U.S. Rep. Angie Craig is fifth Democrat to call on President Biden to step aside in 2024 race

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U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., said Saturday that President Joe Biden should step aside and let someone else run for president on the Democratic ticket.

“If we truly believe that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans must be stopped, there is only a small window left to make sure we have a candidate best equipped to make the case and win,” the Minnesota lawmaker said in a statement. “This future of our country is bigger than any one of us. It’s up to the President from here.”

Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press file)

Craig, who represents Minnesota’s Second Congressional District, is the fifth Democrat publicly calling for Biden to step aside after his performance at last month’s presidential debate in Atlanta sparked concerns about his ability to win re-election.

Biden’s poor performance at the June 27 debate reportedly alarmed Democrats and his financial backers. The ripple effect includes questions about whether Biden is up for a campaign that’s only going to get nastier and whether he can effectively govern for another four years if he wins, according to the Associated Press.

Although Craig says she has “great respect” for Biden’s years of service and his “steadfast commitment to making our country a better place,” she said that events over the past week prompted her decision.

“Given what I saw and heard from the President during last week’s debate in Atlanta, coupled with the lack of a forceful response from the President himself following that debate, I do not believe that the President can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump,” Craig said in the statement.

“This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly, but there is simply too much at stake to risk a second Donald Trump presidency. That’s why I respectfully call on President Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee for a second term as President and allow for a new generation of leaders to step forward.”

The White House has pushed back in recent days.

“We understand the concerns. We get it,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier. But she insisted Biden has no intention of stepping away from the campaign. “The president is clear-eyed and he is staying in the race.”

In her news release, Craig said it was time for someone else to take the lead for the Democratic Party.

“Our party has an extraordinary number of talented leaders within it,” she said. “I believe this is an opportunity to put forward an open, fair, and transparent Democratic process to select a new nominee to inspire and unite our great nation.”

Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas on Tuesday became the first House Democrat to call for the president to withdraw, saying “too much is at stake” for Biden to stay in the race and lose to Trump.

Others have pledged their support of the president’s decision to remain in the race.

CBS News reported that after a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Biden is “fit for office” even as some fellow Democrats called for him to withdraw from the race amid concerns about his poor debate performance.

Walz, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, joined several of his Democratic colleagues leading states across the country — some in-person, some virtually — to speak with the president directly. He and Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Kathy Hochul of New York addressed reporters following their discussion and pledged their support.

“He has had our backs through COVID, through all of the recovery, all the things that have happened. The governors have his back,” Walz said. “We’re working together. Just to make very, very clear on that: A path to victory in November is the number one priority. And that’s the number one priority of the president.”

There were signs party leaders realize the standoff needs to end. Some of the most senior lawmakers, including Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Rep. James Clyburn, are now publicly working to bring the party back to the president. Pelosi and Clyburn had both raised pointed questions about Biden in the aftermath of the debate.

This report includes information from the Associated Press.

.

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St. Paul Public Schools is late on its audit. How did that happen and how could that affect the district?

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St. Paul Public Schools is several months late to submit an independent audit of its 2023 finances to the state of Minnesota, and the review likely won’t be done till September.

The late audit — the second time in two years — could hurt the district’s bond rating, increasing the cost of future borrowing. And, while it hasn’t happened before, the missed deadline could also put state funding in jeopardy.

Such pressures would mean more financial trouble for a district that already had to cut $114 million from its budget this year and anticipates more spending cuts down the road; so far, however, the late audit hasn’t brought any serious consequences.

The district also missed a March 30 deadline for a federal audit, which could affect how the U.S. Department of Education decides to award grants in the future.

The district had never missed a state audit deadline before doing so last year, according to the state education department.

District officials blame staff turnover, a switch to a new accounting firm and the complex nature of the district’s finances — though larger and similarly sized districts have completed their audits.

Meanwhile, state officials say more broadly that a shortage of accountants has caused headaches for many local governments who need their books checked.

The Minnesota Department of Education requires school districts and charter schools to get independent audits to demonstrate financial accountability and improve decision-making for other government agencies. Audits for the previous fiscal year, which ends June 30, are due by Dec. 31.

MDE hasn’t withheld state aid for late audits before and doesn’t plan to take any action with the St. Paul district, according to department spokesman Kevin Burns.

In other states, however, education departments have taken action. In June, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction withheld money from Milwaukee Public Schools for failing to produce an audit that was due in September 2023. District officials there cited staffing trouble but said little else about why the audit was late, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Julie Blaha, State Auditor. (Courtesy of Julie Blaha)

Minnesota State Auditor Julie Blaha said it would take about nine months without an audit before a district is considered a risk under standard accounting practices.

Blaha, whose office oversees $60 billion in local government spending, said a district failing to meet a deadline doesn’t point to any sort of wrongdoing.

“A late audit, in and of itself, is not proof of a problem,” she said. “It is evidence of a risk.”

Transparency concerns

After a long history of timely reporting, the district last year submitted its 2022 audit in March, three months late.

The 2023 audit was supposed to have been presented at the school board’s July 16 meeting, but it was pushed back to as late as September, according to the district’s budget chief Tom Sager, who was hired in September 2022 as then-Superintendent Joe Gothard removed longtime budget chief Marie Schrul.

Then-St. Paul Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard accepts the national superintendent of the year award from the American Association of School Administrators at the group’s annual conference in San Diego, Calif., on Feb. 15, 2024, (Courtesy AASA, The School Superintendents Association)

Among parents and other observers, the late audits raised concerns about transparency and fiscal responsibility as the school board last month adopted a billion-dollar budget for the second year in a row.

Arleen Schilling, who worked in the school district finance office for three decades before retiring as controller in 2022, said a lack of final numbers more than a year after the 2023 fiscal year ended leaves taxpayers in the dark.

“The public has no way of seeing how the money’s been spent at this point in time, because there is no information out there available,” she said. “There are no audited financial statements.”

It’s a departure from how the district operated in the past, said Schilling, who noted the district would routinely earn recognition from the Department of Education for its timely and accurate reporting.

Sager said he doesn’t expect the audit will make any major changes to the overall budget picture. The district submitted preliminary numbers to the state late last year, though they included a note stating they were subject to change pending an audit. He did, however, acknowledge the district wasn’t following state law.

“Anytime a school district or municipality steps out of line with what’s required, that’s just not healthy and good, morally, ethically or legally,” he said. “It’s not anything we would want to continue on with.”

The district, by law, also had to pass a budget by June 30, with or without a completed audit, Sager said.

Community and school board members also expressed transparency concerns with that budget, which didn’t provide specific details on how spending cuts would affect school programs.

While Sager doesn’t expect the audit to dramatically change the school district’s budget picture, Schilling pointed out that a change of just a few million dollars could put the district below its threshold for rainy-day funds.

The district had to dip into its reserves this year in order to balance a billion-dollar budget without more cuts, leaving around $35 million — just above the 5% reserve threshold set by the school board.

School districts keep cash in reserve in the event of funding interruptions or unforeseen expenses. The current reserve would cover about 18 days of district expenses, according to district budget documents.

What’s to blame?

Parents wave to their kids as a school bus drives off to Chelsea Heights Elementary on the first day of school in St. Paul on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

St. Paul is one of four school districts in Minnesota that had an unfinished audit as of late June, according to the state education department. The others were Hopkins, Robbinsdale and Butterfield, plus 10 charter schools across the state.

So, why the trouble? Sager pointed to staff turnover and the hiring of a new audit firm two years ago.

The district used to work with Baker Tilly. Sager said the district is still figuring out its workflow with the new firm, CliftonLarsonAllen, though he said he’s very pleased with their work so far.

