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By Ryan Faircloth

Shari Gross/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Good morning. Minnesota's new blackout license plates soared past sales projections by nearly 90,000 last year, and now we know who's buying the tags that the Legislature allowed the Department of Vehicle Services to offer. Middle-aged Minnesotans are snapping the plates up at the highest rate; for every 10,000 residents between 45 and 54, about 770 now have a blackout plate, my colleague Tim Harlow reports.

Chris Dorn of Eden Prairie said he bought one because of its aesthetic appeal on his new green Kia Telluride with black accents. "The blue and white plates stuck [out] against it. The black and white plate is nice and simple," he said. "It matches what cars look like today.”

Car owners in some of the fastest-growing and wealthiest suburbs have the highest concentration of blackout plates. Dayton tops the list with more than 1,000 blackout plates for every 10,000 residents. Hanover, Rogers, Wayzata and Lake Elmo also have some of the highest purchasing rates.

DVS spokesman Mark Karstedt said the agency has nearly exhausted its supply of the plates' current alphanumeric convention. Tags will appear in inverse order in the near future, with three numbers followed by three letters. Read more.

A new Southwest light-rail audit: Lawmakers reacted to the final report from the state’s watchdog agency detailing construction-related troubles associated with the $2.9 billion Southwest light-rail line with a kind of weary wrath earlier this week. My colleague Janet Moore writes that the 30-page report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) concluded a nearly four-year probe of the Southwest project, which is the most expensive public works project in Minnesota history and has been plagued with cost overruns and delays. The OLA released a total of five reports about the Southwest project, all of which generated bipartisan rancor largely aimed at the Metropolitan Council, which has overseen the project's construction. But the auditor's findings haven't prompted any changes to the structure of the Metropolitan Council, whose members are appointed by the governor rather than elected. Critics contend that elected council members would be more accountable to the public. GOP Rep. Jon Koznick of Lakeville has a bill this year that would see elected officials in the metro serve on the council in staggered terms, but it's unclear if it will gain traction. Read more.

Senate endorsement: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who's running for U.S. Senate, rolled out another endorsement from a statewide official on Tuesday. Flanagan announced that State Auditor Julie Blaha is backing her Senate campaign. Attorney General Keith Ellison has also thrown his support behind Flanagan, whom he's known for about 20 years.

"Peggy listens, reads, digs into the numbers, and then she brings it all together into something that actually makes life better for families," Blaha said in a statement. "She’s smart, she’s fearless, she’s on our side."

State settles lawsuit over records: Separately, the Center of the American Experiment announced Tuesday that the Minnesota Department of Education has agreed to pay it $7,000 to settle a lawsuit over the agency's failure to fulfill a data practices request. 

The center said it requested an ethnic studies framework document produced by the governor's ethnic studies workgroup on Oct. 2. It filed a lawsuit after not receiving any communication from the agency for 56 days.

“Instead of simply emailing us a document everyone knew existed, the Department of Education chose to protect Gov. Walz by stonewalling our request until after the 2024 election,” John Hinderaker, Center of the American Experiment president, said in a statement.

Defamation lawsuit against Alpha News dismissed: Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl dismissed the defamation suit brought by a Minneapolis police officer against the creators of "The Fall of Minneapolis" documentary with prejudice, my colleague Jeff Day writes. Wahl said Tuesday that Alpha News reporter Liz Collin and her co-defendants hit every legal standard necessary to avoid the lawsuit going to trial, including that their questioning of whether Assistant Police Chief Katie Blackwell lied on the witness stand met the legal standard of "substantial truth."

“I think the case will be precedent setting,” Collin said in an interview Tuesday evening. “You can’t just sue journalists because you don’t like what they report.

Attorney Chris Madel, who represented Collin and her co-defendants, called the dismissal "a complete vindication for Liz Collin, J.C. Chaix and Alpha News and a complete victory for the First Amendment.” Read more.

Madel has been rumored to be contemplating a run for governor.

Gov. Tim Walz is back from holding campaign-style town halls in Ohio. On Wednesday, Walz will attend Veterans Day on the Hill and a Minnesota Chamber of Commerce board meeting, according to his official schedule, which gives members of the media a limited view of his activities.

As the governor continues to travel nationally, maintaining the national profile he built last year, he should consider releasing more details of his whereabouts to the Minnesota media.

Perhaps even his full calendar.

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8:30 a.m. — The Minnesota Senate Taxes Committee will take up a "first-in-the-nation" measure sponsored by DFL Sen. Ann Rest to tax large social media companies "that have made billions of dollars by selling data they collect," according to a prepared statement which read: "If passed, Minnesota would become the first state to collect this revenue."