TwoGuys & Beer
The Two Guys & Beer Podcast is a laid-back conversational show that combines the love of beer with a wide range of topics that pique the hosts' interest. These two guys, use beer as a launching pad for discussions on anything and everything that grabs our attention!
TwoGuys & Beer
The American Dream: Politics, Beer, and Small Town Revival
In an era where trust in government continues to wane, our conversation with Luke Merrill, interim mayor of Isanti, Minnesota, offers a refreshing perspective on what local governance can look like when driven by fiscal responsibility and genuine community engagement.
Sharing stories over Hulk Hogan's Real American Beer, Merrill breaks down how his city achieved what seems impossible in today's political climate: cutting taxes by over 15% in a single year while maintaining essential services. It wasn't through slashing programs but by applying common-sense household financial principles to government spending.
"You have to think of everything in a financial light," Merrill explains, detailing how simply questioning standard procedures saved taxpayers nearly $1 million through more efficient bidding processes and technological solutions. His approach challenges the notion that government budgets must perpetually increase, demonstrating that asking thoughtful questions can lead to significant savings.
What truly sets Merrill's leadership style apart is his commitment to transparency and accessibility. Council meetings are now livestreamed, increasing viewership by 3,000%, and he's made himself available to constituents through multiple channels. This openness has transformed how citizens engage with local issues, creating a more collaborative governance model.
The conversation takes fascinating turns through economic development, community initiatives, and the power of volunteer groups to provide amenities without burdening taxpayers. Whether discussing the challenges of infrastructure maintenance or innovative approaches to zoning regulations, Merrill consistently returns to his core philosophy: government should provide essential services while allowing citizens to determine their own priorities.
Whether you're politically engaged or typically avoid such discussions, this episode offers valuable insights into how local government directly impacts your daily life and wallet. Listen now to discover why, as Merrill puts it, "It all starts local."
and welcome in here to the two guys and beer podcast studios. Uh, and andy and sean back in action. Uh, it's been. It's been a hot minute, it's been a minute it's been a while, a couple months but uh, we're getting back into it, and what better time than with America's birthday happening and America, america, america. So we do have a guest with us today, so we'll get a little bit more into that. I'll let you introduce yourself generally, but we'll get to some more of your details once we get to the beer drinking part.
Speaker 3:All right, sure, so my name is Luke Merrill, interim mayor of the city of I-San-E. I've lived in I-San-E for 33 years. Pretty steady conservative. I'm just trying to keep taxes low and do what's best for the people.
Speaker 1:Perfect, there we go.
Speaker 2:I like low taxes. Yeah, you know I love low taxes.
Speaker 3:Everybody does. Conservative, democrat Doesn't matter, the lower the better.
Speaker 1:So the beer today Kind of went on theme, I guess is kind of what we went with this. We went kind of the America With July 4th. I think this is going to come up maybe a little bit after that, but that's kind of where we're going. We're going to kind of cheers to America so we have real American beer Is what this is. So you can see it on the box there and yeah, it's a Hulk Hogan beer. Hulk Hogan beer. Here we go. Hulk Hogan beer, yeah, it's his beer.
Speaker 2:Hell yeah, brother.
Speaker 1:He didn't create it, but he is the front man to it and he is on the can. He's got. You know, it's his quote, that's on the can, and so it's a Hulk Hogan beer, so it's.
Speaker 2:You know what we should have done? I should have told Luke sooner, and he could have just ripped off his shirt, for that there we go.
Speaker 1:Depending on how this beer tastes, we might put him through the table later. Perfect, the flying elbow to taxes. That's what it is.
Speaker 2:The leg drop, the Hogan leg drop.
Speaker 1:Exactly something like that. We'll make something happen. First and foremost, though, the best part of the podcast, I guess, in my opinion, let's crack open to this that's the best part. Ah, that's the best part. So it just says light beer. Not really, I'm assuming it's like a version of a lager, but I don't see it listed on on the couple here that they have. But uh, yeah, it just says light beer. It is definitely a light beer. This is a easy, easy drinking kind of malty. You know something? You're going to have high lawnmower scale. You can drink a dozen.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. It's not like an IPA, where you get tired of it right away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't like light beer, so I think this sucks. If I drink light beer, it's a Coors Light, because Coors Light actually has a little flavor to it. It does, it does, trust me.
Speaker 1:We should have done a taste test. If you do 14 of them, you'll find some flavor in there.
Speaker 2:Oh fine, my first drink of this. I'm not too impressed with it, but it's a Hulk Hogan beer. What do you expect?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all right, it's a light beer.
Speaker 2:To me it tastes kind of like a Bush Light or something. I can't stand Bush Light. But we sell more Bush Light in this part of Minnesota than probably the country right here, probably true, have to go hat free.
Speaker 1:We're trying to make it work with the hat, but they couldn't do it.
Speaker 2:Well, the attempt was there.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:We'll center it up up front here.
Speaker 1:Not too much. On the beer, though. You got to highlight the beer. Perfect, yeah, no, I like a good IPA. I'm a big fan of a good IPA. There To update, if you haven't checked in in a little while to update you as well when we talked the lawnmower scale, what was the other one that we had?
Speaker 1:Was it the campfire scale? So at one point in time Pete Coors if you know Pete Coors, coors, light head of all that, or whatever said he doesn't understand craft beer at all. He tried to kill when they bought the Blue Moon. They tried to kill Blue Moon for many years, tried to just get rid of it, wipe it out. But they had a couple of sales guys. They're like no, no, we got to keep it. People really like it. And he's like I just don't understand it. When I'm going to go drink beer, I'm going to have a couple, two, three before I get good and ready to mow the lawn. I'm going to have a couple while I'm on the mower and I'm going to probably have a couple, two, three afterwards when I'm admiring my nice job. I might not even be drunk at that point, but it's a good, refreshing drink and that's what his mindset was for making beer, thus Coors Light and the same ilk.
Speaker 1:This is kind of in that range, but yeah so that's where an IPA is going to be, like a one to two for a lawn mowing. You know what I mean. Maybe you have one while you're doing it, definitely one afterwards, but you're not going to have more than one. It's just going to be too hot and it's going to be too heavy.
Speaker 2:Be heavy and thick. Yeah, you don't want that type of beer. When you're mowing the yard and you're all sweaty and it's 90 degrees, Like after playing basketball I know you play basketball you don't want to go for an IPA or an AL. You want a light beer or lager. You know, slammer down, so of course, light water.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, yep, I mean a flat, a flat of Mick Golden Tallboys out of the softball tournament. You know it's hard to beat it, you know, yeah, I mean the softball you can beat. But you know, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what do you think of the real American beer? I like it.
Speaker 3:You think it's all right.
Speaker 2:I think it's something you could drink a lot of, it's all right. Yeah, you know I'm a big, I like a lot too. But my favorite beer of all time it's a black ale. It comes from Michigan. It's called Widowmaker. Have you ever tried Widowmaker? Okay, I haven't. Oh, my God, the key when I'm brewing. Oh, yeah, I'm going to get you some Widowmaker.
Speaker 1:I'm going to bring. We drank all that we had here Probably. Yeah, that doesn't last very long.
Speaker 2:It drinks like a light beer, like this, but it has a dark flavor, okay, and it tastes kind of like smoky campfire-y. It's something I'm just going to bring you something. On Sunday, if you come up basketball or something, bring you something.
Speaker 3:I'll try that. There was a Surly. I think it was Surly Blacker. It was certainly blacker. It was like a combination with a couple breweries. I had a bunch of that like probably six, seven years ago. That one was pretty dark but that one was good too.
Speaker 2:Sure it certainly does a pretty good job, Absolutely yeah. A lot of their stuff is pretty damn good, I like Furious quite a bit.
Speaker 3:Yep, yeah, you see that on the tap at the bar it's like yep, well, that's what I'm getting of. Those is going to get you at least feeling something, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And then you're good and you put the rest of your money back in your pocket.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not into pull tabs. I'm not encouraging gambling. Not into pull tabs? No, I don't really do very much pull tabs, unless I've had a couple too many IPAs, and then it's. You know, then one of my buddies is like well, okay, do it pussy. Yeah, me as well. I can be talked into a lot of stuff, but that's fine. So let's see, here, great Central Brewing Company is kind of who does this? That's where it's from the real American spirit. It's got a whole quote from Hulk Hogan. America is at its. It's hard to read because it's a gray on silver type of deal here. America at its best when united. And if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's the simple pleasure of sharing a beer. That's why we started Real American Beer to bring people together. One beer at a time. Cheers to that, hogan. Cheers Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So, along with that, if we're bringing people together, luke, when you're in the parade, why don't you hand out some beer to people? I actually saw that when I was in high school. That's got to be illegal, so it's probably bad now, but 25 years ago it was okay to throw a beer out to people if you were running. I don't remember who he was or what he was running for, I just remember he was handing out beer. Then it couldn't have worked that good. Then you don't remember. He didn't, I didn't, I was too young so I didn't get it. He was very selective.
