I'm running for county commissioner because after 2 years as county commissioner, I've learned a lot. I really do enjoy the challenge and the position and I care about our community. One of the biggest things facing our community is property tax increases.

So the cool thing is that you can work with people and my my passion is working with other people to to find to find solutions to problems that other people don't necessarily have the creativity to figure out or to find a solution for.

The key thing that is killing everybody right now this this year, as John referred to it, is property taxes. We have really gotten the shaft in having those property taxes shifted from the federal and the state level and still have those public mandates for us to be able to provide the services...

Another huge one for for Anoka County is workforce development. We are so blessed that we have the technical college here um in Ramsey. Our business community here and our families uh need that as well as affordable housing uh for our workforce.

So one thing Anoka County, my colleagues on the board, are committed to preventing and stopping fraud and when we find it, to prosecute it... we saved Anoka County taxpayers about $2.6 million.

The other thing I'll just throw out there is we have a big choice in front of us and I'll I'll jump in front of this issue which is the Anoka County Jail. I I think that there's an opportunity there for us to be a little bit more creative about how we figure out a solution there and that forcing ourselves to you know stick to the existing footprint and build up isn't the only answer...

So, the key thing is fraud is obviously bad. Um we need to make sure that we address and prosecute every kind of fraud that we run across uh and be really aggressive about it... So, we need to really focus on the controls and making sure that uh we have mechanisms in place to stop fraud before it really starts.

The problem is is that the federal government has quit funding a lot of those. And so that's going to be represented on our property tax levy to continue mandated services that have stopped funding. That's why I talk uh so passionately about unfunded mandates...

I think that uh just in general the taxpayers of Anoka County deserve accountability and transparency. And so if somebody were to come want to talk to me about that and say you have to not disclose this is what we want to do. I would have a a real issue with that.

Uh, I would fundamentally have a problem with that both uh, morally and responsibility wise. I'm a I'm a public servant for the people. Uh, and anything that gets in the way of transparency and making sure that I can have that dialogue with my the people that I'm representing is a fundamentally a problem.