Capitol View for January 7

Good morning, and congratulations for making it to the first Friday of 2022.

Calls are growing for Hennepin County Sheriff David Hutchinson to resign, after he crashed a county vehicle when he was driving drunk. A majority of the members of the county board have now called for resignation. FOX 9 reported : Board Chair Marion Greene joined commissioners Angela Conley, Chris LaTondresse, Jeff Lunde and Irene Fernando in calling for Hutchinson to quit. They said the sheriff had become a distraction and no longer held the public's confidence. "Sheriff Hutchinson’s actions and subsequent comments have eroded public confidence in his ability to serve and equitably enforce laws," Greene said in a Thursday evening statement, noting that people in her district had expressed their concerns to her. The board cannot vote Hutchinson out because he's an elected official. In a statement through a spokesman, the sheriff said he would not resign. "I am fully committed to continuing to serve the people of Hennepin County who elected me. I will let the citizens, not politicians, decide my future in November," Hutchinson said in the statement. He also got a potential election opponent this week when Suwana Kirkland, president of Minnesota's National Black Police Association chapter, tweeted she is running for sheriff.

Mel Reeves, a longtime Twin Cities writer and activist, died from complications of COVID-19. Reeves, 64, spent decades chronicling and participating in the region’s protest movements. The publisher of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder newspaper, where Reeves worked as community editor, said he embodied the newspaper’s tradition as a "voice for the voiceless." The paper on Thursday announced Reeves’ death, MPR’s Matt Sepic reports . Reeves was passionate about telling stories that helped shed light on important issues in the Twin Cities, said Larry Fitzgerald Sr., a longtime columnist, reporter and editor at the Spokesman-Recorder who knew Reeves for 25 years. "He was just a terrific, passionate person always about community relations and making sure that things were fair for everybody,” he said.

Minnesota's newest COVID-19 community testing site will open at the National Guard Armory in Anoka on Friday,Gov. Tim Walz announced Thursday, while the Guard will help raise the capacity of a similar site in downtown St. Paul by 50 percent. The moves to boost the state's testing capacity amid the spike in omicron variant cases are building on the governor's announcement on Tuesday that the Guard and Minnesota Department of Health would stand up three new community testing sites to deal with the surging demand for testing. “It's going to be a challenging three weeks or so, but we've got Minnesota's best on duty here,” Walz said during a visit to the Anoka facility. “We've got our public health officials across the state. We've got our private-sector partners going.” The governor also said Minnesotans are doing a good job of getting booster vaccinations. "Minnesota is best in the nation with boosters aged 65 and above and we're second in the nation for all boosters 18 and above,” Walz said.

Two more incumbent state legislators said Thursday that they won't be seeking reelection this year, MPR’s Tim Pugmire reports. Rep. Rod Hamilton, a nine term Republican incumbent from Mountain Lake, and two-term DFL Rep. Todd Lippert of Northfield are the latest to announce plans to retire. They join a growing list of lawmakers who are moving on. There are now more than a half dozen House members and nearly as many Senate members who have said they are not seeking reelection or are running for other elected offices. Most of the announcements in both bodies, so far, are from Democrats. More retirements are expected in the coming weeks after new legislative maps are finalized and incumbents learn which district they’re in and whether they’ve been paired with other incumbents.

From the Associated Press:The Supreme Court is taking up two major Biden administration efforts to bump up the nation's vaccination rate against COVID-19 at a time of spiking coronavirus cases because of the omicron variant. The justices on the conservative-oriented court are hearing arguments Friday about whether to allow the administration to enforce a vaccine-or-testing requirement that applies to large employers and a separate vaccine mandate for most health care workers. The arguments were expected to last at least two hours. Legal challenges to the policies from Republican-led states and business groups are in their early stages, but the outcome at the high court probably will determine the fate of vaccine requirements affecting more than 80 million people.

This has nothing to do with politics, but MPR’s Dan Kraker reports the surfing was great on Lake Superior this week. Yes, surfing. On Lake Superior. This week.