Mayor Anne Burt has helped foster a vibrant and welcoming community, according to the Woodbury city council.

Burt was honored by the League of Minnesota Cities last week with the Emerging Leader award, which recognizes elected officials “who are early in their municipal government role and have made meaningful contributions to their city.” Burt was first elected mayor in November 2018.

The league presented awards to city leaders and cities, including Mounds View, during its annual conference Thursday in Duluth.

“Mayor Anne Burt exemplifies this rare combination of dedication, vision, and selfless service,” Edina Mayor James Hovland said in a letter of support to the league. “Her leadership has been marked by humility, integrity, and a focus on collective impact. She elevates others, listens carefully, and guides with clarity—always keeping the broader community impact at heart.”

Burt was recognized for her commitment to public service, support for local organizations and ability to lead Woodbury through challenges including PFAS water contamination, COVID and the murder of George Floyd, according to the league.

“Simply put, in times of challenges and celebrations, obstacles and opportunities, Mayor Burt’s leadership has never wavered,” stated the Woodbury City Council in its letter of support.

95% of Woodbury residents rate the city a good or excellent place to live, with the city council having an approval rating of 95% – data the league credits to Burt’s leadership qualities.

Other city leaders who received awards include Circle Pines Mayor Dave Bartholomay and Dilworth City Administrator L. Peyton Mastera.

Mounds View award

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Mounds View received a City of Excellence award, which “recognizes cities for outstanding programs or projects,” according to the league.

Mounds View was honored for its “comprehensive effort to identify and remove restrictive covenants or clauses that prohibit property ownership or occupancy based on race from residential property deeds,” as part of its Discharge of Discriminatory Covenants initiative, according to the league.

Though the discriminatory clauses are unenforceable through state and federal laws, the city of Mounds View continues to acknowledge the historical harm of the clauses and champion inclusive efforts in partnership with the University of Minnesota, according to the league.

For the full list of awardees, visit lmc.org and click on Latest News.

The safety message of “Start Seeing Motorcycles” will take on more meaning in Minnesota on Tuesday as lane splitting and filtering for motorcyclists become legal.

Passed in the 2024 legislative session, the law takes effect on Tuesday.

“Our concern is for the safety and the lives of riders and drivers all across the state,” said Minnesota Office of Traffic Safety Director Mike Hanson on Monday. “Remember that safety is a shared responsibility. Everybody is going to have to practice and proceed with caution, awareness and patience.”

Here’s what to know about the new law, which Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Center’s Jay Bock calls “lane sharing” overall. It “allows motorcycles to share a lane with vehicles when it is appropriate, at the proper speed,” he said.

What is lane splitting, when does it apply?

Lane splitting allows a motorcycle to pass another vehicle in the same direction of travel and in the same traffic lane.

It’s permitted when two or more lanes of traffic are traveling in the same direction and traffic is moving.

Motorcyclists can lane split at no more than 15 mph over the speed of other traffic. For example, if traffic is crawling along at 5 mph, a motorcyclist’s maximum speed for lane splitting would be 20 mph.

Under all circumstances, the maximum speed for lane splitting is 25 mph.

What is lane filtering, when does it apply?

Lane filtering lets motorcyclists move through traffic that is stopped. It’s allowed when there are two or more lanes of traffic traveling in the same direction. It can be used in situations such as a traffic jam or drivers stopped at a traffic light.

At a demonstration on Monday, motorcyclists slowly pulled up between vehicles stopped at a red light at Minnesota’s Driver and Vehicle Services Eagan-South Metro Exam Station. They then advanced ahead of the vehicles when the light turned green.

Motorcyclists cannot travel more than 15 mph when using lane filtering.

When is lane splitting and filtering not allowed?

The new law does not apply to:

Round-abouts.
In a school zone.
In a work zone when only a single travel lane is available.
On an on-ramp to a freeway or expressway.

Why did this become law?

