Over my career, I have witnessed the toll  being unable to access physical or mental health care has on people. This may mean waiting until they feel like they have no other option than to call 911. In some cases it is too late and now a disease or illness that could have been treated if they had been able to access care earlier has become too advanced. In other cases, EMS, fire departments, or emergency rooms become the primary care providers for patients because they lack resources for transportation to medical facilities, have no insurance coverage, or are burdened by restrictive networks or high deductibles.

At a minimum we should explore expanding the current Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare programs to cover more people. Ideally, I would like Minnesota to lead the way in implementing a single-payer healthcare system. Our healthcare system is broken; it is leaving people behind and we need to do better.

Workers deserve a voice in the workplace and labor unions are the most proven and effective way to balance power in the workplace. I have been a proud union member for over two decades and an elected union officer at the state and local level for 16 years. Over this time I have witnessed firsthand that unions do more than negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions. Over and over again they use their power to lift up and serve others.

Through the union, teachers fight for smaller class sizes, nurses fight for safe staffing ratios, and the building trades fight for Project Labor agreements that protect union and non-union workers alike. I will fight to protect and expand the rights of workers and their ability to organize. I believe unions are one of the best avenues to achieve social and economic justice for everyone.

The lack of market rate or workforce housing is a critical issue for us here in Duluth and other communities around the state. Because of this shortage, home ownership is becoming increasingly difficult for many Minnesotans. This has a domino effect in adversely impacting business development and education funding. 

The bottom line is that if we want to encourage businesses to come to Minnesota or expand their operations, we must expand our workforce, and those workers need to be able to find places to live and set down roots.

We need to explore options like working with local government, non-profits, and contractors to build energy efficient housing options on lots that are currently vacant or have buildings that are no longer habitable. Increasing the supply of market rate housing puts properties back on the tax rolls, reduces blight, and builds neighborhoods.

A robust PreK-12 public school option is the foundation of our education system here in Minnesota. We need to prioritize how we fund schools so that we can ensure all children around Minnesota have access to a high quality public education, without the inconsistency and disparity from tax base funding streams. Relying on school districts to pass tax levies and referendums is not fair or sustainable.

When we fund education we need to write laws to ensure that those funds are used in ways that actually help students and educators. We can do this by focusing on things like reducing class sizes, investing in the mental health of our students, and attracting and retaining the best and brightest by offering pay and benefits that allow for a livable wage and reflect the professionalism and training of our teaching force. In its simplest form, we need two things for learning to occur: students and teachers.

Higher education has evolved since I attended St. Cloud State over 25 years ago. At that time it was still affordable and I was able to graduate without crippling debt. Today, that is not the case for so many Minnesotans. We need to expand opportunities for those who wish to pursue two and four year college degrees, whether that be fixed tuition, expanding college in the schools (CIS), or increasing options for student loan forgiveness.

We are also starting to recognize that a college degree is not the end all, be all answer to be successful. The apprenticeship model that many of our trade unions employ is an amazing job training opportunity that not only provides the necessary training and education, but this model allows the students to work in their trade and, importantly, earn a living while they are training.

As a state, we should work with stakeholders to forecast where Minnesota has an undersupply of workers, or where there will be a deficiency of workers in the future. With that knowledge we can explore avenues the state can take to assist, supplement, and emulate these apprenticeships so that we can ensure we have enough workers to keep building Minnesota. These state-supported programs can help produce the workers that will be the backbone of our state’s industries.

There is a housing crisis here in Minnesota that extends beyond the need for market rate and affordable housing. As a firefighter, I often encounter children and families who are unhoused or underhoused. This experience grounds me in the fact that discussions of homelessness and low-income housing are about people, not just statistics or numbers on paper.

One of the things that has driven me to run for the legislature is the time I’ve spent working with Center City Housing as a board member for the last 9 years. Center City provides housing to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, battling substance abuse and addiction, or with mental illness. They subscribe to a “housing first” model where the number one step in the path out of difficult situations is to remove as many barriers as possible to get people into housing and then work to resolve the other issues. I fully support this approach of “housing first” by making the first step out of difficult situations getting people into stable housing and removing as many barriers as possible to accomplish this. 

Knowing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, I look forward to continuing my work on this critical issue alongside our community leaders, nonprofit and State organizations, other legislators, and most importantly, those citizens with lived experiences of being unhoused. I believe that we will see the most success when people have a safe, secure place to live, with support services available to them, and that all Minnesotans deserve this basic human right.