Nicole Miller has a ready answer when she’s asked during job interviews to explain a difficult time in her career.

Miller was serving as city clerk of St. Anthony Village in July 2016 when St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights.

Nicole Miller (Courtesy photo)

“I can speak to that time, mostly in regard to communications,” Miller said. “It was a challenging time for our community and staff. I am proud of how, with the support of our council, staff was able to improve upon providing transparent communications and sharing the good stories of St. Anthony.”

Miller, 42, who most recently served as assistant city manager in St. Anthony, is the new city administrator in Lake Elmo. The Lake Elmo City Council on Tuesday night approved her contract and agreed to pay Miller a salary of $151,126 a year. She starts June 3.

“I was looking for a community that I felt would be a good fit with my skills,” said Miller, who has a background in strategic planning and communication. “I’m looking forward to being part of the team by understanding the council’s goals and supporting staff with implementation to achieve those goals. I’m very interested in community engagement and building trust with the community, and I’m looking forward to learning about the city operations and getting out in the community and building relationships.”

Miller started at St. Anthony Village as city clerk in 2015 and was later promoted to administrative services coordinator, assistant to the city manager and then, earlier this year, to assistant city manager. Prior to that, she worked in the private sector and as administrative assistant to the city administrator in Wyoming, Minn.

She also has been a paid, on-call firefighter for the city of North St. Paul and worked as a senior court clerk for Hennepin and Ramsey County District Courts.

Miller’s first experience working in city government was in 2007 when she worked as an intern at Oak Park Heights City Hall and Bayport City Hall.

“What really stuck with me was the ability to serve residents and to help them when they came in – in a meaningful way,” she said. “Even if it was just letting them know where to drop their utility bill payments, it was very rewarding. I liked being able to interact with people and be part of the community and make it better.”

Miller, of Wyoming, has a master’s degree in public administration from Hamline University and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.

She and her husband, Randy Miller, who serves as public works supervisor for North St. Paul, have three children.

Twenty-five applicants applied for the job, and Miller was one of three finalists. The others were Renae Fry, former city administrator in North Branch, and former administrative coordinator in Sauk County, Wis., and John Young, tribal administrator of the Lac du Flambeau Tribe in Lac du Flambeau, Wis.

Former Lake Elmo City Administrator Kristina Handt was let go in November. She is now interim administrator in Forest Lake.

City officials have asked Interim City Administrator Clark Schroeder to stay on for a few weeks after Miller starts in order for there to be a few weeks of overlap, Schroeder said.

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By TRAVIS LOLLER (Associated Press)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee judge on Wednesday seemed ready to agree with an attorney for Nashville police that the writings of a school shooter could be released as public record once the investigation is officially closed.

But the parents of children at the Covenant School added an extra twist to an already complicated case by asserting that they have gained legal ownership of the writings from the shooter’s parents and now hold the copyright.

None of the eight attorneys arguing before Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles during a two-day hearing claimed to be a copyright expert. Their answers to Myles’ pointed questions about the interplay of federal copyright protections and the Tennessee Public Records Act seemed at times only to muddy the waters further.

In the end, Myles said she will write an order outlining specific questions she wants them to address. Only after that will she rule on when, if ever, the writings can be released to the public.

Police have said the writings that they collected as part of their investigation into the March 27, 2023, shooting at the Covenant School that killed three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members are public records. However, they have said they cannot be released until their investigation is concluded.

Those asking that the writings be released immediately include news outlets, a Tennessee state senator, a gun-rights group and a law enforcement nonprofit. They argue that the open investigation is a formality at this point. The shooter was killed by police at the scene, and no other suspects have been identified.

Meanwhile, three other groups that have been allowed to intervene in the case argued that none of the writings should ever be released.

In addition to the copyright issues, attorneys representing the Covenant parents, the Covenant School and the Covenant Presbyterian Church presented a united front in arguing that the writings fall under a Tennessee law that protects the privacy of information, records and plans related to school security. Giving the law the broadest possible reading, the writings could inspire copycats and therefore threaten Covenant’s security, they argued.

Myles seemed to take exception to that interpretation.

“Right now, you’re asking me to adopt an interpretation of this statute that information written in a journal should be construed as a plan related to school security,” she said. She noted that any decision she makes is sure to be appealed and will have to survive the scrutiny of a higher court.

Eric Osborne, the parents’ attorney, had yet another reason to keep the writings secret. All of the children of Covenant School are victims under the Tennessee Constitution and have a right to be free from abuse, harassment and intimidation. Releasing the writings publicly could harm the children and would violate the law, he argued.

Myles again pushed back on such a broad approach.

“Is ‘harm’ synonymous with harassment, intimidation and abuse?” she asked. “You’re asking this court to perhaps create new law.”

Myles offered the example of a victim undergoing cross-examination in a criminal trial. It might be upsetting, but it is not a violation of their constitutional rights, she said.

Myles added that she reads the law to protect victims during the pendency of criminal justice proceedings. “To say it is in perpetuity, after the investigation is closed — I don’t see it,” she told Osborne.

He replied that there is no expiration. “Once you are involved in the criminal justice system, you have the constitutional rights that Tennesseans have given to all victims,” Osborne said.

Myles then asked whether there might be some parents at the school who want the writings released. “You represent your clients’ interests. What you are asking the court to do puts a bar on what they want. Are you elevating one group of parents over another?” she said.

Osborne said that 103 of the 112 families with children at the school at the time of the March 27, 2023, attack have signed on to their position that the writings should be suppressed.

At the end of the hearing, Myles made clear that the decision was a difficult one.

“Before I’m a chancellor, I’m a human,” she said. “I’m also a mom.”

