 Thank you. Debate Night 2018 is sponsored in part by AFSCME Council 5, a statewide union of more than 40,000 public employees working together to let candidates who represent the values of real Minnesotans. Lakeland PBS, the Bemidji Pioneer, the Brainer Dispatch, and Northern Community Radio are proud to present Debate Night 2018, a look at our area of legislative candidates, and now the State House of Representatives District 5A Debate. Your moderator tonight is Bethany Wesley. Good evening and welcome back to Debate Night 2018. We are featuring seven state legislative debates this week over four nights of television. Tonight we're live from our Lakeland PBS studio in Bemidji and we are continuing our debates with the candidates running for District 5A. John Purcell to the far right, from the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and Matt Bliss from the Republican Party. Our panel tonight features from my left, Dennis Wyman, News Director for Lakeland PBS, Matthew Lidkey, Government Reporter for the Bemidji Pioneer, and Heidi Holton, the News and Public Affairs Director for Northern Community Radio, KAXE, and KBXE. Now the rules for tonight's debate. Each candidate will get three minutes for an opening statement. Afterwards, our panelists will begin asking questions of our candidates. Some of these questions will be of the panelists' own choosing, others may come from the public. The order of the candidate's responses will be rotated, beginning with opening statements and finishing with their closing statements. Each candidate will have two minutes for each question. Each candidate will also have the opportunity for a one-minute rebuttal. Tonight, each candidate also will have the option of a one-minute bonus time to add on to one of their answers. This can be used during the answer to the initial question or during the rebuttal, but it can only be used once. Questions will continue until we are about 50 minutes into the debate, at which time we will move on to closing comments. Closing comments will be two minutes each. Okay? We're ready to begin. Opening the debate tonight will be John Purcell. John, your opening statement, please. Thank you and greetings to our viewing audience this evening. I'm glad to be back in front of you here. My name is John Purcell. Some of you may remember I served in the state legislature for eight years. I'm a resident of the Bemidji area. I live about halfway between Bemidji and Cast Lake, and I worked over in Cast Lake for the last 40 years, 28 of those years being the director of a small business for the tribe over there, and most recently working on trying to clean up the St. Regis Superfund site, if any of you have heard of that debacle over in Cast Lake. So I'm married to wife Teresa, and between us we have eight children, ten grandchildren, and we don't get to spend enough time with the grandchildren, but I'm sure a number of you know how that goes, but we sure make that effort. I'm just happy to be running again as a Democrat farmer-labor party member, and looking forward to using my legislative experience to do good for all of Minnesotans back in the state legislature. There's a lot of work to be done. We all know the needs in health care and tax reform, mental health, education. The list goes on and on of things that we need to do and address for all of our communities, and we can do that. There's plenty of funding to go around if we just use it wisely and push forward with what we need to do to take care of all Minnesotans. So I look forward to being with you this evening and addressing the questions that are posed to us, so thank you for watching. Thank you, John. Matt. Hi, I'm state representative Matt Bliss. Two years ago I sat in this very chair and asked for you to put your trust in me and elect me as your state representative, and I want to thank you for granting me that privilege. Representing the great people of District 5A in St. Paul has truly been an honor. Over the past two years I've strived to be worthy of that honor. I've worked on legislation that impacts not only northern Minnesota but the entire state as well. In 2017, in my first term in the legislature, we provided tax cuts to nearly 284,000 senior citizens who pay taxes in Minnesota. We ended the crippling cycle of double-digit premium increases and stopped surprise billing. We worked, we provided additional $1,200 in child care assistance to working families making less than $50,000 a year. We provided more than $300 million in roads and bridges funding without raising the gas tax. Our local schools in Bemidji, Walker, and Cass Lake have nearly $4 million in increased funding this biennium overlast. And that's not including the assistance we've given Bemidji school district to address their bussing shortfall. My provision to eliminate tax on fiber and conduit has increased the funding available to provide broadband to our rural areas. We provided $22.5 million to Bemidji State University to replace the out-of-date and failing Hague Sauer building. And we're finally able to secure $12.4 million in state funding for the northern Minnesota Veterans Home in Bemidji. As someone who's served in the U.S. Navy and have a very rich family history of combat and non-combat veterans, from my seven uncles who served in World War I, only six of which returned to my father who enlisted here in Bemidji shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and served in the Pacific Theater, and my brother who served in Vietnam. I'll always fight to ensure our veterans are taken care of and get the care that they deserve. As the Vice Chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee in St. Paul, I have authored several veterans-related bills that have been signed into law, from eliminating predatory lending to our vulnerable veterans and spouses to providing funding for homeless vets. When I took office in 2017, health insurance costs in the individual market were spiraling out of control, with double-digit increases every year, including as much as 67 percent in 2017. We were able to pass an emergency premium relief, one-time premium relief, that had a positive effect and it slowed the increase in premiums. And in 2019, the projections are that we're going to see decreases, maybe even double-digit decreases in premiums. We eliminated surprise billing that impacted thousands of Minnesotans who are working within their plan network, only to receive billing from out of network services. More work remains, but we'll continue to strive to reduce health care costs overall. I look forward to tonight's debate to highlight the differences between myself and my opponent. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Our first question will come from Dennis Wyman. All right. Well, thank you very much, Bethany. I'd like to thank both of you for joining us tonight. It's always great to hear your views on a variety of topics, which we hope to address here tonight. Now, the question I'm going to ask is in regards to the economy. How do you feel the economy is doing in general for the state of Minnesota and more specifically for your district? And what would you do to help improve or spur a stronger economy in the future? Matt, your answer first. Well, the economy in Minnesota has improved over the past few years. We are growing at a slower rate than our neighbors. I think the tax bill that was passed at the federal level certainly assisted the economy in our area. Unfortunately, we were unable to pass a conformity bill this past year. So we were not able to fully appreciate the tax benefits at the state, at the federal level. Regulations on our businesses are burdensome and definitely slowing the economic growth and the rebound. We need to remove regulations in a responsible manner to make sure that our natural resources are protected, our environment is protected. But we do need to ensure that the businesses can grow when they need to. Thank you, Matt. John. Thank you. I believe our economy is chucking along pretty good. Excuse me. And it's been going on since we came out of the great recession as it were, which was going on when I first came into office in 2009. One of the things that helped spur the economy is certainly the good work of all Minnesotans and we've endeavored to keep our road and bridge infrastructure what it needs to be. We have a lot of work to do there, but with a tourism economy pushing, I think, $14-15 billion in Minnesota now, that's very dependent as much of our economic growth in Minnesota on having good roads and bridges. So we need to keep pushing things forward. I'm not aware that there's overburdened some regulations at this point. I'm certainly willing to address those if they are brought forward and we can learn to understand them. But we just need to keep moving forward in a way that we promote good economic development, small business development, renewable energy development. I think renewable energy is definitely part of our future. We know it is. We're making solar panels up on the iron range now. That can be expanded. So if we keep moving in a good, deliberate fashion, Minnesota is going to be fine, I believe. We just have to keep using our common sense for the common good as it were. Thank you, John. Matt, did you have a rebuttal? One thing I did want to add is one of the things that we saw in the bonding bill this past year was some construction projects here locally. Once we get the federal match and the BSU building and the federal match for the Bemidji Veterans Home, that's going to be $60 million in bonding construction jobs for the Bemidji area, Bemidji and surrounding areas. That's an incredible growth opportunity and we need to really make sure that we're training people in the trades to take part of the growing opportunities, the construction trades. We're really, really short staffed on the construction trades. So I'd like to see more of that. Okay. Thank you, Matt. John, a rebuttal? I would just add that and I represent Bliss brought up the Veterans Home and I'm proud of the 10 years that I've put in in getting that Veterans Home off on the rails and I'm happy that Matt Bliss was able with the rest of the legislature and our government to bring that forward. We have work to do and we have to keep that communication going with our federal government to make that Veterans Home a reality. So that's all. Thank you. Our next question will come from Matthew Lidkey. Beltrami County is already a financially stressed county and recently officials have been bringing up the fact that it is approaching a fiscal cliff. This is partially because of a major foster care crisis. I was wondering what can be done in St. Paul to assist Beltrami County as it goes through this troubling financial situation? John, your response? Thank