By Rich Larson, News Director
A Farmington man is in custody charged with attempted first-degree murder, after shooting another man during a mid-day drug deal on Friday.
Authorities said 18-year-old Gage Allan David Anderson had been arrested, along with a juvenile suspect, after a man was shot in the back of the head near the intersection of 209th Street and Catalina Way in Farmington.
The victim said that the two men had robbed him during a drug deal at about 12:45 in the afternoon. He said they were in his car and the two suspects instructed him to get more money. He ran from the car and was shot by a .45 caliber firearm. The victim was taken to the hospital where he gave a statement, and the police arrested Anderson and the juvenile.
There is no updated word on the victim’s condition. Anderson is currently being held in the Dakota County Jail. If convicted, he faces up to twenty years in prison.
District begins planning for the future
As the Northfield School District moves closer to bringing middle and high school students out of the hybrid learning model and back into full time in-person learning, the district leadership is now starting to think about the future.
School Superintendent Dr. Matt Hillmann said that the district is beginning to look at strategic plans for the next five years. The district is planning to reach out to the community for input on what should the Northfield School District look like after the global pandemic has subsided, and what are the priorities upon which they should focus?
Hillmann said that the pandemic has forced education to change, and some of those changes will be evident as early as next year. Assuming that schools will be able to re-open in the fall to in-person learning, he said that the school is applying to the State Department of Education to become a formal online learning provider and that they intend to offer the Portage program – students who participate in distance learning full time – on a permanent basis. However, despite everyone’s desire to call the pandemic over and return to “normal,” Dr. Hillmann said that many of the changes, and even much of the return to a perceived normality will be done incrementally.
Dr. Hillmann said that another priority is offering students help in the lessons they have learned over the last year.
“If you think about the people you know who came out of some of the most significant crises in American history that we can remember, you think about some of the things that they used their entire life. It wasn’t necessarily something they learned in school during that crisis, it was something they learned during the crisis about themself.
I think that we are all appropriately worried about our teenagers today, and understandably so. I am very curious, a decade from now, to see what they learned during this crisis that we couldn’t teach them in school that carries them through the rest of their life.”
Hillmann went on to say that it is the responsibility of the district, as educators, to give students the academic, social and emotional tools the students will need to process the lessons of the pandemic, so they can apply those lessons in a healthy manner.
Jeff Johnson’s full conversation with Dr. Matt Hillmann can be heard here
Draheim downplays passenger rail
Last week the Northfield City Council passed a resolution supporting a bill authored by Representative Todd Lippert that would create a study on a
passenger rail line that would run from the Twin Cities through Northfield to Albert Lea, and potentially into Iowa.
Now State Senator Rich Draheim has made it known that he does not support such a study.
Senator Draheim’s major concern is he does not believe the railroad companies will support passenger rail use on their proprietary tracks, saying he has talked to people from rail lines, and they are short on capacity as it is.
Currently, he said there is a back log on shipping fuel, wood, and grain. He pointed out that fuel prices are up, and lumber prices have doubled in the last year. Making it more difficult to ship these things would only be counterproductive. If the freight companies won’t give consent to the use of the tracks, he said, then the study would be a waste of money.
“If we can use an existing line and it pays for itself, then yeah, let’s have that conversation. But if we don’t have a willing participant, the two rail lines, then I don’t think it’s worth moving forward and spending half-a-million dollars.”
The Senator also expressed concern that, across the country, passenger rail lines are heavily subsidized by state and federal governments. He is skeptical that a Southern Minnesota line would be able to pay for itself.
Jeff Johnson’s full conversation with Senator Rich Draheim can be heard here
