Nearly two-thirds of Minnesota abortions were performed using Mifepristone in 2023 (Photo illustration by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: The warmest year in Minnesota history; a surge in state government spending; the latest abortion data from the state; a data center’s staggering power needs; and 464 deaths on the road.
The warmest year
The Twin Cities notched the warmest year on record in 2024, and once final data is compiled it’s likely that will hold true for the entire state. Record high annual average temperatures were recorded in Duluth, Fargo and St. Cloud as well.
Mild, unseasonable weather at the beginning and end of the year were major factors, a reminder that climate change is causing winters to heat up much faster than summers. “From 1970 through 2021, average daily winter low temperatures rose more than 15 times faster than average daily summer high temperatures,” according to the Department of Natural Resources.
As of this writing the southern two-thirds of the state is bereft of snow and snow depths are well below average across much of the remainder, prompting the postponement of the Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon in Duluth.
Government spending surpasses $6,000 per person
John Phelan, an economist at the conservative Center of the American Experiment, recently crunched some numbers to look at the change in per-capita state government spending in Minnesota since 1990.
In inflation-adjusted terms, the figure rose from about $3,500 per person in 1990 to $6,100 in 2024, an increase of around 75%. Close to half of that new $2,500 in annual spending has been added just since 2019.
Something to keep in mind: State government is a big consumer of health care and education, and those sectors tend to see cost increases above inflation because of what’s called Baumol’s cost disease, i.e., they struggle to achieve productivity gains while employing lots of people whose wages consistently rise.
Still, Minnesota has a well-earned reputation as a state with high taxes and robust spending on social services. Many residents, like Reformer columnist Eric Harris Bernstein, view that as a net positive. “Everyone depends on the public goods and services that our tax dollars pay for,” Bernstein wrote last year, “and we take for granted a great many public needs that are satisfied through government intervention.”
But conservatives have been sounding the alarm over staggering levels of fraud and mismanagement in state spending, along with the threat of an upcoming fiscal deficit after years of surplus. Evidently, enough Minnesotans shared those concerns to break the DFL’s trifecta control of state government in November.
Out-of-state patients drive abortion increase
Minnesota abortions were up 16% in 2023, driven in large part by a 50% surge in out-of-state patients, according to Department of Health data released at the end of December. Those out-of-state patients accounted for more than one-quarter of the 14,000 abortions performed in Minnesota. It was the highest number of abortions recorded in the state in two decades.
The number of patients traveling from Wisconsin more than doubled between 2022 and 2023, from 383 to 825. The number of abortion-seekers from Iowa tripled from 174 to 520. There was a fivefold increase in patients traveling from Nebraska, rising to 127 individuals in 2023.
More than 92% of Minnesota abortions were performed in the first trimester of pregnancy, while just one abortion happened in the third trimester, at 29 weeks. Nearly two-thirds of the abortions were performed using the drug Mifepristone.
In 2023 the Legislature repealed certain abortion reporting requirements, including women’s reasons for seeking an abortion, their number of previous abortions, and their insurance status.
Staggering power needs at proposed Amazon data center
The Star Tribune’s Walker Orenstein flagged an arresting statistic in a recent Public Utilities Commission filing: Amazon’s proposed data center in Becker will have a peak daily electricity need of 600 megawatts of power, roughly equivalent to the output of the Monticello nuclear plant.
Amazon plans to build the center near Xcel Energy’s coal-fired Sherco plant. Roughly half of Xcel’s new power demand in the next five years is expected to come from data centers, the Star Tribune reported last year.
464 deaths on Minnesota roadways in 2024
Provisional data from the Department of Public Safety shows that 464 people were killed in car crashes in 2024, up from 414 the previous year. The increase was driven in part by a surge in fatalities at the start of the year, possibly due to unusually warm weather.
Through November, pedestrians accounted for 41 fatalities, and 75 motorcyclists were killed on the roads. There were seven bicyclist deaths. DWIs were up slightly in 2024. In addition to fatalities, tens of thousands of people are injured on Minnesota roadways each year.