you. Certainly, that is an issue for Beltrami County, the out of home placement with the low tax base that we have in Beltrami County and other counties are facing similar circumstances. I think just to sum it up in one item that the legislature could have done, there was a $19 million bill presented for local government aid and however it happened in that $19 million, and this is information from our local Beltrami County administrator, that $19 million would have funded the shortfall that counties are seeing across Minnesota. That whatever happened, that $19 million got cut down to $5 million. So fully funding LGA is very important, very important. They've always been an ardent supporter of local government aid, particularly our way we see it front and center because of a low tax base in the county, and it just helps support our basic services, police, the fire, and the out of home placement that we're seeing. We have to take care of children, we know that, we have to take care of elders, we know that. We just need to find the funding to do it and we do have that funding available to us. We just need to get it to where it needs to be. This is a very serious problem for Beltrami County. The out of home child placement has drained the county's reserves to almost nothing. If we continue down this road, the county will be probably the first county in the state to have to declare bankruptcy. I have met with party leadership in St. Paul to discuss this issue with them. It's on their radar, we'll be addressing it right away when we get back into session. We need to really look at this in the long term. There's a three pronged approach that we have to take. One is the vast majority of the out of home placements are for Red Lake children, and Red Lake really wants to take this on themselves and the Leech Lake Reservation and the White Earth Reservation are both pilot programs to address this problem within their own government agencies and within their borders. Currently right now, the Beltrami County is getting $3 million a year in aid, and they would be happy to transfer that up to the tribe. And again, the Red Lake Band is willing to do this and wanting to do this. That's the first step. The second step is, even if we were to fund this 100% today, the problem is being exacerbated by opioid abuse. The problems before the opioid abuse became this prevalent, we could get the child put back. That's the ultimate goal is to put the child back in the home. With the opioid epidemic, it takes more than a year to get these children back with the families and remove the danger. So that's a problem. We have to fix that. We have to fix the opioid epidemic. And that's a bigger problem on the whole, and we need to address that in St. Paul. The third part is, we need to make Beltrami County whole. We need to restore some of the money that they've expended on this and get their reserves back into the shape they're in. So again, it's a three-pronged approach. Just funding it financially would not fix the problem. Appreciate it. John, a rebuttal? Just to add, Mr. Bliss brought up the opioid crisis, and indeed, we have to address that, and we need to take it on full bore. Unfortunately, the Republican legislature really fell under duff on this one, because we had the opportunity, they had the opportunity to fund that penny appeal that would have helped the opioid crisis and would have helped out all of the counties across the state of Minnesota that are dealing with opioid crisis. So I certainly support that penny appeal, and if elected, I'm going to be back down there pushing for that penny appeal on the opioids. Thank you, John. Matt, a rebuttal? Just a real quick one. We did have money in the supplemental bonding or supplemental operating bill that would have addressed some opioid issues. Again, it wasn't nearly enough. We do need to address it fully, and this year we will be, that'll be probably one of the number one priorities we take up. Thank you. Heidi. We asked our listeners, KXE, KBXE for questions, and we had a post on our Facebook page. Charlie from Puposki wanted to ask both of you about recent federal and EPA rollbacks and how you think Minnesota should proceed to either support them or substitute state statutes to maintain the former standards. Matt, you're up first. Minnesota's always been a leader in the EPA. Most of our standards are more stringent than the federal governments to begin with. I think that's a double-edged sword. I think we need to definitely protect our natural resources and our fresh water, but at the same time, to really take stock of what the true cost, not only environmental, but also economic costs of these regulations. I'd like to see more stakeholders at the table when these rules are being developed, and we really need to get everybody involved and to make sure that the rules that we come up with work for everybody. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. As a chemist and environmental policy person over the last number of decades, I'd have to say, and I've done quite a bit of research on our natural resources in Minnesota, I'm not aware of any natural resource standards or regulations that need to be rolled back. I'm perplexed by what the federal government has proposed to do, particularly with regard to some of the air emissions. We know, for instance, that the mercury in our fish tissue has been increasing now for a couple of decades, and that's just unfortunate that that's allowed to go on, and we have to increase our diligence, I believe, in environmental policy to overcome that. I think all the audience likely knows that women of childbearing age in Minnesota can't eat a walleye that's over 20 inches long safely. That's a travesty. We know that's a travesty for Minnesota to be in that state. I know a regulation that the Republican legislature endeavored to overturn. It was a water quality. It was a sulfate standard for water that protects wild rice in Minnesota. Why they wanted to overturn that and do away with it, I have no idea, but that was one of the silliest things to come out of the legislature. Fortunately, Governor Dayton vetoed that law. Thank you, John. Matt, do you have a rebuttal? Yeah, John brought up the water sulfate standards, and the sulfate standard that's currently in place right now has been in place since the mid-70s and has never been enforced, never been enforced. The DNR and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency had been working in a partnership to develop standards that could be implemented. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency moved away from that, and they went out and started to develop their own standards, which, in their own literature, in their own studies, said that it could take up to 10 years to come up with a permit for plants, for water discharge. Minnesota businesses need regulatory certainty. What we had done was we said, and by the way, those new standards were not only rejected by an administrative law judge, but it was also the administrative law judge review. Thank you. Appreciate that. All right, John, a rebuttal? Well, it's certainly not an easy issue to try and talk about on the television, I'll tell you. There's a lot to this issue. Suffice to say that the science does support that we need to protect wild rice from sulfate pollutants, and there is an entity on the iron range that discharges that is being brought under that sulfate water quality standard, so it's not accurate to say that it's never been enforced. There is a permit in place, and we're looking into that across the state, but I can tell you, as one who's researched wild rice beds around northern Minnesota, we never found sulfate above about 5 milligram per liter with a 10 standard. Thank you. All right, we're going to go back to Dennis Weiman for our fourth question. Okay, school vouchers are state or school district-funded scholarships that allow students to attend a private school of the family's choice rather than sending the child to public school. Most states don't have them. D.C. and 13 states have offered school vouchers. Would you be in favor of school vouchers for Minnesota? John, you're up. I'll tell you that the school voucher issue is certainly one that has concerns for our school districts, and we, the taxpayers, and for instance, if too many students were pulled out of a school district through the voucher system, what would be the viability of that district and how many students would be in class? Would they still need the school size? We just built a new school out here in Bemidji, a new elementary school. Would we still need that? So I believe that the voucher system for education is one that has to be very carefully considered. Our constitution, our Minnesota constitution contains language that says we will educate our children and we need to provide funding to do that. But to have that in a system where we're going to have vouchers and who's keeping track of the credibility of the schools, we've had problems across the state with some charter schools and are they up to the par? Some are. Some aren't. And so we really need to take that on carefully. I want to see the language of any bill to know specifically how we're going to handle vouchers. Matt? School vouchers, I can't support school vouchers. I would rather see school tax credits going to the parents if they chose to put their students into private schools. The problem with school vouchers is it becomes government money and once the school takes government money, they have to come under government control. So the school vouchers per se I wouldn't support. I would support tax credits. I do agree with John that we need to be careful and make sure that these schools are up to standards. But I don't want the voucher being considered government money. As far as the schools failing and taking our public money, that's where market forces come in. If your student or your child is going to a private school and they're not up to stuff, you pull them out of that school and you put them in another one or you put them back to a good public school. My wife is a public school teacher and I don't take this issue lightly. I understand the need for the public schools and I support our public schools. We've increased funding for public schools. It's just, again, I would not support vouchers. I would support a tax credit system. I would have to review the language of the bill as well. Thank you. No, thanks. All right, question five will go to Matthew Litke. Matthew? Yes. I wanted to talk a little bit about workforce issues in terms of providing workforce housing and child daycare. It's something that is an issue, especially in rural communities like Black Duck, Black Duck just north of here. What can be done at the state level in St. Paul to help