DFL candidate forum held in Red Lake

      (RLNN) - The first of two scheduled candidate forums for House 2B potential DFL candidates took place on Tuesday, October 21, 2003, at Red Lake Tribal Council Headquarters.

      These candidate forums, designed to draw attention to interested candidates, is a process used to find Democrats to run in state House seats in 2004.

      At Red Lake’s forum, three potential candidates were there consisting of Mark Edevold, the DFL nominee in 2002, Quentin Fairbanks, a Red Lake members and current Beltrami County Commissioner, along with newcomer Brita Sailer of Park Rapids who has been the Hubbard County DFL chairwoman for several years.

      Last year Edevold, a field agent for the North Central Regional Council of Carpenters, came out on top in a five-way Democrat endorsement battle, facing a DFL primary with Fairbanks. Edevold won that primary 1,350 to Fairbanks’ 852, but went on to lose the general election to Republican Doug Lindgren of Bagley who garnished 51% of the votes

      In the 4B House seat, Democrats hope to also find a candidate to face incumbent Rep. Doug Fuller of Bemidji, who last year received 56.1 percent of the vote over DFLer Monte Hammitt of Bemidji.

      The three potential candidates introduced themselves to an audience of about 20 people, and presented some of their ideas.

      Edevold said it didn’t feel good not to win, when he lost to Lindgren in 2002, and he planned on working very hard to try and win this time around.

      “For District 2B, I think more than a lot of other districts, it is so critical that we get a good, strong DFL represented elected,” he said. “This area needs a DFL prespective, it needs a DFL voice down in St. Paul. The Republican Party is not going to serve us well.”

      He said he lived in Bagley, was fourth generation in that area on both sides of his family, and both he and his wife had deep roots in this area.

      Edevold worked for the Lakes and Plains Regional Council of Carpenters, Carpenter’s Union in shorthand, and he has been there for about three years. He said that job took him all over northwest Minnesota.

      “As a candidate, and as a elected official, what I want to do is take the job that I do now for carpenters and expand that job to everyone in the district, so that I’m working towards helping everyone in the district have better jobs, health insurance, pensions, and that ability to retire with dignity, because that’s what it’s all about,” he said.

      He said having been through this once before he goes into it with eyes wide-oped knowing what it’s going to take, as it takes a lot.

      Brita Sailer said she was married for twenty-eight years, they had two grown sons, owned her own consultant business, and was the Hubbard County DFL chairwoman.

      Her business dealt with household hazardous waste in managing it and getting rid of it, recycling education pieces for the county of Hubbard, and grant writing.

      Fairbanks said he was born and raised on the Red Lake Reservation, the eldest of eight children, and left Red Lake to go into the service. From there he attended UMD in Duluth and graduated with a business degree, but ended up working fifteen years on the Minnesota Highway Patrol.

      He said he had three children, very well educated, and he believed strongly in education.

      “I came back to Red Lake fourteen years ago, and since then I’ve been very involved,” he said. “I work here on the reservation, I write grants, I work with elderly maintenance programs, and I’ve done just about anything that’s come along. I wrote a grant for $3 million for the Water Plant here we have going–we’re going to get that back started up. I started the Fire Department, those grants for the Fire Department and so forth.”

      He said since he’s been back he has been really involved. He said he was presently chairman of the Beltrami County Board and belonged to numerous other boards.

      “I think that I have the experience to serve as representative 2B,” he said. “I have the background for it, I have the education for it, and I have the belief in it.”

      He also said he couldn’t count his generations.

      The three candidates answered questions presented by the audience and read by Beltrami County DFL Secretary and moderator of the event, Onen Markeson. The questions involved education, the economy, taxes, and health insurance.

      In enhancing public education in Minnesota, Sailer said the first thing that needed to be done was the establishment of a secure funding base that will serve equitably for rural schools, as well as schools in the metro area.

      Fairbanks said Charter Schools was really a bad situation. He said that although they sound like a good idea, they go against the entire public education system because they can choose their students.

      “The other thing is, why should we have schools every fifteen miles?” he said. “These colleges, technical schools, there’s just so many of them. We’re diluting our school system by so many various types of school. And I don’t know if they’re doing their job, because I deal with some technical schools and I just shake my head at them because I don’t think they have any direction where they’re going.”

