Your Daily Guide

Watch where you swim: Lake Nokomis reportedly suffered from a toxic blue-green algae bloom in recent days and was not safe to swim in. One Minneapolis Redditor documented thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores. With more high temperatures ahead this week, be sure to check out the City of Minneapolis's Lake Water Quality Map before swimming. [Star Tribune]

Finally free: After more than four months in ICE custody, Burnsville resident Andrea Pedro Francisco has been released from a detention facility in El Paso, Texas. Pedro Francisco spent her months in detention battling pain from an ovarian cyst without receiving her prescribed pain medication. A doctor assessed that she needed surgery back in February. Despite her life-threatening condition, Pedro Francisco was denied humanitarian release in May. Now that she is free, she will be able to seek medical treatment and her asylum case will continue through the courts. [Sahan Journal]

Denying funds: The Minnesota Department of Human Services disenrolled more than 3,400 health providers from Medicaid in an effort to combat fraud. Payments to those providers have immediately stopped. Many providers claim they are offering legitimate services and that the state disenrolled them simply because the agency ran out of time to review their operations. The DHS has rolled out a website to help Minnesotans find a new provider if their care has been disrupted. [MPR News]

Let's leash our dogs: The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has moved to decommission the Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park as it sits on a sacred site for the Dakota people. MPRB District 4 Commissioner Jason Garcia said that the park will still remain open to people in the future, as they're only decommissioning the "off-leash" element of the park. The MPRB is also exploring policies to make park land more accessible to Indigenous people, and has passed a resolution to waive any fees for Indigenous people using parks to practice ceremonies. [🎧 City Cast Twin Cities]

Leave "Leave a Future": The University of Minnesota is ditching its terrible new slogan idea after what the Star Tribune generously called a "lukewarm" reception from the community. Instead of explicitly including the new slogan as a part of their rebrand, the university plans to "integrate its sentiment" into their content. The University of Minnesota has not introduced another slogan to replace it. [Star Tribune]

More housing for St. Paul? A developer has requested tax incentives from the City of St. Paul to jumpstart a long-stalled office-to-residential conversion downtown. Bigos Management purchased the Galtier Plaza overlooking Mears Park in 2019 with plans to turn the desolate office spaces into 166 units of market-rate apartments, but the pandemic put plans on hold. The St. Paul City Council is set to vote on whether or not to provide a total of $5.21 million to the project in a meeting on June 10. [Pioneer Press]

• Lead Sawyer at Wood From the Hood | $25 – $32 per hour
• Director of Philanthropy at Mitchell Hamline School of Law | $90k – $115k per year
• AI Project Manager at University of Minnesota | $36.06 – $40.39 per hour
• Sr. Host / Producer at YourClassical MPR | $88k – $106k per year
• Grants Manager at New Native Theatre | $58k – $68k per year