with the workforce issues of not enough housing and not enough daycare? Yeah. Well, first the housing issue. We need to really take a look at the affordable housing market in Minnesota. When you get the funding through the Minnesota Housing Project, I'm not sure the exact agency, they put all these requirements on the homes that really, really jack up the cost. And affordable housing, if you build through them, really doesn't become affordable housing. It's much more expensive to build through that. So we really need to look at those regulations and pare them down so that we're not putting overdue or overburden some regulations on building these homes to make them affordable for people to move into. As far as daycare goes, we've lost, in the last eight years, we've lost more than 25% of our daycare providers in Minnesota. That's horrible. The problem is that we are over-regulating these agencies. We want our children to be safe in these daycare facilities, but if we're over-regulating them to the point where more than 25% are getting out of the business and more are talking about getting out of the business, we're not going to have daycare in rural Minnesota. We can't have that, so we need to really review the regulations that are on these facilities and causing them to get out of the business. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. I certainly believe that with regard to the housing and affordable housing, that in many instances, the state can form a partnership and perhaps along with the federal government and with the employer. And ensure that good housing is provided. That's been an issue for some time and likely will continue. It's a hard one to solve, especially when businesses are growing and in need of additional housing, you know, every month or every six months. It's a good thing for our economy. It's a tough thing to meet those needs. And so I do believe that we can work together as federal, state, local governments and meet those needs. It certainly takes that partnership. I think similarly with childcare and in quality childcare. I mean, that's very important for these young children to have opportunities for learning wherever they are in childcare and they're likely in many instances and there is now and they're likely will continue to be a need for some subsidy, certainly in some areas of the state, because childcare is very expensive. Good quality childcare is very expensive, but we need to do that. We talk about closing the loop in how do we solve problems down the road with mental health issues or education issues. It all begins when they're children, so we need to be able to have good opportunities for those youngsters. Thank you. Matt, everybody? Real quick, just a quick example. There was a business in northern Minnesota that was adding a product line to their manufacturing. They have a lot of employees. The problem was that they didn't have housing for the new employees for this new product line and they had to move that production out of state, so we lost those employees because of the lack of housing, so we need to really focus on that. And also, back to the childcare subsidies, recent headlines down in Minneapolis, we've seen some multiple, multiple examples of abuse of the system. We really need to crack down on that. I've heard numbers as high as $150 million a year being taken out of the system by people that don't need it. They're just gaming the system. We could really use that $150 million to help offset some of the costs up here. Thank you, Matt. John? I definitely agree with what Mr. Blich just said. Anybody that's gaming the system needs to be held accountable. We don't have enough money the way it is, so we need to use it wisely. Thank you. Our next question comes from Heidi. We have heard from people that they're getting weary of politics and partisanship. Sometimes it makes them not want to go to the polls or get involved in their communities, and they often feel like their elected officials follow their party's politics and don't always serve all the constituents that they represent. I'm wondering your thoughts on this and perhaps examples of how you've worked with people outside your parties and how you would do this if you're the next representative of District 5A. John? Well, certainly you don't have to walk very far, very fast to find folks that are disenchanted with our current political system. And, you know, what you see going on, it's at your own deputation that you start talking about national politics now because it is so polarized as everyone knows. It doesn't need to be that way. You know, if folks would just use their common sense and agree, as many of us do, that we're going to work for, in our instance, as state representatives for all of Minnesota, they're the best of our ability. And so certainly the fear of the political system is something that can be overcome. Giving an example, when I was a majority whip in 2013-2014, I made every effort to work across the aisle with my Republican colleagues. And, you know, it paid off. I was probably the thing that I'm most proud of as that majority whip for those two years is the fact that 93% of the bills that went through the House and the law were bipartisan. And that took some work to do that. So bipartisanship can be done just to have to leave the polarizing aspects behind and, you know, be good citizens, be good neighbors. We