      He added that at one time he thought they were great, but they outlived their life right now.

      Edevold said the key thing was, that Minnesota was known nationwide as the education state.

      “I grew up, and many of you grew up, in a state that prided itself in high quality education for everyone,” he said. “I have been mildly disturbed over the last ten or twenty years to see that the quality education system we have, kind of chipped away at. There’s sort of this notion that if you’re rich enough you get a better education, and if you’re poor enough well it doesn’t matter, you don’t need much of an education.”

      He said the number one thing was that Minnesota needed to recommit itself to education, to go back to that commitment of years ago. It was an educated workforce and an educated population that’s going to take us into the 21^st Century, keep Minnesota on top, keep wages up, and keep life good.

      “This program we went through a couple years ago of shifting the funding of education away from property taxes on to income taxes, was a very good idea,” he said. “That’s why it gained a lot of support. Unfortunately, it got turned into kind of a gimmick to provide tax cuts for the wealthy and to cut off the funding to schools in the rural areas. That needs to change...”

      On the topic of prevailing wage laws on construction projects, Fairbanks said it was a very good thing because it gives a living wage and was a uniform system.

      Edevold said he knew a lot about prevailing wages since he dealt with that in his work.

      “Prevailing wages are set throughout Minnesota based on surveys done by the Dept. Of Labor and those wages are based on the most common wage paid within an area,” he explained. “So for Beltrami County they have a certain prevailing wage rate that’s based on the most common wage paid in that area.”

      He said the whole concept of prevailing wage is to create a level playing field on the bidding process, to take wages basically out of the bidding process.

      “The whole purpose of the prevailing wage law is to keep the erosion of those wages, because there’s always someone, some contractor, who says they’ll do it for a couple dollars less, and the next go around, I’ll do it for a couple dollars even less than that, and the next thing we know...we face a lot of pressure here from North Dakota, people willing to work for significantly less.

      “On the face of it, when you’re trying to build a school or trying to build a project, you say, well wouldn’t it be better if we had people building it for less because we’d save all this money. The problem is then, that you have people who actually become ‘users’ of public services, not ‘supporters’ of public services. What you want are construction workers who have health insurance, who have pensions, who have sufficient money to go buy things in the stores and to be assets to the community–not just to be cheap labor to get a cheap project done.”

      Edevold said that prevailing wages were a very necessary component to keeping up a high quality, skilled workforce, to keep them working, compensated adequately, so that construction could become a good career.

      Sailer thanked Edevold for the good lesson on prevailing. She said she has had some contacts with just trying to set up building projects in the counties she’s worked with. She also admitted she wasn’t well-versed in prevailing wage laws, but she always believed that communities were stronger when people were paid a decent wage, when they could afford to pay for their services they need and don’t have to move away, so they can afford to pay their taxes which made the whole thing go around.

      Fairbanks, in addressing that issue, said his voting record with Beltrami County was very strong union.

      In answering a question about what the biggest issue was facing District 2B, Sailer said the economy was a very big issue and overriding for everything else. She said agriculture, education and health care also fit right into that category.

      “When students travel from one school to the next school, to the next school and bringing problems with them and those sorts of things, that–maybe not documented very well until he gets to that school–I think there’s some issues with that,” she said.

      Fairbanks said health care was the biggest issue because we had a growing, aging population.

      “Along with that, immigration is coming into the cities and they’re coming up here and retiring,” he said. “You can see what’s happening in Bemidji with the hospitals and Medicare is really growing. But we need it in rural areas.”

      He also mentioned what Kelliher did to their old school. It started out as a small project and it turned out they ended up taking the whole school and revamped it, where they took and set up a little clinic.

      “They’ve been doing testing and so forth through Bemidji clinic, to come up there once a week–they’re not paying for it and not making money on it–but they’re getting referrals,” Fairbanks said. “What they’re finding out is unbelievable. Some of these people up in that area have never gone to a doctor for fifteen years. They’re testing, pap-smears are coming back, all the various tests are coming back positive and they’re shipping these people away down to Bemidji, to the hospital and so forth, and they’re saving their lives....”

      Fairbanks also said we had to find a way to keep our young people in this area. It was very important and that was our future.

