There's no data center coming to Lakeville. Nobody has knocked down my door to say, 'Hey, we're going to build this data center.'

If Lakeville can even hit 25% of that revenue that the Duth Air Show brings in, you are looking at $5 million revenue for the city.

Dakota Electric charges about 4 cents more per kilowatt than Excel Energy. ... That extra 4 cents a kilowatt equals $1,000 a year. And over a 10-year lease, that's $10,000.

Let's go after the small businesses, the mom and pop shops, the growing ones, right? They might have 100, 200 staff members, right? And put those in, right? That's where we want to put our energy in, not in these large corporations.

if we can find ways to bring the businesses and um opportunities to spend that money in our own backyard, that enhances everybody's um ability to uh lower cost across the board and pro provide better services.

if you want to keep them here, would it not be a good incentive to make it so that the taxes do not go up by 15% for over two years?

we need to set some standards in the council and in the town and um, we need to have a public hearing and just and discuss what we consider acceptable to come into this town.

Amazon and these big distribution facilities are not going to create jobs. They're going to lose jobs, right? those jobs are going to go away because there's too much other things that they can invest in to save a penny, right?

On the other side, we want to protect our our community from large potential corporations that may be data center proposals in the future. I want to clarify again that we haven't had one.

there's an opportunity right now if you get the right mix of mayor and city council members where we can write into law via ordinance that there will be no data centers in the city of of Lakeville.

The quickest way to create jobs is to retain and promote the businesses that are already here.

it's not going to how you do it is um grants and I just happen to know somebody who gets a lot of grants. That guy right there, he just secured $50 million for the city of St. Paul for capital improvements. He knows how to get grants.

our biggest asset is our staff and every single year as most of us would ask for a raise is something that our staff um would like to have. Um and that alone is something that increases our our operational budget every single year.

I think a more robust portfolio of city or municipally owned businesses um that provide needs for the community uh are a great way to generate revenue and lower property taxes and take that burden away from property taxes.

one of the items that kind of jumps to my mind, uh, from a different location is a large aquatic center... Something for the the families and kids to do in the winter because we have that and it's long.

at the end of the day, it's going to be on the burden of the taxpayers and so we have to have a real conversation about what we're willing to do and what we're not interested in doing.

instead of bailing out these failing businesses because I believe we're in a free market. This is supposed to be a capitalist country. The bad businesses are supposed to fail. I believe that we can relieve ourselves of this $17 million tax payment bond issuance.

I think the one big thing though is sometimes we shut off our listening ears and we really need to open up and listen to the neighbors and the neighborhoods and the small businesses that want to come in.

Lakeville is unique in its approach to how we've developed commercial nodes around the community. Um it it's not an Apple Valley where you have one strip and you just see every single possible restaurant um in in one lane.

If you live in Lakeville and you want to run a business, we should have a request for proposal. We should have a running list lined up of everyone who wants to do something here. That's how we create a pipeline from our schools to jobs in our community, not shelling out millions of dollars to CEOs uh for large corporations that come here.

Lakeville last year was the number one city in the country for reducing red tape and being transparent when it comes to business.

if you are running in the park at 5:59 a.m. and you do not have permission per the clause in the uh section there, if you do not have permission from the city to run in the park at 5:59 a.m. in the parks that we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, you can go to jail per the general penalty set out in title one uh chapter 4 section one, you can go to jail for 90 days for that.

I think that this would be a wonderful opportunity to launch an Lakeville app and this app would be configured with SMS messaging. We could deploy this very easily with AI.

I serve on the Chamber of Commerce's uh access and issues um committee. And so in that role, we we meet [clears throat] on a monthly basis with our our local business leaders to to hear and and field questions and and talk about issues that are important to them.

My connection is um having three businesses. ... I think just being out and about um in the community and and shopping local um but being visible talking with with all the business owners.

my current connection to the Lakefield business community is uh I've been a longtime employee uh that's hit a glass ceiling as a young broke millennial that doesn't have the money to uh break that barrier to entry uh just due to cost of living um in our town.

this is from title 11 chapter 34 section 5. And what it essentially allows is, and forgive my vulgarity here, but it essentially allows for the establishment of within 3001 ft of any sort of daycare or elementary school or preschool. It allows the establishment of uh strip clubs, pornography stores, and escort agencies.

I did not know that. Thank you for telling me that. I am a a parent of two beautiful boys. ... And I just said, I got to get involved. This is not going where we want it to go. And I can't have that for my kids. I can't. So that's why I'm running.

I'm in agreement, right? If I'm elected, I'm going to first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say no data centers, no bottling plants, right? anything that hurts our environment, I'm going to put a kibash on and we're going to put it in code and we're going to pass it right away.