The American Motorcyclist Association supports lane splitting and filtering, and cites a University of California, Berkeley, analysis released in 2015. It “found that lane-splitting is relatively safe if done in traffic moving at 50 mph or less, and if motorcyclists do not exceed the speed of other vehicles by more than 15 mph.

Minnesota’s law says motorcyclists can’t travel more than 25 mph while lane filtering.

Minnesotan Phil Stalboerger advocated for the changes after he was rear-ended on his motorcycle while in traffic, which caused leg fractures to his wife, who was a passenger. He told legislators about the crash as a way to keep it from happening to other people.

“With this new ability to filter through slow-moving traffic and at stoplights, riders in Minnesota will benefit from increased safety on the open road,” American Motorcyclist Association Central States Representative Nick Sands said in a statement last year.

Did the Minnesota Department of Public Safety back this change?

DPS did not sponsor the legislation, Hanson said.

“This wasn’t an initiative that we brought forward,” he said. “Our position was we had some concerns with this. We all know our roads are busier and more congested than they’ve ever been, and we’re adding another element to that roadway congestion and all of the busyness going on around it. And so there were some concerns raised with how we could roll this out effectively and safely for everybody.”

The legislature appropriated $200,000 to the Office of Traffic Safety to educate people in the state over the last year.

Advice to motorcyclists and drivers?

Motorcyclists should keep in mind factors such as lane width, size of surrounding vehicles, weather, lighting conditions and whether they are visible to drivers.

“Riders, this is not a free pass for dangerous driving behaviors,” Hanson said. “Take it slow.”

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Bock emphasized that while lane splitting and filtering is becoming legal, “they are not mandatory, and they’re not always the best option. Motorcyclists should use their best judgment about it and when they can do it safely.”

Upon reaching 25 miles an hour, motorcyclists are required to return to an assigned lane, Bock said.

“It is the responsibility of motorcyclists to practice these maneuvers safely,” he said. “Motorists … cannot impede, block or get in the way of a motorcyclist.”

Drivers should “respect that the riders have that right and to allow them the space to do that,” Hanson said. “… Never use your cell phone while driving or be distracted in any other way.”

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered rare open criticism of the Trump administration — and singer Bono held back tears as he recited a poem — in an emotional video farewell on Monday with staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Monday was the last day as an independent agency for the six-decade-old humanitarian and development organization, created by President John F. Kennedy as a peaceful way of promoting U.S. national security by boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID absorbed into the State Department on Tuesday.

The former presidents and Bono spoke during a videoconference with thousands in the USAID community, which was billed as a closed-press event to allow political leaders and others privacy for sometimes angry and often teary remarks. Parts of the video were shared with The Associated Press.

FILE – Former President Barack Obama speaks at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum, Dec. 5, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley, File)

They expressed their appreciation for the thousands of USAID staffers who have lost their jobs and life’s work. Their agency was one of the first and most fiercely targeted for government-cutting by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, with staffers abruptly locked out of systems and offices and terminated by mass emailing.

Trump claimed the agency was run by “radical left lunatics” and rife with “tremendous fraud.” Musk called it “a criminal organization.”

Obama, speaking in a recorded statement, offered assurances to the aid and development workers, some listening from overseas.

“Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,” he told them.

Obama has largely kept a low public profile during Trump’s second term and refrained from criticizing the monumental changes that Trump has made to U.S. programs and priorities at home and abroad.

“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” Obama said. He credited USAID with not only saving lives, but being a main factor in global economic growth that has turned some aid-receiving countries into U.S. markets and trade partners.

The former Democratic president called Trump’s dismantling of USAID a “colossal mistake” that hurts the U.S. and predicted that ”sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed.”

Asked for comment, the State Department said it would be introducing the department’s foreign assistance successor to USAID, to be called America First, this week.

“The new process will ensure there is proper oversight and that every tax dollar spent will help advance our national interests,” the department said.

