When I get to the State House, my first priority will always be serving the people of District 20b and voicing their concerns. Following this, my legislative goals are improvements in the following areas
Funding for Rural Minnesota
One of the prime roles of our government is to pool funds and use them for large projects and improvements in our communities that no individual person or family could afford. Historically, the Republican representation of our district has not worked with the local governments to identify projects and get funding for them. In fact, they’ve done just the opposite by voting against project appropriations for our district such as the road work completed last year on Jefferson Drive in Zumbrota.
The point of a representative is to advocate for their community and for improvements that will help the people – and when I am elected, I will speak with the leadership of each city and township in District 20b to see where they believe we need better support. What our local governments do not need is extraneous rules or stipulations: I plan to make sure that when the state allocates support, it is done in a way that allows the community to decide how to best use the money instead of mandating a top-down “one-size-fits-all” plan.
Additionally, our communities require emergency and support services if they are to continue to thrive. Teachers, fire fighters, road workers, police and EMTs are all essential for our communities to function, yet we do not treat these groups, or fund them, with the urgency and levels that are required. The worst part is that we don’t consider EMT’s in rural Minnesota to be essential services: If you or a loved one suddenly needs an ambulance, it’s all too apparent how essential they are. We need to provide all our communities with the funding to keep well-equipped and trained EMTs readily available.
Affordable Home Ownership
Most discussion of this issue starts around affordable housing, but I think we should be striving for more Minnesotans to own their homes so that they can build wealth instead of just subsidizing corporate-owned housing that drains wealth from our communities. I believe we need a two-pronged approach:
First we need to increase taxes on corporate and out-of-state owned single-family homes/duplexes to decrease profits on large portfolios of investment properties and keep money within our state. We also should add fees to the process of transferring residential properties to corporate ownership. Our housing market must be made friendly to family buyers, not Wall Street investors.
I will also push for more subsidies to build smaller homes in our rural communities. A starting family cannot afford a giant $500,000 home, yet those are the majority of new homes being built. We need to help open up markets for younger and first time buyers by making sure new, smaller and more affordable homes are being built, and made available for families to purchase.
Childcare and family support
If we want to encourage people to have families in Minnesota, we need to make sure that there are affordable options for childcare across our state. It’s not an easy challenge, and there is no single, simple solution. I support a thorough review of our current regulations to ensure that they are in place to protect children, and aren’t just a pork-barrel burden for the smaller, in-home facilities that make up the majority of rural childcare.
To effectively develop regulations ensuring child safety, we need to help smaller and in-home facilities receive proper training and materials, which – especially in our most rural communities – can be not just cost prohibitive, but impossible. We also need to increase our higher education funding in healthcare, childcare, and education so that we are equipping the future families of Minnesota with the best care options for their children. In the short term, I believe we should increase and extend the family tax credit, especially for families with children under the age of 8, since the larger systemic fixes will take longer to come to fruition.
Nutrition and Clean Water Security
Without nutritious food and clean water, we cannot survive, let alone thrive. It is doubly unfortunate that in one of the most fertile areas of farmland in the world, we have a childhood hunger rate of around one in ten. Think of how many kids you know – and imagine what that means.
Our district is also home to townships where nearly half the private wells are contaminated with dangerous levels of nitrates. This should be unacceptable in a state with our immense resources. While the best way to fight hunger is to ensure food affordability and availability, at the state level we should support community food assistance programs and encourage more local sourcing whenever possible.
As for the water supply in our district, nitrates are not a new issue: They’re a problem that has been compounding for decades – if not a century – and we are dealing now with issues caused by both past and present usage. This is another complex issue, since nitrates are a necessity in current agricultural processes. I believe the majority of farmers are responsible stewards of the land and want to do the right thing to protect and preserve its bounty for future generations.
It is the government’s job to give them proper tools, guidance and help offset the costs of modernizing so we can keep our communities both productive and safe. Like other issues in our state, if this was easy it would not be a problem, and we need to look at multiple factors in building a solution that works best for everyone. Identifying trouble spots is crucial, is important, so as a state we first need to push more funding to help pay for water testing in our small communities and on private wells. The solution will be a combination of steps including but not limited to:
- Improved weather predictions to help farmers spread at ideal times
- Programs to help adoption of profitable cover crops
- Building green dams near sinkholes
- Updating our rural wastewater facilities
- Subsidies for proper filtration systems to make the water safe to drink in currently dangerous areas
The different regions in our state will require very different solutions, so we should empower local government entities to find the most efficient and effective path forward instead of creating a cookie-cutter approach for everyone.
MN sure and Mental health care
Without access to affordable health and mental care, our communities will continue to suffer. We can see strong correlations between the lack of easy, affordable access to health and mental care and increases in drug abuse, poverty and crime.
Even the current opioid epidemic in rural America has been partially caused by unreliable access doctors, leading people to seek out alternative sources for medication. While it’s a large undertaking, this is actually something our state government can solve:
First, we need to make MNSure available to everyone in the state as an insurance option and increase its scope of care to include more mental health coverage. This will drive down the overall cost of insurance by having a competing option that is not taking a profit out, and will help our small businesses and entrepreneurs, since healthcare expenses are cited as the top reason people don’t form new businesses or expand their existing small businesses.
While I believe that our farmers as a group should have access to MNSure immediately, I do not see any reason why any Minnesotan should not have a public option available. We also need to mandate that all private health insurance plans include coverage for mental health treatment and therapy.
Lastly, our state needs more dedicated mental health facilities and staff trained to take care of people who are not well or in a crisis. Right now these individuals are either housed in our prisons or in our regular hospitals, neither of which are properly set up to care for them, nor are they providing them the opportunities to get better or live peacefully.
Ranked choice voting
Simply put, our “first past the post” system of voting does not serve our communities:It only serves to further polarize our current two party system and regularly uplifts
candidates who receive less than a majority share of votes. To make it worse, with only two parties it is very easy for the ultra wealthy to just buy both sides. There is a reason that the richest people in our country regularly donate money to both Republicans and Democrats: They are getting what is good for them, no matter what.
What is good for the super-rich is only very rarely good for the rest of us, and those “good for everyone” things – health care, for instance – are not priorities for the one percent of Americans who hold more wealth than the combined entire middle class. Ranked Choice Voting gives us more options, and leads to candidates who are more likely to align with our individual beliefs – and it’s also cheaper to hold a single round of Ranked Choice Voting in an election year instead of having to do a caucus, primary election, and final election.
States that are already using RCV have seen a drastic decrease in divisive rhetoric and fringe candidates, allowing voters to elect officials that align more closely with the average person in the area. Our government functions best when we are having discussions, making compromises, and working together to find the best solution. Our two-party system has broken down into a winner-take-all competition fueled by ideologies that lead to drastic legislative and judicial changes after elections, and those shifts prevent long-term, meaningful progress.
Minnesota is already close to making RCV a reality, and when I am elected I will bring the energy needed to get this across the finish line so that we can return to a government working for the people.