Despite the late audit last year and this year’s ongoing delay, Sager said he expects audits to go more smoothly in the future as staffing stabilizes and the district continues to work with its new accounting firm.

Schilling agreed that turnover likely has been the biggest contributor to the accounting delays.

“St. Paul is a much bigger district than any other district, so in order to understand the finance of it, you need people with experience,” she said.

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Liberty Classical Academy’s expansion plans raise concerns in northern Washington County

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People who live near Liberty Classical Academy in Hugo say the school, which moved part of its lower-school programming to the former Withrow Elementary School building two years ago, has been a good neighbor.

The private Christian academy splits its students between the former Withrow school and rented space at the Church of St. Pius X in White Bear Lake. Its 190 preschool through second-grade students are in the Withrow building; its 280 students in grades 3-12 are at St. Pius X.

Liberty officials purchased the former Withrow building in 2021 from Stillwater Area Public Schools for $1.4 million. At the time of the purchase, Liberty officials said their goal was to have all preschoolers through 12th-graders on one campus in three to five years. “God has great plans for Liberty, and we are just getting started,” officials wrote in a Facebook post at the time.

To that end, Liberty officials bought the neighboring 88-acre Zahler farm for $1.5 million in transactions that occurred in November 2022 and January 2023, according to Washington County property records. Part of the farmland is in Hugo; the rest is in May Township.

Neighbors who live in the area are worried about the school’s plans for future expansion, citing concerns about an increase in traffic and its proposed subsurface sewage treatment system.

“It’s overdesigned for what they need for an elementary school,” said David Truax, a longtime Hugo resident who lives a mile north of the school. “This is a suburban campus that is being put in a cornfield that is miles away from city water and city sewer.”

School officials earlier this year submitted the first phase of plans to the Hugo City Council for approval. The plans call for an approximately 33,500-square-foot building addition to the existing school and associated parking on the Withrow property, which is located at 10158 122nd St. N. The Hugo City Council approved the plans, which will effectively double the size of the school building, at its June 3 council meeting.

Liberty officials hope to move the school’s high school students to the new addition, which will include a varsity gym, in time for the start of school in the fall of 2025, said Rebekah Hagstrom, the school’s founder and headmaster. Students in grades 3-8 would remain at St. Pius X, she said.

School officials on Thursday will be asking the May Township Board to approve plans for a sewage treatment system and stormwater management facilities that are proposed to be located in May Township.

The proposed sewage treatment system, which will service the existing school and proposed addition, also must be permitted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency since the proposed system will have a flow greater than 10,000 gallons per day. The new system is being built to handle up to 10,375 gallons per day, “which barely exceeds the need for MPCA oversight,” Hagstrom said. “We are required to build redundancy into the system, which means it will not be used to full capacity.”

Rebekah Hagstrom, founder and headmaster of Liberty Classical Academy in Hugo and White Bear Lake. (Courtesy of Rebekah Hagstrom)

Liberty officials have spoken with the three neighbors who abut the area where the proposed sewage treatment system would be located and “have received letters of support from all three,” Hagstrom said.

But Truax and others are lobbying the May Township Board to carefully consider the plans, saying they don’t fit in with the township’s “rural character.”

“This is a wastewater treatment facility that is the equivalent of a small town in rural Minnesota,” Truax said. “All this on an 80-acre site.”

Future plans

Withrow was one of three elementary schools that the Stillwater school board voted in March 2016 to close. Between 2017 and 2022, the building sat empty.

Hugo City Administrator Bryan Bear said city officials were happy to have the building become a school again. A developer in 2019 proposed turning the school into veterans housing, but the school is not zoned for housing and does not have city water or sewer.

“When Withrow closed, there was a lot of concern about what might happen to the property,” Bear said. “What we heard loud and clear from the community was that they wanted it to be a school. Since opening there, we feel that Liberty Classical Academy has been a good fit for the community, and it seems to have been a compatible use so far. We’ve been pleased to have them here.”