USAID oversaw programs around the world, providing water and life-saving food to millions uprooted by conflict in Sudan, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, sponsoring the “Green Revolution” that revolutionized modern agriculture and curbed starvation and famine, preventing disease outbreaks, promoting democracy, and providing financing and development that allowed countries and people to climb out of poverty.

FILE – Former President George W. Bush attends a baseball game, May 15, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

Bush, who also spoke in a recorded message, went straight to the cuts in a landmark AIDS and HIV program started by his Republican administration and credited with saving 25 million lives around the world.

Bipartisan blowback from Congress to cutting the popular President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, helped save significant funding for the program. But cuts and rule changes have reduced the number getting the life-saving care.

“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work — and that is your good heart,’’ Bush told USAID staffers. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you,” he said.

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Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former Colombian President Juan Manual Santos and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield also spoke to the staffers.

So did humanitarian workers, including one who spoke of the welcome appearance of USAID staffers with food when she was a frightened 8-year-old child in a Liberian refugee camp. A World Food Program official vowed through sobs that the U.S. aid mission would be back someday.

Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was announced as the “surprise guest,” in shades and a cap.

He jokingly hailed the USAID staffers as “secret agents of international development” in acknowledgment of the down-low nature of Monday’s unofficial gathering of the USAID community.

Bono held back tears at times as he recited a poem he had written to the agency and its gutting. He spoke of children dying of malnutrition, a reference to millions of people who Boston University researchers and other analysts say will die because of the U.S. cuts to funding for health and other programs abroad.

“They called you crooks. When you were the best of us,” Bono said.

By KEVIN FREKING and LISA MASCARO, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans are inching closer to getting their tax and spending cut bill through Congress with a final Senate vote likely late Monday or early Tuesday.

At some 940-pages, the legislation is a sprawling collection of tax breaks, spending cuts and other Republican priorities, including new money for national defense and deportations. President Donald Trump has admonished Republicans, who hold majority power in the House and Senate, to skip their holiday vacations and deliver the bill by the Fourth of July.

Democrats are united against the legislation and were offering scores of amendments to alter it Monday as the Senate slogged through what is known as a vote-a-rama. Senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments, with each receiving a vote. Once the bill clears the Senate, it would have to pass the House before Trump can sign it into law.

Here’s the latest on what’s in the bill. There could be changes as GOP lawmakers continue to negotiate.

Tax cuts are the priority

Republicans say the bill is crucial because there would be a massive tax increase after December when tax breaks from Trump’s first term expire. The legislation contains about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

The existing tax rates and brackets would become permanent under the bill. It temporarily would add new tax breaks that Trump campaigned on: no taxes on tips, overtime pay, the ability to deduct interest payments for some automotive loans, along with a $6,000 deduction for older adults who earn no more than $75,000 a year.

It would boost the $2,000 child tax credit to $2,200. Millions of families at lower income levels would not get the full credit.

A cap on state and local deductions, called SALT, would quadruple to $40,000 for five years. It’s a provision important to New York and other high tax states, though the House wanted it to last for 10 years.

There are scores of business-related tax cuts, including allowing businesses to immediately write off 100% of the cost of equipment and research.

The wealthiest households would see a $12,000 increase from the legislation, which would cost the poorest people $1,600 a year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House’s version.

Middle-income taxpayers would see a tax break of $500 to $1,500, the CBO said.

Money for deportations, a border wall and the Golden Dome

The bill would provide some $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, including $46 billion for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and $45 billion for 100,000 migrant detention facility beds, as he aims to fulfill his promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history.

Money would go for hiring 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with $10,000 signing bonuses and a surge of Border Patrol officers, as well. The goal is to deport some 1 million people per year.

The homeland security secretary would have a new $10 billion fund for grants for states that help with federal immigration enforcement and deportation actions.

To help pay for it, immigrants would face various new fees, including when seeking asylum protections.

