(uplifting music) - [Narrator] Welcome to "Meet the Candidates," the local election forum from Pioneer PBS.

This season, we ask every candidate the same list of questions to learn more about what type of legislator they will be if elected.

In this episode, we will meet candidates from Minnesota House District 21A.

District lines have changed since the 2020 Census.

District 21A is made up of Lincoln, Pipestone, Rock, Murray, and portions of Cottonwood and Nobles Counties.

Major cities include Pipestone, Luverne, and Slayton.

To find out which district you live in, visit mnvotes.org.

And now, let's meet the candidates.

We'll start with the Independence Alliance Party candidate Credence Petrov.

- Hello everyone.

My name's Credence Petrov.

I'm an Independent candidate for District 21A.

I've been running for nearly a year now, and it's been great to be able to reach out to my constituents and get to know their concerns.

Many may wonder how a 20, almost 21-year-old can represent a community, because many assume that since I'm so young that I do not have the experience to do so.

But I believe from my life of having been raised by a single mother who raised three children, working three jobs, barely making it by while dealing with her own addiction and alcoholism problems has proven quite well that I've gone through a lot, including going with having barely enough food on the table with also not having clean drinking water, and even at times not being able to wear clean clothes or take a heated shower because we didn't have enough money to pay the bills or even to get laundry detergent.

And I believe that I am the fit candidate in this race because I'm ready to put people over politics and work with anyone I can in order to get the job done.

I'm ready to put the people first and stop the theater in politics.

- [Narrator] Why do you want to be the representative for your district?

- Well, my slogan says it all: people over politics.

I believe that people are tired of electing politicians to go to St. Paul, and they do absolutely nothing for us.

They sit there, they put on this theater, they accept their special interest money while taking our tax payer money, and they just vote against our own interests.

And I believe that we need a leader who's gonna be willing to work with both sides and doesn't just shut one sider out like we saw in the 2023 state legislator session.

We need to be able to come up with solutions and stop decriminalizing the words compromise and bipartisanship, and that is what I believe I can bring to the table.

- [Narrator] What are your priorities for the next legislative session?

- Well, I'll list my top priority, and you can find the rest on my website at www.credenceforminnesota.com.

My top priority is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Now many people have two concerns when it comes to this.

The first being, how will this put strain on small businesses?

Well, in Minnesota, you may not know, we have brackets for wages, wages for the small businesses and wages for big businesses.

This will have no effect on small businesses because we will only be raising it on the people that can afford it, the corporations that make billions of dollars.

As for the second concern, many people are concerned, how will this affect them at the price tag?

And my solution is simple.

It will be to split the corporate tax into two brackets along the same lines of wages and cut it for big business down to 5% and for small businesses down to 2%, as well as closing loopholes and reforming corporate welfare.

This will not only help at the price tag, but this will also help by expanding and encouraging economic growth.

And this will be a good compromise for both the right and left, because the right likes to champion on tax cuts, and the left likes to champion on wage increases.

And that will be my top priority when I enter the state legislator office.

- [Narrator] What unique perspective do you bring to the Minnesota House?

- Well, I believe that both my youth and my life experience brings so much to what the office brings, because too often we are electing people who are out of touch with their constituents.

Too often we are electing people who don't know what they're talking about, and think that they can govern over professionals.

What I bring is my experience as having grown in a impoverished community and having grown up with people who have struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.

I believe that I can bring a unique perspective, and also be able to bring in new faces and bring back power to my district.

- [Narrator] What is your vision for the future of Minnesota?

- My vision is simple.

It is to make sure that both the people who are currently living and the people who will inhabit our land will be able to function and have a growing family, and will have be able to afford the food that they put on the table and the clothes that they put on the backs.

And I believe also being able to have even a little extra money to go on a vacation here and there.

That's what the American Dream is about.

And I believe that even though right now it is not the best at functioning, that we can still bring it back to life and that we can bring it to the next generation.

And I believe it's not too late to do so.

- [Narrator] And now a closing statement.

- It was very nice to be able to answer the questions.

I believe that I can best represent our district because I don't believe my opponent has done enough, and that's why I'm running, and that's why I said it to both the major parties, the middle finger to them, because I went out and got over 500 signatures in order to get on the ballot, talking directly to the people, something that I don't believe my opponent has done well enough.

And I believe that in order to get our state forward back on track and listening to all voices, not just the people that we want to hear from, we need to put people or politics.

I can't say that well enough.

Again, if you want to find out more, go to my website, creedenceforminnesota.com.

And I encourage you to look at everything on there, and really reach out to me if you want to.

