tequila and a container of Tums, among other things. For dinner, his rider provided a list of entree options — soul food, roast turkey, grilled chicken, spaghetti with meatballs, steak — and asked that side dishes include a hot soup, spinach salad, fresh vegetables, either mashed or baked potato and “options of cakes/cookies/pies.”

To illustrate how a rider request transforms into an actual meal: That artist’s ultimate dinner menu at the Fair included Italian beef and vegetable soup, a salad bar, a pasta bar with three sauce options and meatballs, Mediterranean chicken breasts, eggplant parmesan, grilled vegetables, roasted potatoes, tiramisu and yogurt bowls.

And they pull produce from the garden and lean on Minnesota food suppliers whenever they can, too.

“It’s nice to showcase a lot of local stuff during the Fair,” Kaplan said. “And some riders ask for stir fry, and that’s fine too. It kind of runs the gamut from pot roast to barbecue chicken to anything in between.”

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