For the Pentagon, the bill would provide billions for ship building, munitions systems, and quality of life measures for servicemen and women, as well as $25 billion for the development of the Golden Dome missile defense system. The Defense Department would have $1 billion for border security.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., arrives for a closed-door Republican meeting to advance President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, June 27, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

How to pay for it? Cuts to Medicaid and other programs

To help partly offset the lost tax revenue and new spending, Republicans aim to cut back on Medicaid and food assistance for the poor.

Republicans argue they are trying to rightsize the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse.

The package includes new 80-hour-a-month work requirements for many adults receiving Medicaid and food stamps, including older people up to age 65. Parents of children 14 and older would have to meet the program’s work requirements.

There’s also a proposed new $35 co-payment that can be charged to patients using Medicaid services.

More than 71 million people rely on Medicaid, which expanded under Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and 40 million use the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Most already work, according to analysts.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law and 3 million more would not qualify for food stamps.

The Senate proposes a $25 billion Rural Hospital Transformation Program to help offset reduced Medicaid dollars. It’s a new addition, intended to win over holdout GOP senators and a coalition of House Republicans warning that the proposed Medicaid provider tax cuts would hurt rural hospitals.

A ‘death sentence’ for clean energy?

Republicans are proposing to dramatically roll back tax breaks designed to boost clean energy projects fueled by renewable sources such as energy and wind. The tax breaks were a central component of President Joe Biden’s 2022 landmark bill focused on addressing climate change and lowering healthcare costs.

Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden went so far as to call the GOP provisions a “death sentence for America’s wind and solar industries and an inevitable hike in utility bills.”

Under the bill, a tax credit that subsidizes the production of electricity would be eliminated for any wind and solar plant not plugged into the grid by the end of 2027. But Republicans aren’t just looking to roll back the tax breaks Biden put into place: they’re also looking to add a tax for new wind and solar projects that use a certain percentage of components from China.

A tax break for people who buy new or used electric vehicles would expire on Sept. 30 of this year, instead of at the end of 2032 under current law.

Meanwhile, a tax credit for the production of critical materials will be expanded to include metallurgical coal used in steelmaking.

Trump savings accounts and so, so much more

A number of extra provisions reflect other GOP priorities.

The House and Senate both have a new children’s savings program, called Trump Accounts, with a potential $1,000 deposit from the Treasury.

The Senate provided $40 million to establish Trump’s long-sought “National Garden of American Heroes.”

There’s a new excise tax on university endowments. A $200 tax on gun silencers and short-barreled rifles and shotguns was eliminated. One provision bars money to family planning providers, namely Planned Parenthood, while $88 million is earmarked for a pandemic response accountability committee.

Another section expands the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a hard-fought provision from GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for those impacted by nuclear development and testing.

Billions would go for the Artemis moon mission and for exploration to Mars.

The bill would deter states from regulating artificial intelligence by linking certain federal AI infrastructure money to maintaining a freeze. Seventeen Republican governors have asked GOP leaders to drop the provision.

Additionally, a provision would increase the nation’s debt limit, by $5 trillion, to allow continued borrowing to pay already accrued bills.

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What’s the final cost?

Altogether, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill would increase federal deficits over the next 10 years by nearly $3.3 trillion from 2025 to 2034.

Or not, depending on how one does the math.

Senate Republicans are proposing a unique strategy of not counting the existing tax breaks as a new cost because those breaks are already “current policy.” Republican senators say the Senate Budget Committee chairman has the authority to set the baseline for the preferred approach.

Under the alternative Senate GOP view, the bill would reduce deficits by almost a half-trillion dollars over the coming decade, the CBO said.

Democrats say this is “magic math” that obscures the true costs of the tax breaks. Some nonpartisan groups worried about the country’s fiscal trajectory are siding with Democrats in that take. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Senate Republicans are employing an “accounting gimmick that would make Enron executives blush.”