Election Day tomorrow; Power failure likely led to outages

Minnesota today is supported by Granite Partners, over 20 years of growing Minnesota-based companies that source and sell around the world. Granite Partners, growing companies, enhancing communities. You can learn more at granite.com. This is Minnesota today for Monday, August 10th. I'm Emily Reese, and here's what's happening in Minnesota. Tomorrow is primary election day in Minnesota. Voters will winnow the field of candidates running for governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and a host of other state and local races. The results will determine which candidates advance to the general election in November. Polls in Minnesota open at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. They remain open until 8 o'clock tomorrow night. You can find out what's on your ballot in Minnesota and learn more about the candidates with the voter guide online at mprnews.org. There are also primary elections tomorrow in Wisconsin, including the race for governor. A power failure at a Minneapolis data center called the 511 building is likely behind disruptions to several government services last week, including some 911 lines and voting machines. The Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange is housed in the facility and confirmed the outage to NPR News. Its partners include some of the public sector networks that were affected. Faisal Kalim directs the cybersecurity program at Metro State University. If indeed it was a power failure, nobody kind of publicly said that, hey, there was some backup failure as well, but they need to go at the root cause that if there was a backup system, why that backup system did not kick in in time. Thursday's outage lasted for about an hour and a half. It's unclear if it's also behind a grounding of flights that happened at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Cologics operates the data center and has not responded to requests for comment. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says cutting the police budget is not the answer to alleviating a $30 million deficit. Fry is expected to propose his 2027 budget this week and says he also wants to adjust police spending after the department went millions of dollars over budget in the last two years. Most of that overspending was on overtime. Frye says he'd rather make a more accurate budget for extra hours than cut them. That's what we're trying to correct for going into this year's budget. We're working out the exact logistics as to how we got there. Certainly improvements that can be made, but by and large, yeah, we need to do those overtime hours. City Council members have criticized public safety officials for the overspending. A Minnesota-based magnet maker is set to receive a $150 million federal loan through the Department of Defense. Matthew Holding Eagle of the Third reports. Niron Magnetics manufactures magnets through a process that combines iron and nitrogen into iron nitride. This method cuts out the dependence on foreign mine rare earth elements needed to make traditional magnets, and it lowers environmental impacts.