According to the school’s website and Facebook page, the academy was founded in 2003 and “balances challenging academics and a Christian worldview.” Tuition ranges from $9,570 for kindergarten to $15,080 for high school.

Liberty officials have publicly shared plans for a permanent pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade campus that could house 850 students and would include a commons area, chapel, a long driveway and drop-off area and ball fields, but Liberty is not seeking permitting for the complete facility at this time, Bear said.

“The (Hugo) City Council, in approving the building addition, was pretty clear with school (officials) that they have some work to do in creating future plans,” he said. “There should be no assumption by anybody that any future plans would be approved.”

Sandra Knaeble, who lives in Grant, said Liberty officials have not done enough to reach out to neighbors who will be affected by the expansion.

“Much of the local population is still unaware of the impacts heading their way,” she said. “It would be nice to see a sign that says ‘Future home of Liberty Classical Academy’s wastewater treatment facility’ (on 122nd Street North). I think people would notice that.”

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The school’s planned sewage treatment system “has the capacity to serve well over 1,000 people,” she said. “It basically is what you would need for a high-density development. That would be like having 228 homes on that 80 acres if each home has five people living in it. Well, the maximum number of houses that May Township would allow on 80 acres is eight houses. They are looking at wastewater treatment for a far higher number. It’s very clear that it does not fit the rural nature of this area.”

Knaeble said she also is worried about the “visual blight” of a large sewage treatment system in the neighborhood.

She hopes the May Township Board will turn down the school’s request to build a sewage treatment system in the township. “Once phase 1 is approved, then everything is going to start happening,” she said. “It’s going to be much, much harder to stop.”

Another school option

Town Board Chairman John Pazlar said township officials have heard from a number of concerned residents about Liberty’s expansion plans.

“Generally, I think most folks agree that if we can expand the educational opportunities in northern Washington County, that’s good for the township,” he said. “What seems to be drawing concerns is the size and scale of a K-12 campus — the impervious surface of parking lots, the traffic impacts, the sewage treatment facility, the additional structure for housing pumps and that sort of thing, the stormwater retention pond, the mounds, the athletic fields. Just the totality of that is drawing some concerns.”

But Pazlar said having another school option so close to the township is a good thing.

Township residents didn’t have many nearby options available to them after the Stillwater Area school district closed Marine Elementary School and Withrow Elementary School in the spring of 2017. Now, township residents have three schools in the area, he said.

“It’s fair to say that it’s a good era right here right now with River Grove Charter School, with Marine Village school that is thriving and with this school to fill the old Withrow School,” he said. “If you’re a parent in May Township, you probably have more educational options than you ever had.”

Sheryl Ferguson lives directly east of the school in Hugo on 122nd Street North. The farm that Liberty purchased used to belong to her maternal grandfather, Eugene Zahler, she said.

“I went to Withrow School. I’m glad and I’m happy that it’s a school. Absolutely,” she said. “My mom was a cook at that school; my grandma was a cook at that school.”

A small rural elementary school is one thing, but a pre-K through 12th-grade school campus that could one day have 850 students and more than 100 staff is another story, according to Ferguson. “When I heard that, I thought, ‘OK, now we’re at 1,000 people. We’re not rural anymore,” said Ferguson, who has held neighborhood meetings in her garage to share news about the school’s expansion plans.

“My goal is not to change people’s minds about the school,” she said. “My goal is to let people know that this is happening in their community. I think that they should be aware. How will it affect traffic? How about water? How about taxes?”

Ferguson said she and other neighbors are concerned that school officials are in the process of “setting up infrastructure now for phase 2.”

“That’s our worry,” she said. “What is going to stop them from saying ‘No’ to phase 2 when they have everything ready for it.”

Kelly Williams, who lives on a 10-acre farm a half-mile south of the school, said she is worried about an increase in traffic on the area’s “narrow, little county roads.”

