Good morning, and hearty congratulations for making it to another Friday, the last one of summer (yes, it’s still summer for a few more hours). Early voting in municipal and school board elections starts today. 

Minnesota’s marijuana regulatory agency will be led by Erin DuPree, who founded a low-dose THC company she will leave behind to oversee the state’s move to a legal market for full-fledged cannabis products.MPR’s Brian Bakst and Mark Zdechlik report Gov. Tim Walz on Thursday named DuPree the first executive director of the Office of Cannabis Management. Walz said his appointee “is a proven and effective leader, who will be successful in standing up Minnesota’s new adult-use cannabis market and helping Minnesotans succeed in the industry.” In that role, DuPree will take charge in refining and enforcing boundaries around aspects of marijuana from growth to sale. DuPree, 43, said in an interview that she has a firm grasp of the cannabis landscape having founded Loonacy Cannabis Co. and done other business consulting for about two decades. “I’m a good fit because I am young enough to be able to connect with the people who are going to be actively entering this industry as we create it,” DuPree said. “But I'm experienced enough to deal with the real problems that businesses are going to run into trying to be a part of this industry. I am here to not only serve Minnesotans but to serve Minnesota businesses.” 

More: When she begins the assignment in early October, she’ll be building an agency from the ground up. She’ll start by filling an initial nine positions and eventually 150 employees.  “It is a big job,” said Rep. Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids. He helped write the law that made possession and use of marijuana legal for adults 21 and older this August. Rather than assign oversight to several agencies, the law’s sponsors created the new entity to set rules, review license applications and ensure what’s sold is within potency limits. “They will immediately take over that and shepherd that process through so that we can have a legal marketplace up and running as expeditiously as possible so that that rulemaking process,” Stephenson said. “It’s really going to set the framework for how our legal cannabis industry is going to look in Minnesota.” DuPree met Wednesday night with some of the lawmakers who wrote the marijuana law. Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville said there will be a lot of focus on the marijuana office buildout, but she’s hopeful her colleagues afford DuPree some latitude. “As it expands down the road, it will probably start to look more like other agencies,” Port said. “But it's, I think, in the first couple of years, going to feel more like kind of a scrappy startup. It's going to have to do a lot of work really quickly. And we laid out a really aggressive timeline to get sales, license sales, testing—all of that up online.”

Personal information about students, potential students and employees at the University of Minnesota between 1989 and August of 2021 may have been stolen by hackers, the university acknowledged on Thursday.MPR News reports university officials sent out a notice providing more information on a data breach initially reported last month. They said an investigation determined that someone likely gained unauthorized access to a university database in 2021. Potentially breached information includes full names, addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers, driver’s license or passport information, birth dates and other demographic information, the university said in a statement. The U said it would post notices about the breach on its websites and email people potentially affected by the breach, if their email addresses are on file. It will send email notifications to approximately two million individuals.

Top Democrats are again signaling they won’t support a special legislative session on police officers in schools. DFL House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic issued a statement late Thursday on school resource officers. “Today, we are announcing a commitment to hold public hearings about SROs in the House and the Senate within the first two weeks of the 2024 legislative session,” it said. “After discussions with law enforcement organization leaders, we all believe these latest developments will help to return SROs to schools as soon as possible.” And Gov. Tim Walz put out a statement of his own saying progress is being made on the issue.  “I am committed to further addressing this issue next legislative session and eager to see school resource officers return to schools as soon as possible,” Walz said. 

Those statements came after Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told MPR News Thursday that he believes his latest legal memo together with a Wednesday night meeting that included Walz, legislators and law enforcement officials will resolve the controversy around how police can operate in Minnesota schools.  Some 40 law enforcement agencies have pulled or plan to pull their school resource officers out of schools, citing uncertainty about recent changes in state law they believe would legally limit officers or staff in how they can physically restrain students when needed. On Wednesday, Ellison in a written opinion reiterated the changes passed by lawmakers last spring “do not limit the types of reasonable force that may be used by public officers to carry out their lawful duties.” “I think now we’re all clear that a school resource officer or a contracted police officer may use reasonable force to prevent bodily injury or death or affect a lawful arrest or to stop property damage,” Ellison said Thursday morning. “They can do their jobs as they’ve been used to doing them for so many years.”

MPR’s Dan Kraker had an in-depth look at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, or HERC, in downtown Minneapolis, which is also known to some as the garbage burner.  Residents and businesses in Hennepin County generate about 800,000 tons of garbage every year that isn’t recycled or composted. About 45 percent of that trash is burned here, in the booming North Loop neighborhood of Minneapolis, next to a light rail station, hotel and new condos. The rest is trucked to landfills around the Metro area. “In a perfect world, there would be no trash. And there would be no landfills. There would be no need for HERC,” said Dave McNary, Hennepin County's assistant director of environment and energy. “But we're so far from there. A lot of us that have worked in this [field] for 30 years look at the 800,000 tons and say, ‘Wow. It's a monumental effort to get to zero.’ So until we get to that point, we believe that waste processing is better than landfilling.” But a growing chorus of community activists and elected officials disagree, and are pushing Hennepin County to commit to closing the incinerator. Their efforts received a boost from the state Legislature this year, which changed the law to say that energy generated by the facility can no longer be treated as renewable. “This is an environmental catastrophe,” argues Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, who helped push the legislation. He said air pollutants emitted by the facility have long created an environmental justice issue.  And the Star Tribune reports: Environmental justice advocates and Hennepin County commissioners were frustrated Thursday by a report and recommendation from county staff that said it was best to wait until 2040 to close the HERC.

Will there be a federal government shutdown?The New York Times reports on the latest setback for GOP House leaders: Right-wing House Republicans dealt another stunning rebuke to Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday, blocking a Pentagon funding bill for the second time this week in a vivid display of G.O.P. disunity on federal spending that threatens to lead to a government shutdown in nine days. Just hours after Mr. McCarthy signaled he had won over some of the holdouts and was ready to move forward, a handful of Republicans broke with their party to oppose the routine measure that would allow the military appropriations bill to come to the House floor for debate, joining with Democrats to defeat it. It was a major black eye for Mr. McCarthy, who has on multiple occasions admonished his members in private for taking the rare step of bringing down such votes, known as rules, proposed by their own party — a previously unheard-of tactic. And it signaled continuing right-wing resistance to funding the government, even after the speaker had capitulated Wednesday night to demands from hard-right Republicans for deeper spending cuts as part of any bill to prevent a shutdown.