FAIRMONT–With another legislative session over, state legislators representing Martin County are evaluating what they were and weren’t able to do.

Senator Rich Draheim was in the minority as a Republican in the State Senate. Being in the minority, he said he couldn’t pick and choose what to focus on.

“The best thing you can do is call out the flaws in proposals and make suggestions to make it work and I think I got some good provisions in there,” Draheim said.

He was able to prevent a ban on key fobs and certain paints, an effort he had been working on in late April. Overall, he said they weren’t able to get much done.

“We stopped a lot of things but there will still be budgetary constraints,” Draheim said. “I am worried about property taxes and what the counties are going to have to do, and that’s going to trickle down to the cities.”

With rising costs and prices, Draheim said he’s seeing the pipeline of life break down.

“The pipeline should be an education should lead to a career, which should lead to home ownership, and that should lead to retirement,” he said. “Instead, most people are having a hard time paying for their rent, car payments, and aren’t close to home ownership. Did we make that situation better? I don’t think we did.”

In terms of budget cuts to reduce spending, Draheim said the state agencies didn’t cut down as much as he believed they should under deficit protocol conditions.

This year’s legislative session also had the first non-COVID-related special session since 2019. Draheim said issues with special sessions continued to be a burden this year.

“Most committees don’t have the transparency that the people deserve,” he said. “Even in my committee, we didn’t see the language of the bill until the day of the vote. How is the public supposed to know about what’s on the bills? It’s a terrible process and needs to change. This is the worst I’ve seen it. It handicaps us from doing the work we’re supposed to do.”

Taking the whole legislative session in, Draheim said they didn’t solve any long-term problems.

“We’ll probably have the same problems in two years,” he said “I am disappointed with this session and thought we could do better. There wasn’t enough conversation on a bipartisan level in the Senate. We are supposed to be the upper body and we didn’t act like it.”

In the House of Representatives, Bjorn Olson said the main goals were to not raise taxes on Minnesota families and cut spending. While momentum rose and fell throughout the legislative session, he said they were to accomplish those goals but not to full satisfaction.

“We definitely didn’t cut as much as I would have liked,” Olson said. “We had to make compromises on some issues and we weren’t able to roll back some of the things I wanted to.”

One area of disappointment is $5.43 million which was not approved for road money in Martin County. Olson said there is a clear account they could have received the money from, one previously dedicated to a railroad project connecting Duluth and the Twin Cities which has already had money taken from it.

“This year we raided that account of about $77 million to pay unemployment for part-time school staff,” Olson said. “They raided the account, leaving it with insufficient funds to make the train while not allowing us to zero out the balance of that account. There’s an account at the state of Minnesota with $108 million sitting in it the Democrats said we couldn’t touch.”

Olson said the Democrat-majority was willing to shut down the government over this issue, so the money did not go through.

What did go through was $2.25 million in funding for the Fairmont Opera House via a grant to the Minnesota Historical Society in the Legacy Bill.

“[The Historical Society] has to create a grant process, and they have to award grants to nonprofits for structural historical buildings,” he said. “Within the grant, we specifically say the Historical Society is supposed to give preferential treatment to the Fairmont Opera House.”

While other qualified building organizations can apply for these grants, Olson said the Fairmont Opera House will receive preferential treatment as long as they apply.

Compared to previous special sessions, Olson said they were able to get together and figure things out better.

“There were arguments, but everyone goes into it with the right mindset that we have to get this done [to avoid shutdown],” he said.

Speaking on the session as a whole, Olson said he feels they did right by the state of Minnesota.

Olson also touched on the assassination of House Speaker Melissa Hortman, which he said put a horrific and nerve-wracking tone on the end of the session. While they didn’t agree on much politically, Olson said Hortman was one of the nicest people in the House of Representatives.

“The last conversation I had with her, I was sitting down at my desk and as she walked past, she looked at me and said, ‘Hey, you are doing a really great job up there.'” Olson recounted. “She’s way high up leadership on the other side of the aisle. There’s no real reason why she needs to talk to me, but she felt that would be a nice thing and brighten my day.”

The great job Hortman was referring to is Olson’s work in the session as Speaker Pro Tempore, a position Hortman held from 2013 to 2014 before becoming Deputy Minority Leader in 2015.

“That encompasses who she was,” Olson said.