Although her “heart grieves” for the children, Myles said she has to put emotion aside. “I have to take how I feel out of it. I have to interpret the law as written by the legislature,” she said.

As law enforcement agencies struggle to find new officers, St. Paul police and the Minnesota National Guard are teaming up to work on recruitment and find career paths for soldiers when they leave the service.

The Army has a long-standing program called Partnership for Your Success (PaYS) that works with private industry, academia and federal, state and local government. People who are ending their service with the Army, along with Minnesota National Guard members and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets, are guaranteed five job interviews for potential employment.

“It serves as a bridge between the individual skills acquired in the military and the opportunities awaiting them in the civilian workforce,” said Major General Shawn Manke, Minnesota National Guard adjutant general. And employers who take part in PaYS can select from a “pool of highly skilled, motivated and responsible candidates,” he added.

The Minnesota National Guard and St. Paul police signed an agreement Wednesday to mark their collaboration.

St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry thanked the Guard members who were gathered and said the agreement means going beyond just saying “thank you.”

“How are we expressing that thanks for your service, how are we supporting people who serve when they go to move on to a new career?” Henry said. “… We want those people who serve, we want people that understand there’s something bigger and broader than just themselves.”

Members of the Armed Forces “have demonstrated what it means to go all in, in service to our community, and service to our country,” said St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter.

“This agreement, this relationship is about demonstrating to you that we are invested in your future, just the same as you’ve been invested in our community,” Carter said.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN and BRITTANY PETERSON (Associated Press)

With cloud seeding, it may rain, but it doesn’t really pour or flood — at least nothing like what drenched the United Arab Emirates and paralyzed Dubai, meteorologists said.

Cloud seeding, although decades old, is still controversial in the weather community, mostly because it has been hard to prove that it does very much. No one reports the type of flooding that on Tuesday doused the UAE, which often deploys the technology in an attempt to squeeze every drop of moisture from a sky that usually gives less than 4 or 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) of rain a year.

“It’s most certainly not cloud seeding,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time. You can’t create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That’s akin to perpetual motion technology.”

Meteorologists and climate scientists said the extreme rainfall is akin to what the world expects with human-caused climate change, and one way to know for certain that it was not caused by tinkering with clouds is that it was forecast days in advance. Atmospheric science researcher Tomer Burg pointed to computer models that six days earlier forecast several inches of rain — the typical amount for an entire year in the UAE.

Three low-pressure systems formed a train of storms slowly moving along the jet stream — the river of air that moves weather systems — toward the Persian Gulf, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. Blaming cloud seeding ignores the forecasts and the cause, he said.

Many of the people pointing to cloud seeding are also climate change deniers who are trying to divert attention from what’s really happening, Mann and other scientists said.

“When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading,” said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads a team that does rapid attribution of weather extremes to see if they were caused by global warming or not. “Rainfall is becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.”

WHAT IS CLOUD SEEDING?

Clouds need tiny water or ice droplets called nuclei to make rain. The weather modification method uses planes and ground-based cannons to shoot particles into clouds making more nucleai, attracting moisture that falls as snow and rain. Usually silver iodide is used, but it can also be dry ice and other materials. The method, first pioneered in the 1940s, became popular in the U.S. West starting in the 1960s, mostly for snow.

It can’t create water from a clear sky — particles must be shot into a storm cloud that already holds moisture to get it to fall, or to fall more than it otherwise would naturally.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS IT?

A recent study of aerial seeding found a clear precipitation pattern on a radar that mirrored the seeding and offers evidence the method works. But exactly how effective it is remains unclear, scientists say.

The physics makes sense, but the results have been so small that scientists just can’t agree on whether it is fair to say it really works, said Maue and Mann.

Atmospheric forces are so huge and so chaotic that technically cloud seeding “is way too small a scale to create what happened,” Maue said. Extra rainfall from cloud seeding would have been minimal, both said.

WHO USES IT?

Despite not knowing its efficacy, governments in drought-stricken regions like the U.S. West and the UAE are often willing to invest in technology like seeding in the hopes of getting even a small amount of water.

Utah estimates cloud seeding helped increase its water supply by 12% in 2018, according to an analysis by the state’s Division of Water Resources. The analysis used estimates provided to them by the contractors paid to do the seeding.

Dozens of countries in Asia and the Middle East also use cloud seeding.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spent $2.4 million last year on cloud seeding along the overtapped Colorado River. Utah recently increased its seeding budget by tenfold.

SO WHAT CAUSED THE DELUGE?

That part of the Middle East doesn’t get many storms, but when it does, they are whoppers that dwarf what people in the United States are used to, Maue said.

Huge tropical storms like this “are not rare events for the Middle East,” said University of Reading meteorology professor Suzanne Gray. She cited a recent study analyzing nearly 100 such events over the southern Arabian Peninsula from 2000 to 2020, with most in March and April, including a March 2016 storm that dropped 9.4 inches (almost 24 centimeters) on Dubai in just a few hours.

The 2021 study said “a statistically significant increase in the (whopper storms) duration over southeast Arabian Peninsula has been found, suggesting that such extreme events may be even more impactful in a warming world.”

SIZE IS IMPORTANT

While cloud seeding can work around the margins, it doesn’t do big things, scientists say.

“It’s maybe a little bit of a human conceit that, yeah, we can control the weather in like a Star Trek sense,” Maue, who was appointed to NOAA by then-President Donald Trump, said. “Maybe on long time scales, climate time scales, we’re affecting the atmosphere on long time scales. But when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that. And if we were capable of doing that, I think we would be capable of solving many more difficult problems than creating a rain shower over Dubai.”

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Borenstein reported from Washington, Peterson from Boulder, Colorado.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment