Since winning the primary over former governor Tim Pawlenty in August, Jeff Johnson has been busy touring around Minnesota and said it’s been important for him to make
greater Minnesota a priority both in his campaign and once elected to office. On Friday Johnson met with more than 40 local residents at RBJs in Crookston both talking about his plans for office and having a discussion about what was important to constituents in our community. Johnson said he was very glad to see a wide representation of the local population come out and he learned a few things he’ll be looking into.
“We met with a broad swath of the community, we had teachers, small business people, farmers, government officials and this is what I love about campaigning,” Johnson said. “I’ve been on the campaign trail for a year and four months and I learned three brand new things today about issues people haven’t brought up before.”
Some of the issues brought up to Johnson by local community members included transportation concerns regarding local roads not able to handle the heavy loads that are prominent during harvest season, that current state regulations regarding federal agencies to approve local transportation increases the deterioration of the roadways. The recent changes to teacher licensing having a long-term negative impact on education and that Minnesota may have one of the highest rates of high school graduates going out-of-state for post-secondary education and finding a way to reverse that trend.
Johnson also spent time going over some of his platform, including some of what he felt was important to the local community, “number one I believe Minnesotans are overtaxed, number two that they are very worried about insurance and I want to force more competition into the system. We did healthcare better ten years ago then we do today and we need to back to that system.”
Johnson concluded the discussion, by stating his number one priority will be reviving the bill from the last legislative session that was vetoed in May which focused on state-federal tax code alignment intended to prevent major filing headaches for Minnesotans when filing next years taxes. Johnson expressed the importance of that bi-partisan bill to himself and to the state and said he intends to work on getting that re-addressed even before officially in office as the governor-elect.
Johnson speaking to the crowd at RBJ’s