Williams is a preservation breeder of an endangered horse breed called Nokota, and she relies on regular hay deliveries from a neighboring farmer. “We could have an additional 800 cars a day, and I don’t know how farmers are going to get down these roads with their farm equipment,” she said.

Withrow Elementary School was “a beloved community school, and people in the neighborhood sent their kids there,” she said. “(Liberty) is $15,000 a year per student, which really doesn’t serve this community. Once they get a foothold, it’s going to be a massive expansion. They should go someplace that has infrastructure to support it.”

‘Serving families’

An architectural rendering of Liberty Classical Academy’s plans for an approximately 33,500-square-foot addition to its existing school in Hugo. (Courtesy of Liberty Classical Academy)

Roughly 90 percent of the students who attend Liberty “live within a 20-minute drive of the Hugo campus,” Hagstrom said. “One-third come from right around the Hugo area. We are serving families who live here.”

Most students either carpool or take a bus to school from the St. Pius site, she said.

Plans for the first phase of the expansion call for the entrance of the school to move from 122nd Street to Keller Avenue, and Liberty will pay to have right-turn lanes installed at the intersection and at the entrance, Hagstrom said. “The current entrance no longer meets code because it is too close to the intersection,” she said. “Washington County officials have told us that moving our entrance to Keller would add only 5.8 percent of the total capacity of Keller.”

Liberty officials have raised $12 million of the $20 million needed to fund the first phase of the expansion — the 33,500-square-foot addition to the school’s current building.

Any possible future expansion plans beyond that depend on fundraising and enrollment growth, she said. Although school officials had originally hoped expansion might occur in three to five years, Hagstrom said they later realized “the timeline is going to have be much more flexible.”

“It could be years down the road, or it could never happen,” she said. “It’s just so hard to know. But, as our architect likes to say, it’s prudent to plan ahead and to be thinking about the future. We did, in good faith, submit future phase plans to the city of Hugo. However, they understood that we’re really only looking at this next phase, which is the addition onto the current school.”

Most of the growth at Liberty has come in the lower grades, she said. “People are starting to realize that the public schools may not align with their values or meet their children’s academic needs,” she said.

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Hagstrom said she hopes the school will become a “center of the community” — a place where local families come to use the playground and walk on its nature paths.

“We really do hope to be good neighbors,” she said. “Our design is meant to blend in with the natural beauty of the surroundings, and any future phases are centrally located in the property in order to be less visible.”

But Knaeble said Liberty officials are going to have a hard sell.

“We really object to the development as currently designed,” Knaeble said. “We don’t object to schools; we don’t object to children. We simply object to what is a high-density development. It doesn’t have a place here.”

To a defiant Biden, the 2024 race is up to the voters, not to Democrats on Capitol Hill

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WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — To a defiant President Joe Biden, the 2024 election is up to the public — not the Democrats on Capitol Hill. But the chorus of Democratic voices calling for him to step aside is growing, from donors, strategists, lawmakers and their constituents who say he should bow out.

The party has not fallen in line behind him even after the events that were set up as part of a blitz to reset his imperiled campaign and show everyone he wasn’t too old to stay in the job or to do it another four years.

On Saturday, a fifth Democratic lawmaker said openly that Biden should not run again. Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota said that after what she saw and heard in the debate with Republican rival Donald Trump, and Biden’s “lack of a forceful response” afterward, he should step aside “and allow for a new generation of leaders to step forward.”

Craig posted one of the Democrats’ key suburban wins in the 2018 midterms and could be a barometer for districts that were vital for Biden in 2020.

With the Democratic convention approaching and just four months to Election Day, neither camp in the party can much afford this internecine drama much longer. But it is bound to drag on until Biden steps aside or Democrats realize he won’t and learn to contain their concerns about the president’s chances against Trump.

There were signs party leaders realize the standoff needs to end. Some of the most senior lawmakers, including Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Rep. James Clyburn, were now publicly working to bring the party back to the president. Pelosi and Clyburn had both raised pointed questions about Biden in the aftermath of the debate.

