By Mark Fischenich
The Free Press
MANKATO
October 30, 2006 02:52 pm
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If Mankato-area voters like their state Senate candidates well-seasoned, they’ve got a pair of pretty solid choices on the menu on Nov. 7.
Democrat Kathy Sheran of Mankato spent 16 years on the Mankato City Council, is a registered nurse and has spent more than a decade as an instructor and assistant professor of nursing.
Republican Mark Piepho of Skyline has been a mayor, spent nine years in the state House and Senate starting in 1978 and manages a family-owned business.
The duo have been campaigning for nearly a year, jumping into the race just days after Sen. John Hottinger, DFL-St. Peter, announced his plans to retire after 16 years in the Senate.
The race has been extremely polite and courteous to date, although both candidates are showing the wear of 12 months of campaigning.
Sheran made clear that the forums before various groups are starting to run together. She wouldn’t even venture a guess at how many she and Piepho have participated in.
“I haven’t got the slightest idea,” she said laughing.
Piepho, after letting out a large yawn during a late morning interview recently, guessed there have been close to 10 — mostly in the last few weeks.
“I was with her more than I was with my wife,” he said.
Piepho no stranger to campaign trail
MANKATO — Mark Piepho, who now has a son who’s a senior in high school, wasn’t even married when he first ran for the state House in 1978.
The upstart young candidate won that race and ran off a string of victories before suffering three excruciatingly close losses starting in 1986 — the three defeats coming by a combined margin of fewer than 500 votes.
“In a sense, it’s better to get blown out,” he said. “Because then you know you’re not wanted. Of course, you super analyze everything (you did).”
After his final loss to Rep. John Dorn in 1988, Piepho essentially retired as a player and became a political coach. He worked in local Republican politics, helping other candidates try to topple Dorn and Sen. John Hottinger and working as the Blue Earth County director of statewide and national campaigns — including working on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign in 2004.
Young Republican volunteers even told of Piepho relaying war stories from previous campaigns like he was a grizzled veteran. The reality is that Piepho started in politics at such a young age that he even now — after an 18-year sabbatical from running for anything other than Skyline mayor — is still substantially younger than several area legislative candidates.
“It’s rewarding in a lot of ways,” he said of being back on the campaign trail.
For people who knew him back when, Piepho said there have been some subtle changes.
“I think I’m a little bit more realistic, maybe a little more pragmatic,” he said. “Raising a family, running a business (Piepho Moving and Storage) ... There is a pragmatic side to getting things done.”
Values and priorities
Piepho believes his values and philosophies mesh well with the people of District 23, which includes Mankato-North Mankato but stretches all the way into Sibley County.
“I think we’re representing the majority with our values,” said Piepho, who supports the constitutional amendment defining marriage and opposes abortion except in cases involving rape, incest and the health of the mother.
He promises to be a strong promoter for Mankato-area economic development, particularly renewable energy resources such as biodiesel, ethanol and wind energy. And he will push for a small-government, low-taxes business climate.
“We need the environment for all this to grow and prosper,” he said. “You need to keep a lid on taxes. It’s a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”
Supporting education, higher education and transportation improvements are at the top of his agenda.
On K-12 education, Piepho said schools have received decent support from the state — with per-student funding increasing more than the inflation rate — in the past 15 years.
The colleges in the district are key to the region’s economic growth, he said. Along with producing educated workers for area businesses, the institutions conduct research that can be an important contribution to the local economy.
He points specifically to the research at Minnesota State University in automotive engineering, particularly in regard to using renewable fuels in vehicles.
“Higher education will help us grow and prosper if the dollars are spent wisely,” Piepho said. “We need to hold them accountable.”
Road warrior
Improving rural roads will be a major focus if he’s elected to the Senate, Piepho said.
“Transportation kind of gets talked about, but it’s lip service,” he said. “It should be a priority.”
He supports the constitutional amendment on the ballot that would dedicate the motor vehicle sales tax to transportation projects, saying he would work to guarantee that highways get their fair share of the proceeds if voters approve the amendment.
But that revenue — eventually about $300 million a year — isn’t enough to cover the growing backlog of needed road repairs and expansions, he said. Piepho supports a gas-tax increase or an alternative revenue source such as a mileage tax or wheelage tax to produce more dollars for roads.
“We have to look down the road to a comprehensive funding solution,” he said. “You’re not talking to a person who likes to raise taxes, but that’s one area I would support.”
Free-market medicine
Rising health-care costs, along with a lack of insurance for many Minnesotans, is a serious problem, Piepho said. He calls mostly for market-based improvements to the state’s health-care system.
“We couldn’t devise a more screwed-up system than we’ve got,” he said. “But the solution is more market-driven, more choice (for consumers).”
He supports tort reform that he said would ease the pressure medical professionals feel to conduct expensive and often unnecessary tests. He would favor legislation to encourage Minnesotans to establish health savings accounts and provide small businesses with a way to purchase insurance through pools that would boost their bargaining power.
As for getting most or all Minnesotans into some sort of health-care plan, Piepho doesn’t have a specific plan, but he’s ready to talk about methods for getting there.
“We have common goals in health care,” he said. “The question is how do we get there?”
Property taxes, politics
Piepho disagrees with a basic premise of Kathy Sheran’s run for the Senate: that reductions in state aid to cities — pushed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and supported by the Republican-controlled House in a time of state budget deficits — drove property taxes higher for area homeowners.