I'm all ears when it comes to this, and I'm willing to fight for you.

I'm willing to get up there and be able to be a voice for the people that have been forgotten and left behind.

Let's do this, people.

- [Narrator] You can find more information online about Creedence Petroff at his campaign Facebook page.

Creedence Petrov for Minnesota State Representative District 21A.

Next, the Republican Party candidate, Joe Schumacher.

- Hello, I'm Joe Schumacher.

I'm Southwest Minnesota's State representative.

I'm a small business owner in Laverne, Minnesota with my parents and brother.

We own a cleaning company, an appliance and mattress store, and a sodium fabric store.

And so I get to see firsthand what it's like to run a business in our part of the region.

We set that up in order to make sure that people didn't have to go to Sioux Falls for every little thing that they needed to shop for in town and to try and keep the community thriving.

And it's been challenging over the last couple of years to do that.

And we're experiencing a lot of the decisions made at the Capitol firsthand in our business, but we're also seeing the resiliency of people in southwestern Minnesota, and are thankful for that.

I spent the last more than decade in the legislature serving the people of Southwestern Minnesota, and currently I serve on the Ways and Means Committee, the Economic Development Committee.

And I am the Republican lead on the Health Finance Committee.

I'm born and raised in Rock County, graduated from Laverne High School, and Southwest Minnesota State University and the George Washington University.

After graduation, I moved back home in order to start our businesses and to try and keep Southwest Minnesota Strong.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] Why do you want to be the representative for your district?

- I wanna be the representative for Southwestern Minnesota because we deserve to have someone who shares the values of the majority of the people in our region.

Too often we get to hear about what the metro is up to and and what they're thinking, or a loud minority of people tries to control the agenda and we just don't need that.

We need someone who knows and understands Southwestern Minnesota, who understands how hardworking we are, what our schools are like, what our roads are like, and is able to advocate for that in a sensible way up at the Capitol.

I am not the type of person who throws bombs and gives long speeches on the House floor.

It's not something I've ever been willing to do really, because that's not the type of representative I think that Southwest Minnesota wants.

They want someone who's going to under represent the majority, but also understand where the minority is coming from with their pieces.

They don't want to be just a one party type of district.

They want to be a district that has a representative who gets things done.

And that's where I've always come from with that.

One area where we had success in that over the last legislative session was in the area of lead pipe development and the getting those lead pipes out of communities.

I heard about this bill in the workforce, the Economic Development Committee, and immediately signed onto that bill and tried to lead it from a Republican perspective, even though a Democrat was carrying that bill, because it was the right thing to do for our communities.

Water infrastructure is so important to many of us, and so I wanted to make sure that we were able to get that.

The Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities, which is one of the leaders in advocacy for in southwestern Minnesota, recognized that and gave me a distinguished leadership award for that work of working across the aisle to get something done.

What I just saw it as something that Southwest Minnesota expected.

And it was a great honor to get that, and I'm happy to work on those types of issues in order to see Southwest Minnesota stay strong.

- [Narrator] What are your priorities for the next legislative session?

- There's really only one priority that we should be working on as a state in the next legislative session, and that's the economy.

Now, the state doesn't control the economy overall, but it does have a pretty big influence, not only in the amount of money that it spends, but also on the types of things that people are able to spend their money on.

And so in the last two years, we've seen a struggling economy overall.

I see it in my own business.

I see it from other business owners that I talk to, both in our region, across the state, across the country.

The amount of inflation that's been impacting people's pocketbooks, not only in the products that we sell and to the services that we do, but also just in the overall, the needs of what they have.

It's becoming more and more expensive to live in this state.

And so when we see the rising cost of things like our energy, we have to ask ourselves, is our electric bill higher because of the legislature two years ago passing a bill to have 20/40 mandates put across?

When we look at the cost of groceries at the grocery store and how expensive that's getting, we have to ask ourselves is that because of the policies that were put in place that hindered farmers' ability to do the work that they need to do in an efficient manner?

And we've all seen our homeowners insurance go up over the last year, or we're getting those notices now.

And in those letters that I received and many of my neighbors received, it blamed the legislature specifically for the reason that these rates were going up.

What kind of economy is going to be able to sustain that; when the government's putting regulations in, that's going to draw out money from the consumers, from our taxpayers pocketbooks.

For these essential pieces, it doesn't leave money for the rest of it.

And so if we're going to continue down a path that has a stronger economy, we need to get out of the way of innovation and try to bring more regulation relief to people to drive those costs down.

- [Narrator] What unique perspective do you bring to the Minnesota House?

