ABOVE: State Representative Bjorn Olson, right, discusses issues with the people at Wednesday’s Town Hall while State Senate Candidate Jeremy Munson, middle, standing, listens and prepares his own feedback. The town hall spanned several topics, including AI data centers, paid family medical leave and fraud.

FAIRMONT – Current State Representative Bjorn Olson and State Senator candidate Jeremy Munson listened to constituent concerns during a town hall on Wednesday at the American Legion in Fairmont.

The event comes just days after the filing period for primaries ended. Neither Olson nor Munson received any primary challengers, but they will go up against Democrats Sonja Denn and Marisa Ulmen, respectively, in the November elections.

To start, Martin County District 5 Commissioner Billeye Rabbe said she has been getting lots of calls regarding the PowerOn utility program, set to put a 765 kV line through Martin County on its way to the Rochester area. Munson says he understands where farmers’ concerns are on this.

“All the farmers are upset because they don’t want footprints around and you got large planters,” he said. “The money they want to pay you isn’t just to put the pole out there; it’s that they have the right to trample your crops to get out there to service it at any time, and then creating compaction that takes 10 years or more to get rid of.”

Ongoing solar projects were also brought up, with Rabbe speaking on the difference between a farmer’s choice to bring a solar project on their land and energy companies putting poles on people’s land. Olson agreed with this distinction.

“People come to me and they say, ‘Oh, Bjorn, you should make a law that says you can’t put a solar farm on prime farmland,'” he said. “I say, ‘Okay, wait a second, are you for personal property rights? Because if you are, then you have to be okay with it, if that’s their own personal decision.’ What I can tell you I’m against when you’re talking about solar farms, is the government giving subsidies and paying out of my own taxpayer dollar to put a solar field on someone else’s farm.”

Also in the crowd Wednesday was Denn, who asked the candidates about their stance on the AI data centers. Munson said it is an exciting technology that has a cost to it. He acknowledged that due diligence needs to be done, but he would prefer to have these centers in America.

“I do want them in the United States, because I want them to be here, where we have freedom of speech and freedom of thought,” he said. “I don’t want data centers to be housed in China or somewhere else. Because the internet is interconnected and everywhere, we do need to have them here, finding out the proper use for power consumption and water consumption.”

Munson then brought up paid medical and family leave, asking whether anyone had been dealing with anything because a coworker was out. Denn said they have been able to find replacement work for the three employees at her small construction company through temp agencies.

“My position is I think paid family medical leave is great for some people,” Munson said. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all. If you are having problems hiring people or finding people for your industry, offer this benefit. There are thousands of companies in Minnesota that have been offering paid family leave for decades.”

On the subject raised by an attendee of disability fraud and the disabled people impacted by it, Olson said this is something they have gotten a start on by passing a bill to open the Office of the Inspector General.

“When I was a small-town mayor, the attorney would say that you can do whatever you want until someone tells you that you can’t, which means someone sues you and the judge tells you you can’t do it,” he said. “Now we finally have someone in the state government who will say you can’t do that, and that’s the real benefit of what we’ve got. It’s an embarrassment that we had to create an independent agency to look at this situation, because it’s gone too far afoot.”

In rectifying this, Munson acknowledged that innocent people could be caught in the process.

“Everybody wants, they demand there be cuts,” he said. “They demand that we need to get rid of the fraud. In trying to systematically remove fraud quickly, there are going to be legitimate recipients who are cut or get delays, or providers that have to go through more paperwork in order to prove they’re authentic. We’re hearing from those people, like, ‘Hey, I’m legitimate, I got cut off.’ Well, just be patient, work through it, you’re going to be paid eventually, that kind of thing.”

The meeting ended with Munson providing two QR codes for people to scan if they wished. One was a nine-question survey on legislative priorities, while the other allowed participants to submit a bill idea of their own to Munson for review.

To access this survey, visit jeremymunson.com/priorities. To submit a bill idea, visit jeremymunson.com/cs.