Just about 60 people attended a town hall meeting with Congressman Tom Emmer Monday night in Big Lake. The event’s objective was for Emmer to field questions and concerns from Sixth District constituents.

The evening started off with Mayor Paul Knier addressing the guests and making an opening statement in the library commons area. He thanked Emmer and his staff for visiting Big Lake and opened the floor to the two-term congressman.

Emmer thanked his staff and several individauls who he recognized who were in attendance including Minnesota State Representative Paul Novotny, Sherburne County Commissioner District 3 Gregg Felber and Police Chief John Kaczmarek.

Emmer’s Chief of Staff, Sally Fox was tasked with ascertaining who would ask questions for the one-hour long event.

Some of the questions fielded by Emmer included concerns about the federal budget and expenditures, social security, WWTF funding, the war in Ukraine, Medicare, Veteran’s issues, the war on Donald Trump, government over reach, voting fraud concerns, Republican party concerns, support for Minneapolis PD, border issues, digitizing of money, lawlessness, political blaming and other topics.

Emmer stressed that the federal government has a spending problem with the debt service at $9 trillion dollars and growing.

“This is serious and balancing the budget is essential for us all to stop the bleeding,” he said. “If we don’t correct course, right now, the debt service in the next 10 years is going to be in excess of $10 trillion dollars. And by 2032, you’re going to be borrowing just to stay afloat. So this has been serious.”

Emmer said he and his staff are always happy to help smooth things out in Minneapolis (in regards to the police matter) but he said Minneapolis needs to figure things out first. He mentioned staffing at the Minneapolis Police Dept. is extremely low and he’d like to see the city get a grip on that problem and move on from there.

“You can’t keep attacking the people that are charged with enforcing the law, and you can’t have prosecutors who decide that they’re not going to enforce laws,” he said. “This whole civil society is based on honoring the rule of law. If you don’t like it, then you get elected to a state legislature or somewhere else and you move to change the laws that you disagree with. It’s the way we maintain order, and unfortunately, we haven’t been doing it.”

Emmer addressed a comment from a guest who suggested the federal government move to term limits for politicians to stop the “life-long politicians.”

“When it comes down to term limits, changes need to made to the bureaucrats first before it can be applied to others,” Emmer said. “Bureaucrats  typically outlast all representatives and congressmen and so the cycle continues.”

Emmer promised to work with one gentleman from Big Lake who said he has been stonewalled by Emmer and his staff and “you never communicate back with me.” His concerns he delivered to Emmer were in regards to Veteran’s issues.

Emmer said he would be happy to work with the man and promised he would go back through the communication efforts and get the man the answers he was looking for.

Another guest mentioned the biased reporting of news media entities and how it restricts people from getting the “real news”.

Emmer concurred that the  news media was a huge problem in America and said those are some of the issues he and his staff and party face each and every day.

Emmer finished his evening by saying he loves coming back to Minnesota and visiting with people and having small town hall events. 

“It’s the best part of my job,” he said. “It’s important to take care of the people at home first and then to take care of yourself.”