all strive to do that. And that's what it takes. Matt. There was a bill that was introduced by a representative, Kinesh Podine. She's a DFL legislator out of Minneapolis. I'm not sure where northern suburbs, I believe. It was for the Indigenous Women's Missing and Abused Indigenous Women's Task Force. When she showed me that bill, I jumped on it. This was a bill that was good. It was good for our area. It was good for the Native women throughout the state. When we signed that, when we got that bill into the committee, I proudly pushed that bill to get heard in committees. Every committee it went through it picked up more and more signatures. One of our committee chairs said that there's Republican bills and there's Democrat bills and then there's good bills. And this one was a good bill. We had to actually, Representative Kinesh Podine had to actually create a clone bill because there were so many people that wanted to sign onto that bill. That was a good example of how I signed onto a bill early and pushed it through our caucus and got a lot of extra support on that. I co-sponsored a bill that increased the education funding in the state of Minnesota to a 2% and 2% when our party was much lower than that. That was an unpopular position at the time. That's where we eventually got to. I'm proud that that was my provision. One of the things that you don't see a lot on the news is that most bills are bipartisan. Unfortunately, the media will show you the ones that aren't and nobody wants to hear good news, bad news cells in the media. And John can attest to this. It's a collegial atmosphere down there. After the floor debates, we walk back as a group and talk about our grandchildren and fishing. And it's unfortunate that that's what you see in the media. Thank you, Matt. John Rebaugh? No, thank you. Okay. Question seven is back to Dennis Weiman. Question from one of our viewers sent to us. Despite assurances about pipeline safety, we know leaks do happen considering the abundance of lakes, rivers, wetlands, and groundwater in northern and central Minnesota. Is it ever an acceptable risk to run a pipeline through the area? That's to Matt first. Leaks do happen in pipelines. Trains do derail. Trucks do crash. The oil is coming out of the ground. We're an oil-based society, and until that changes, we have to pick the route that has the most safety features with it. And by far, the pipelines are the safest way and most economical way to transport oil. Having trains carrying miles of rail cars full of oil through communities of Minneapolis, through across the lakes and rivers in Minnesota, and the rail system, you could have accident at any given point. So yes, pipelines do leak, and there's so many safeguards built into those pipelines and the sensors that alert the companies to the leaks and the companies will go out and fix them. The beauty of our system is that we have people that oppose something and they express their opinions, and that'll help the process, and that helps improve the safety of the project. So I'm happy with the way it's going, and I do support the pipeline. Thank you, Matt. John. Thank you. I certainly do believe that pipelines can safely transport oil or natural gas or other commodities. We certainly have our share of them going through Minnesota. It is my preference that if and when new pipelines are constructed and they likely need to be, the ones that are in the ground now, several of them are aging and the viability of them is very questionable. But any new pipeline, the route needs to be carefully considered. Water is our primary resource and we have an abundance of it. Let's don't mess it up. So let's avoid crossing and going underwater wherever we can. So the route is very important in pipeline construction. But certainly, if you look at the alternatives and petroleum products are going to be moved, petroleum is going to be moved to the United States and pipelines are much more safe than rail or trucks. The other two primary methods where we would move petroleum products. So yes, let's be safe about it and let's support to the best of our ability and with all of our might, the production of electric vehicles. That is when we will see petroleum products not needed anymore when we have more electric vehicles on the road. Thank you John, Matt, everybody. I'm good. Question eight from Matthew Litke. Yes, I would like to talk just a little bit about infrastructure. Seems like every year it's brought up and I wanted to get feedback on if Minnesota needs a massive infrastructure hall not just with roads and bridges but also with things like pipelines, storm sewer, water, things like that. John, your answer. I think the question as well but do we need infrastructure renewal as it were constantly and we have not shown a viable method for that in Minnesota. Just the sewer and water infrastructure is one that I recall. When I was in the legislature the last two years, 15, 16, the number that I'm remembering is on sewer and water infrastructure needs in Minnesota was that we could bond for a billion dollars a year and have most of that be in sewer and water infrastructure and not catch up for 10 years. So we're really behind, really behind in sewer and water infrastructure in Minnesota. The same is true for roads and bridges. And by golly, if we didn't learn anything else about August 1st, 2007, it's let not ever let that happen