The Topline: The deerpocalypse is canceled

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: Xcel enjoys a negative federal corporate tax rate; Mayo rakes in $1 billion in 2023; the geographic oddity that is Maplewood; the final word on deer harvests; and concealed carry data.

Xcel Energy’s tax rate is effectively negative

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a DC think tank, released a study last week on corporate tax avoidance. It focused on the country’s 342 most profitable large companies, and found that 55 of them – including Minnesota’s own Xcel Energy – pay an effective federal tax rate of less than 5%.

That’s well under the statutory rate of 21%, and it’s possible thanks to a generous smorgasbord of tax breaks and loopholes that Congress has written into the corporate tax code. Xcel was one of a select group of companies that managed to pull a negative tax rate for the five years between 2017 and 2022. 

Despite making $7.5 billion in profits during that time, Xcel took advantage of a number of tax breaks and credits that meant the federal government actually paid the company $47 million, on top of the billions in earnings. The utilities sector had the lowest rates of any industry in the report, largely due to their ability to write off capital investments.

Mayo pulls in a $1 billion margin in 2023

The Rochester Post-Bulletin reports that the Mayo Clinic’s 2023 revenues were $1.08 billion higher than its expenses last year, just in time to break ground on the big $5 billion expansion the health care giant recently announced.

Those big dollar figures are the reason why Mayo is able to throw its weight around at the Capitol, pressuring lawmakers to shelve bills it doesn’t like, including ones that aim to rein in health care costs. 

The clinic, including its multi-state health system and campuses in Arizona and Florida, treated 1.3 million people last year, including your Topline writer, who remains lymphoma-free almost a year after the end of his treatment.

Why is Maplewood such a weird shape?

The Star Tribune published a fun little piece last week on the geographic oddity that is Maplewood, which is apparently shaped like a lumpy upside-down L. It got its shape because the city wanted to be sure to include the land occupied by 3M — and all the juicy tax revenue that entails. By 1965 the company accounted for 65% of the township’s tax base.

Maplewood Mayor Marylee Abrams is quoted in the story as not being aware of what the city’s borders actually look like: “I’ve heard it’s shaped like an L, [or] it’s shaped like a key — I don’t quite get that,” she said. 

This seems like kind of a funny thing for a mayor to admit, but then again most people probably couldn’t identify their community’s borders in a line-up.

Final deer harvest numbers are in

The Department of Natural Resources reports that hunters harvested 158,678 deer in 2023, down 8% from the prior year. But that was partly due to fewer registered hunters. In the end, hunters’ 2023 success rate (32%) was identical to the previous year’s.

Hunters and their allies have made a big stink over the alleged lack of deer in the state’s northeast sector, and they’ve blamed wolves. And while the harvest decline was indeed steepest in that sector, so was the drop-off in the number of hunters. Overall, the hunter success rate in the northeast dipped by just 3 percentage points — hardly the catastrophe some have made it out to be.

4,701 concealed carry permit holders did crimes last year

The Department of Public Safety has released its annual report on concealed carry permit holders in the state. The department issued about 65,000 new permits in 2023, similar to the previous year’s tally and down significantly from a pandemic-era spike.

There are currently about 402,000 permit holders in the state, and in 2023 4,701 of them — or about 1% — committed various crimes. Most of them were DWIs or other traffic offenses. That’s in line with gun owner criminality rates in prior years.