“Biden is who our country needs,” Clyburn said late Friday after Biden’s interview with ABC aired.

On Saturday, Biden’s campaign said the president joined a biweekly meeting with all 10 of the campaign’s nation co-chairs to “discuss their shared commitment to winning the 2024 race.” Clyburn was among them.

But the silence from most other House Democrats on Saturday was notable, suggesting that lawmakers are not all being convinced by what they saw from the president. More House Democrats are likely to call for Biden to step aside when lawmakers return to Washington at the start of the week.

Biden had public schedule Saturday, as he and aides stepped back from the fervor over the past few days. But the president will head out campaigning again on Sunday in Philadelphia, intent on putting the debate behind him. And this coming week, the U.S. is hosting the NATO summit and the president is to hold a news conference.

Vice President Kamala Harris planned to campaign Saturday in New Orleans.

The president’s ABC interview on Friday night — billed as an effort to get the campaign back on track — stirred carefully worded expressions of disappointment from the party’s ranks, and worse from those who spoke anonymously. Ten days into the crisis moment of the Biden-Trump debate, Biden is dug in.

Even within the White House there were concerns the ABC interview wasn’t enough to turn the page.

Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez has been texting lawmakers and administration officials are encouraging them not to go public with their concerns about the race and the president’s electability, according to a Democrat granted anonymity to discuss the situation.

Democrats are wrestling over what they see and hear from the president but are not at all certain about a path forward. They were particularly concerned that Biden suggested that even if he were to be defeated in a rematch with Trump, he would know that he gave it his all. That seemed an insufficient response.

As Biden’s camp encourages House lawmakers to give the president the chance to show what he can do, one Democratic aide said the Friday interview didn’t help and in fact made things worse. The aide expects more Democrats will likely be calling on Biden to step aside.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, without breaking with Biden at this point, are pulling together meetings with members in the next few days to discuss options. Many lawmakers are hearing from constituents at home and fielding questions. One senator was working to get others together to ask him to step aside.

Following the interview, a Democratic donor reported that many of the fellow donors he spoke with were furious, particularly because the president declined to acknowledge the effects his aging. Many of those donors are seeking a change in leadership at the top of the ticket, said the person, who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Biden roundly swatted away calls Friday to step away from the race, telling telling voters at a Wisconsin rally, reporters outside Air Force One and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he was not going anywhere.

“Completely ruling that out,” he told reporters the rally.

Biden dismissed those who were calling for his ouster, instead saying he’d spoken with 20 lawmakers and they had all encouraged him to stay in the race.

Concern about Biden’s fitness for another four years has been persistent. In an August 2023 poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, fully 77% of U.S. adults said Biden was too old to be effective for four more years. Not only did 89% of Republicans say that, but so did 69% of Democrats. His approval rating stands at 38%.

Biden has dismissed the polling, citing as evidence his 2020 surge to the nomination and win over Trump, after initially faltering, and the 2022 midterm elections, when polls suggested Republicans would sweep but didn’t, largely in part over the issue of abortion rights.

“I don’t buy that,” when he was reminded that he was behind in the polls. “I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me.”

At times, Biden rambled during the interview, which ABC said aired in full and without edits. Asked how he might turn the race around, Biden argued that one key would be large and energetic rallies like the one he held Friday in Wisconsin. When reminded that Trump routinely draws larger crowds, the president laid into his opponent.

“Trump is a pathological liar,” Biden said, accusing Trump of bungling the federal response to the COVID pandemic and failing to create jobs. “You ever see something that Trump did that benefited someone else and not him?”

Republicans, though, are squarely behind their candidate, and support for Trump, who at 78 is three years younger than Biden, has been growing.

And that’s despite Trump’s 34 felony convictions in a hush money trial, that he was found liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, and that his businesses were found to have engaged in fraud.

___

Miller and Mascaro reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Saugatuck, Michigan, and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.

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