again, the 35W bridge falling down. And that was totally avoidable. Totally avoidable. But there was just, wasn't enough funding to go toward all of the needs, all of the bridge inspections that needed to be done. Let's don't do that again. We need to look at what funding is needed. We have a AAA bond rating in Minnesota. Let's bond for transportation dollars as we need to. And if we need to find other means of funding for transportation for roads and bridges, let's do it. Let's don't let people die over not making our roads and bridges safe. Okay, Matt? When we look at the bonding bill every year, there's always sewage treatment plants and they get a high priority. And we've been building them. Not at the rate we should be building them, admitted. As far as transportation infrastructure, when I sat here two years ago, I stated that we needed to look at other forms of revenue for roads and bridges. And one of the areas I said was the taxes that we pay on auto parts and car rentals. And we did that in 2017. We've found another $300 million out of the taxes that we're already paying on vehicles. The problem that we're having with the gas tax is that as we're pushing cars for more and more fuel efficiency, we're losing revenue on the gas tax. So we need to move that in a different way. So what we come up with was funding it through the taxes that were already being paid. And I do support the referendum to put this on the, for a state constitution where we dedicate the sales taxes, the 100% sales taxes on auto parts and car rentals and that sort. And that would bring in roughly $600 million additional revenue. Okay. Thank you, man. John, a rebuttal? Just to add that the $300 million from auto parts that Matt mentioned, I don't dispute that that funding can be used for roads and bridges, but what happened was there was no replacement in the general fund for that $300 million. So the general fund came up short and so something didn't get funded, whether it's housing or mental health or I mean go down the list of things that we need in Minnesota. We don't have enough to fund all of our programs anyway, but then to lose that $300 million, that came up short somewhere else in the budget. Thank you. Matt, a rebuttal? Real quickly, we had an $800 million to a billion surplus that year. Nothing was shorted. The taxes were taken out of the surplus, the state still. We increased spending on the schools, $1.3 billion I believe that year. We increased spending on health and human services. Again, it was a budget surplus, a very large budget surplus that year that we were able to fund these projects and make sure that we got the roads and bridges funded the way they should. Thank you, Matt. This is probably our last question from Heidi. I would suspect. We have a growing aging population and many issues come with that, including healthcare, transportation, housing, elder abuse, what's working right now and what isn't working? Matt. Well, elder abuse was a popular topic last year. We certainly got a lot of testimony on it. The housing aspect of it, we need to really help find seniors to downsize in their homes, which will really help also in the workforce housing and affordable housing shortages because that will free up some lower income housing that the seniors will be moving out of. I'm sorry, I forgot what the rest of it was. Healthcare, transportation, housing. Transportation, we need to focus more on the, like the Paul Bunyan transit, that type, especially in the rural areas where we don't have a bus service that can go out and pick up the elderly and bring them to their doctor's appointments. We need to fund the local transport services. All right. Thank you, Matt. John. Well, certainly the elder abuse issues catch everybody's attention and rightfully so. What did not happen that needs to happen is to fully fund health human services so they can address those issues straight away and not have to, with fewer staff than they need, they have to ration how they address those elder abuse issues. So that's one instance where I was talking about funding that didn't happen because $300 million was pulled from the general fund by the Republican legislature. That's something that didn't get funded fully was for addressing elder abuse in Minnesota. So those issues and other funding issues, we know what we need and oftentimes we cannot. My time in the legislature, decisions are tough and you don't always have the funding you need to address the issues, all of them. But you have to work to try to address the issues. And I'll tell you when in 2013, when we raised taxes on the wealthiest, we, the Democrat legislature, raised taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Minnesotans. If you didn't make more than $250,000 a year, after deductions, then you weren't paying a dime more in taxes. What that brought forward, was that we were funding that we could use to address many of these issues and we did our best to do that. We have to consider all of our options here. Otherwise, folks are going to fall through the cracks. We're going to keep hearing these elder abuse stories. We're going to keep hearing the stories about suicide, opiate abuse, et cetera. That's good. Thank you. Matt, a rebuttal? Yeah. There's all sorts of waste, fraud and abuse down on. In the health and human services alone, and this was something I brought up in the last campaign as well, there