My unique perspective is that I'm a small business owner, and I live and die by the decisions that are made both in our business and at the state for when it comes to the way that businesses are allowed to operate.

Now we've seen this in the last two years how the regulations that we're on big businesses before were all of a sudden scaled down.

They weren't actually scaled down, they were driven down to the single employer type of business.

So it used to be that if I had 50 or more employees, a certain regulation would apply to me.

Now, it's down to if I have one employee, that applies to me, and I'm able to bring a perspective that sees not only how that's going to impact smaller businesses, businesses that are just trying to thrive, that try to stay away from the big box mentality, the big box model of things that's a little more personal and a little more relational with our customers.

Trying to keep that focus is so hard to do in a state that is really pushing down a lot of these mandates that just don't work for for people.

And so, bringing that perspective is unique.

I also work to get both sides together on things that they actually want to see done.

I've always said that I'm willing to work with anybody who's actually looking for a solution.

When I don't work with you, it's because you're either not looking for an actual solution, you're looking for a talking point, or you're looking to move the goalpost.

I can't work with people like that.

We saw in this last legislative session when legislative leaders came down to a deal on the end of session, and if we could end on a timely manner, we had to do it with nursing home funding also being part of the package.

And I was brought in to negotiate that final package for nursing home funding.

There were four legislators at the end of that piece that we're working on that, both Republicans and Democrats.

And we were able to bring different perspectives in, mine on a historical basis for what it's like to work in a nursing home and what it's like to operate in a nursing home, and the history of our funding system.

I was able to use that experience in those negotiations to get that done, and we were happy to do that on a bipartisan basis.

- [Narrator] What is your vision for the future of Minnesota?

- My vision for the future of Minnesota is to have it be less metro-centric.

We see a lot of the policies that are being pushed forward as a one-size-fits-all type of approach.

And those one sizes are coming out of the metro area and being applied to things statewide.

We see it, I talked about that with what our businesses have experienced.

We see it in our school districts, and the one-size-fits-all platforms that have been pushed down from there.

We hear about how schools got historic amounts of funding over the last two years, but when you start to look at the amount of regulations that they have also to endure, the cost of those new regulations exceeds what they were able to receive in new funding.

And so we see examples like that.

We see examples in our transportation funding, and why we're able to afford a high speed rail system from Minneapolis to Duluth, but we can't fix our roads and bridges out here in southwestern Minnesota.

It just doesn't get that far in the overall policies.

We gotta get beyond the metro focus in there.

We gotta get beyond the top down that St. Paul knows best and everyone else should just fall in line.

We do things differently out here.

We do things better out here.

We have different circumstances, different opportunities than what they have in Minneapolis.

And while I can advocate for that, if we're not successful with it in the advocacy, we're still going to have to live under those regulations and we shouldn't have to do that.

I think we'll be able to be successful in this in due time, and I think we'll be able to mark that success when I stopped getting asked the question of how hard it would be to move the South Dakota line over east by just a few miles - [Narrator] And now, a closing statement.

- Well, thank you again for the opportunity to serve you in the Minnesota legislature.

It continues to be an honor and a privilege.

Over the last two years, it's been a little bit more of a struggle to get through with that.

We've had single party control for the last two years.

We saw governments spend 30% more than what they had before.

They took a $17 billion surplus, added $10 billion in new taxes, and now we're facing a deficit going into the next budget.

And so 30% more spending throughout the state.

We're not seeing 30% better roads.

We're not seeing 30% smarter students.

We're not seeing 30% safer streets, but we still see Minnesota trying to become a leader in ideology, and not a leader in solutions.

And we need to get beyond that.

I so appreciate the amount of outpouring of support that I have received over the last two years.

I've gotten text messages, emails, phone calls, people stop me in the street, people stop me at the county fairs just to tell me to stay encouraged and to keep my chin up with everything that's been going on.

And I just have to say thank you for that.

It has been a difficult two years to serve in the legislature, but it's never stopped being an honor for that.

And it's because of the outpouring of support that I've received from people that are watching this today, and that just means a lot to me and gives me the encouragement to keep going, to keep working on behalf of the people of southwestern Minnesota, and to do the job in the way that you expect me to do.

So thank you again for the opportunity.

I'm asking for your support in this election so that we can can continue to move this state in the right direction, and move it in a different direction that makes it the right direction.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] You can find more information online about Joe Schumacher at his website, joeforhouse.com.

Learn more about voting, how to register, and what district you live in by visiting the Minnesota Secretary of State website, at mnvotes.org.

Remember, election day is Tuesday, November 5th.

Thank you for watching "Meet the Candidates" on Pioneer PBS.