      “We are getting to be a very old population,” he said. “We lose that (the young people), this will just turn into a nice hunting ground for Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

      In talking about the question of the Minnesota budget deficit, Fairbanks said taxes were definitely going to have to be increased. He said Beltrami County just went through a $2.5 million shortfall

      “It comes right down, if you want the service, you’re going to have to pay for it,” he said.

      Edevold said the tax question was one that every Democrat fears because one had to talk about reality.

      “As Quinten said, we have to pay for what we get,” he said. “Then we get labeled, oh there goes those tax and spend Democrats. Well somehow we’ve got to start getting that notion back that, the goal of Minnesota has always been–and we’ve gotten away from this–to tax fairly, to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share, and to make sure that those tax dollars are invested wisely...”

      He said those tax dollars pay for roads, schools, help with hospitals and etc.

      “All the gimmickery and sloganism that went on last year, no new taxes, get rid of taxes and cut taxes, all that really does is just hurts us as a state, and I think more people are recognizing it, seeing it–be careful what you wish for,” he said. “Nobody wants to pay taxes. I suspect nobody pays more than they are required to pay. But, it’s a thing we do as a responsible member of society, we pay our fair share of taxes to help support the education system and all of that.”

      Edevold said one of the first steps was to roll-back some of the tax cuts that were implementing a couple of years ago. He said we survived the 90s at a certain tax rate–doing very well with that–and if we survived then with those rates, he thought we could survive again.

      “Well I think we already are paying the taxes, it’s just that now we call them fees,” Sailer said. “There’s a higher fee for everything in the court system. I was looking at this list of what Minnesotans now pay in fees. I think you pay, or you pay–you can call it taxes or you can call it fees–but ultimately it still ends up coming out of pockets of people.”

      When asked about the Leave No Child Behind Legislation and the state funding of schools, Edevold said that it seemed like ‘Leave No Child Behind’ kind of turned into ‘Leave No Rich Child Behind’.

      “What we know is class sizes are still increasing, we’re seeing more difficulty in funding, schools are having a harder time making it–we need to do better,” he said. “The State of Minnesota, we the people of Minnesota, need to make that recommitment to education both K-12, Post-Secondary, Vo-Tech, in an educated workforce, an educated population, is what made Minnesota, and what’s going to make Minnesota again.”

      Sailer said that simply stated, ‘Leave No Child Behind’, she thought it stunk.

      “I think it’s not good,” she said. “I haven’t heard anybody involved with education that thought anything very highly of it.”

      She said she just learned things about schools through her work and contacts with educators.

      “They come out with a program, Outcome Based Education, okay--fine,” she said. “So that’s what we have and they have to work on that. Well then, all of a sudden it’s shifted. Now we have to go to the Profiles of Learning. They struggled through that, kind of made that start to work, with the funding coming the project–where they send out teachers to be trained and then they come back and try to get everybody on the staff up to par with this program. So they sort of get a handle on that and then a few years later now we’re investing another program. It just seems to me like it’s a terrible waste of time of our educators, because instead of being out there doing what they can do best–working with the students and the children because after all that’s what we’re about with education–they are revamping rules, working towards tests, and sometimes even the rules, as I understand with the latest Pawlenty change, now the standards came out and they had to be done so quickly, that people were kind of throwing things together.”

      She said the tests they were dealing with actually came from before, so they were dealing with different testing for what they were teaching to.

      “They might teach to one thing and test to another and no wonder our kids don’t look like they’re doing so well,” she said.

      Fairbanks said, Leave No Child Behind was just another gimmick, and they come out every two-three years with a new gimmick–and he wondered who made these things up.

      “But there is something wrong with our whole educational system,” he said. “When we give superintendents and administrators the packages and the salaries–we pay them more than we pay our governor, sometimes more than we pay our president–it just doesn’t make sense. We look at our colleges, what are they doing with athletes? They’re driving Mercedes-Benz. And these people aren’t coming from Minnesota, they’re coming from Pennsylvania, Mississippi...”

      Fairbanks also talked about big fancy school buildings with auditoriums that were unbelievable, and with that, we weren’t putting money into education, but instead putting money into monuments for superintendents and the school board.

      Discussions also included the high cost of tuition for education, higher education, taxes, technical colleges, health care, community ownership and other subjects.