was over $150 million estimated that is going to subsidize healthcare insurance for people that don't need it. The abuse again in the childcare assistance, that's another $150 million. That's $300 million and I've just named two. We really need to crack down on that and we can use it for the elder abuse. And yes, we need to pay these people more that are taking care of our elderly citizens and we need to do it now. Thank you, Matt. John? No, thank you. Thank you. We finished up with our question period of the debate. Now we are going to move to closing statements. So closing statements first, we'll go to John. Thank you. Just a couple of things that I would like to say. I ran for the legislature a decade ago with issues in mind that my public service is driven by what I see in our communities and the needs that we have. We've talked about a lot of those needs this evening. I mean, the roads we're going to drive home on tonight and as we go across bridges, are they safe? Well, we know they are up here. At least we believe so. But now we have funding to address more of those issues and sustainable economic development. We need to keep working on that. That's always part of our community here in northern Minnesota. It's small business development. And I was at a meeting a couple of evenings ago at Northwest Minnesota Initiative Fund downtown Bemidji. And we were talking about a specific project or initiative, if you will, called Thriving by Design. And what a good group of folks that showed up to talk about that. And if you think about it, it's kind of like common sense for the common good, which is one of my favorite phrases, that if we do work together, we're capable of doing many things for our communities. And they will thrive. We'll have the economic development. We'll have the affordable housing. We'll have good environmental quality standards, renewable energy development. We can do those tasks. We can take them on and manage our natural resources. So that we have those natural resources for future generations in the tourism industry that we would be lost without that here in northern Minnesota. So we need to keep good management of natural resources. And above all else, let's look at our education system and make sure we have funded all of our needs for education. And I want to put a plug in for making sure that we have counselors in our K-12 education system for those children that do have issues and need to talk to someone. We've been lagging behind the rest of the states in how many counselors we have for children who need to have someone to talk to about mental health issues. And let's make sure we have the funding to do all of that. And we can do it. Minnesota is a very wealthy state in good people and in our natural resources. And we have funding to address most all of these issues in a prudent way. Thank you. Thank you, John. Matt, final thoughts. Well, I thank Lakeland Public TV and our moderators for their time in allowing us to present our vision for the future for the residents of District 5A. Over the past hour, you've heard two different visions for our area. I think I've demonstrated my ability to work across party lines and the ability to bring important legislation over the finish line. I'm extremely proud to have delivered two major bonding projects for Bemidji in my first term. We cut taxes for small businesses, senior citizens, working families, and young people struggling with college debt. We provided relief for people who are being crushed by out-of-control health care costs. We increased funding to our local schools by nearly $4 million and we made changes to allow the schools to keep the most qualified teachers in front of our children. Last year, we provided $25 million to School District to apply for grants to improve school safety. And I'm extremely proud to have the Cass Lake being a school district to receive $343,000 in grants announced today to improve the safety for the middle school. This is an area we'll continue to invest in as we move forward. If elected again, I'll continue to put Northern Minnesota first and I'm asking once again for your confidence and trust in November. I'm State Representative Matt Bliss and I'm asking for your vote on November 6th. Thank you. I want to thank both Matt and John for agreeing to and taking part in Debate Night 2018. If you missed any portion of tonight's debate, either this one or the one that preceded it, the full broadcast will be posted online on the Lakeland PBS website within the next 24 hours. That site is lptv.org. Additionally, the Bemidji Pioneer will have a write-up on the debates both in print and online in the days to come. Please visit BemidjiPioneer.com for recaps. I want to thank you again for tuning in tonight. I invite you to consider joining us again Wednesday evening. At 7 o'clock, we'll have Steve Green from the Republican Party and Karen Brandon from the DFL Party as they campaign for District 2B. Then, at 8 p.m., we'll feature the candidates vying for District 2A, Matt Grosl from the Republican Party and Michael Northbird from the DFL Party. We look forward to seeing you then. From all of us here at Lakeland PBS, we thank our candidates, we thank our panelists and we thank you, the viewers for tuning in. Have a great night. Programming on Lakeland PBS is brought to you in part by Frizzelle Furniture Gallery, your authorized dealer of the...