FAIRMONT — Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton recently announced the establishment of a Governor’s Task Force on Housing. Dayton called housing a “persistent crisis” for Minnesota families, and said wages for lower- and middle-income people have remained stagnant while rental rates have gone up.

“Affordable housing has not kept pace,” Dayton said. “The result is more and more people and their families are in crisis situations.”

State Rep. Bob Gunther, R-Fairmont, was selected by Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt to serve on the task force, representing the House Republican majority. Gunther has championed a number of bills to improve access to affordable workforce housing in outstate Minnesota during his tenure and was available to comment on the issue.

“The task force is going to be broken up into three different groups,” he said. “The Speaker put me in there because of my knowledge and interest in housing.

“The population of greater Minnesota is not shrinking when you put it all together, but for our area it is. In order to change that, we have to have more jobs here. There are three things that people are looking for before they put a plant in our area, and those are affordable workforce housing, availability of daycare and a trained workforce.”

Concerning daycare, Gunther noted that Minnesota has the highest percentage of women in the workforce of any state in the nation.

From there, he moved on to job-related education.

“Everybody knows that Minnesota’s got a great workforce,” he said. “We’ve got a good education system, and [the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development] has a good job-training program. We’re the envy of the nation as far as having junior colleges and post-secondary education, and even in Fairmont’s case they’re training welders and several other things here in our high schools.

“Let’s say AGCO needed to have a bunch of assembly people. They would go to Jackson vocational school and between AGCO and the school, they would develop a curriculum that would take care of the needs of AGCO. The person who wanted to work for them would take that program, pay for the tuition and, upon graduation, would start at a higher salary than somebody that walked off the street.

“So we are really doing everything we can educationally, and we’re paying attention to the needs and wants of employers, but this [affordable housing] is what we’re striving to do now.

“So we’ve got to look at what people want to live in, an apartment, a condo or a house. Most people would like to live in a house, but can’t afford it, so most people want an apartment. We have to figure out a way we can build more apartments.”

Gunther said part of the problem for southern Minnesota is that 68 percent of the population lives in the metro area, thus making it difficult for the rural areas to fight for what is needed in regard to affordable housing. However, he went on to praise Fairmont for its method of taking dilapidated properties and building apartments, such as was done by Krueger Realty with the recent City Center Townhomes.

“We have to figure out a way we can build more apartments,” he said. “I think we also have to look at blighted towns in our district.

“Elmore has around 28 houses that should be torn down and half the business buildings downtown should be torn down. So we have to look at what we can do to get those houses torn down, and take those lots and get people to want to build houses in Elmore.”

Gunther says he is pleased to have been named to the governor’s housing task force and hopes to help find common sense solutions to the problem.