“Yes, there were some fees, and property taxes went up,” he said. “But that’s a choice for local governments. ... They have to make choices and they have to be as accountable as the state government.”
Although Piepho has been heavily involved in partisan activities since the 1970s, he said he has the right attitude and personality to help the Legislature work more smoothly than it has in the often rancorous sessions of recent years. And if he’s a member of the Senate, he won’t take any per-diem payments if special sessions are required.
“I’ve been around enough and I’ve been through enough of those battles that (I understand) politics is the art of compromise,” Piepho said. “You still have your values, and you don’t lose those, but in the end you compromise.”
Politics a part of life for Sheran
MANKATO — Kathy Sheran’s hiatus from elected government service was relatively brief, maybe because it’s in her blood.
The daughter of a former state lawmaker and state Supreme Court chief justice, Sheran chose not to seek another term on the City Council in 2000 after 16 straight years of service — mostly as council president. But even as she decided that new blood would be good for the council, Sheran readily admitted she’d be interested in running for a higher office someday.
While the Legislature might be a slightly more intense political pressure-cooker than city politics, she and her fellow council members took on several tough issues. The merger of the police and fire departments, the imposition of the local sales tax to build the Midwest Wireless Civic Center, the approval of the River Hills Mall permit ... All brought strong opposition.
At the same time, she lobbied at the state Capitol on a number of Mankato legislative initiatives or on behalf of the League of Minnesota Cities or the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities.
“I loved that,” she said in 2000. “When you talk about what I’ll grieve the most, it’s representing my community in the region and the state.”
A good match
Six years later, Sheran thinks the time is right to do that again. Her government experience and her work experience match well the challenges facing the state in general and south-central Minnesota in particular, she said.
“The issues that are confronting us are very aligned with the experiences I have,” said Sheran, pointing to her work in local government, health care and higher education. “... The things I feel are critical for us as a state to deal with over the next decade are areas where I have — I think — preparation and expertise.”
At the top of Sheran’s list of challenges is reining in property taxes. State actions are directly responsible for soaring property taxes, particularly for homeowners, she said.
There had long been a partnership between the state and cities, counties and school districts. The state consistently provided aid to those local governments, based on the needs and the property wealth of different parts of the state, and that allowed local property taxes to remain at a reasonable level, she said. That changed in the past four years with Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty successfully pushing for deep cuts in aid.
“Shifts in taxation have a substantially negative impact on our region,” Sheran said.
That’s because incomes in rural parts of the state aren’t growing as fast as in the metro area and the tax base is lower, which makes property-tax increases disproportionately painful in small towns and rural school districts.
In addition, local property taxes — unlike state income taxes — don’t take into account a person’s ability to pay, she said.
“Property taxes and fees are regressive and create more of a split between those who have and those who have not, between the metro and the rural,” Sheran said. “... That’s something I’ve been clamoring about since the beginning.”
A constitutional duty
As important as that issue is, Sheran has one higher priority for any surplus revenue available when the next state budget is set.
“My priority for that would be to restore cuts in education and then restore cuts in Local Government Aid,” she said.
Providing equal education across the state is such a fundamental Minnesota value that it’s required by the state Constitution, she said. And recent state policy has undermined that cornerstone obligation.
The state has shifted some K-12 costs from the state to local property taxes, something that gives a clear advantage to affluent areas such as some suburban communities over poorer areas in outstate Minnesota, Sheran said.
“It creates a disparity between higher wealth communities and lower wealth communities,” she said. “It creates a disparity between urban and rural areas.”
State action over several decades also has shifted the onus of paying for college increasingly on to the backs of students, she said. Three or four decades ago, the state covered nearly two-thirds of the cost of providing an education at a state college. Now it’s a 50-50 split.
In the long term, she would support moving the state’s share back to 65 percent. But she’s making no short-term promises of doing that. Available state funds must go first to property-tax reductions, early childhood and K-12 education and transportation.
Health-care ideas
Health care is an obvious focus for Sheran as a nurse and a nurse educator. But the issue is one that’s vital for almost every Minnesota institution and every Minnesotan, she said. Local and state government budgets are being driven higher by skyrocketing health-care costs, businesses are struggling to continue to provide coverage for employees, and individuals are facing higher deductibles.
In addition, many Minnesotans have no insurance coverage.
Like Republican opponent Mark Piepho, she said the ultimate solutions will require a lengthy discussion by government and private sector institutions involved in health care. But Sheran has a slew of ideas for easing the health-care burden in the near term including a state purchasing pool for prescription drugs to lower costs, encouraging preventive medicine and making it easier for older Minnesotans to get care in their homes so they can delay moving to costly nursing homes.
An ample agenda
Sheran has a lot to talk about beyond those issues. There are the transportation partnerships she helped establish such as the one that’s successfully pushed for more funding for the Highway 14 expansion.
There’s her commitment to force more state attention to be paid to roads and environmental protection. There’s her philosophy of keeping government out of the areas where the private sector performs better and keeping government out of people’s private lives as much as possible.
There’s her belief that one of the best ways to create a strong business climate is to provide good schools, affordable colleges and top-notch universities that provide Minnesota businesses with the best-trained workers.
But ultimately, her message is she’s the right woman to be the first woman to represent the Mankato area in the state Senate.
“At this point in time,” she said. “I’m a pretty good fit.”
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