Speaker 1:You can tell if he selected a bunch of the beers and he doesn't remember the coverage.
Speaker 2:I don't remember if it was Isani Mayor or Councilman.
Speaker 3:I don't know what it was, but he was just like oh, I'm going to profit In the I-Sanity Parade yeah, I was handing out cans of beer.
Speaker 2:I like that idea, not too many, maybe one every 50 feet or 100 feet. It was pretty minimal. But he was like, oh here. Then he said, oh, here Gets the people going. I'm like that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:It's a good way to get some votes later about. You know something with that like the social district idea, the concept of that, where certain areas or like the whole city is just like Vegas. You grab a beer and you just walk around, sure you know you can have it wherever. So I think Anoka has a section of it.
Speaker 2:I think Minneapolis is starting to do like a block, or yeah, there's a couple of places that have it, but it's not super often, but it's kind of a fun idea.
Speaker 1:I but it's not super often, but it's kind of a fun idea. I mean some places it's more an understood social district more than anything.
Speaker 3:I think that's kind of what most things are in I-SANI. We're a little bit relaxed and if you're not being an asshole, you're going to be fine.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's the key right there yeah.
Speaker 3:You have the rules for the people that need the rules enforced on them. Otherwise, so be it.
Speaker 2:Well, on the street dances, you know those go out five, six times a summer. You can drink up and down main street. Outside there there's a couple breweries. There was it last year. Two years ago. I went to one of them. There's a couple breweries there at the stand and we're selling beer and stuff thunder brothers, uh, the lions club.
Speaker 3:I don't know if there's been any others, but there's. I mean there's a lot of breweries around here. You know like 320 Brewing. I haven't been up there in a few years, but yeah, there's a lot of good breweries around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is Thunder Brothers that we had on the podcast a handful of episodes ago. Lee Akram, I think, is his name from 320. We've been in contact with them. We've actually had to cancel, I think, two or three different times. Once it was a snowstorm, and then the rescheduled date. Oh, probably shouldn't reschedule for Super Bowl Sunday.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, so we've had that planned or whatever, and he's still in, it's still coming, it's up and coming. 320 is going to be on the air at some point in time. But yeah, I love me some good craft beer everywhere that I can get it pretty much.
Speaker 2:Shout out to Thunder Bros I-Sanity.
Speaker 3:Business. Yeah, there you go, and they own the Rendezvous Coffee in I-Sanity. Yeah, a coffee shop yep Very invested in our community.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's a great company and that Rendezvous has been there ever since I can remember. That's the oldest house in I-Sanity fun fact. Oh is it?
Speaker 3:yeah, so yeah, the second oldest house and rendezvous is the oldest, that's god. I think it's like 1840 or something, oh, really a long time. You know, all that area was actually owned by the railroad and then it, uh, and then it became isanti village when they bought land from the railroad or however that worked. I was reading up on it the other day and it's it's kind of interesting. But yeah, that house is still. Yeah, I like history.
Speaker 1:It's all these little towns dotted every like five, six miles, like right along a railroad, like even Graston here. You know, like Bram, graston was bigger than Bram for a long time, sure, but people move there. You know stuff like that. You know, henriette, you know it's all along that railroad track, little towns everywhere, which is kind of fun. You know. You go like up north or you take the back way and you could what are they called the Champaign Roadway or something like that or whatever Just have like drink here and there everywhere. So many little communities everywhere.
Speaker 3:I'd like to see the railroad utilized a little more. So we actually have and I say we have an opportunity for railway spurs for businesses, and I think that's something that's very interesting and intriguing because we're one of the only cities in Minnesota that has an unused railway spur opportunity and we have a lot of acreage that the city owns in that area.
Speaker 3:So we're looking to actually find a big industrial business that needs a railway spur, like a lumber yard steel yard a big plant, like a 3M manufacturing plant, anything like that, because you can utilize that railway spur and then create a bunch of jobs in the community, a bunch of tax base, all that stuff. Inland right now is just farmland. So that's something that we've been looking into. The railroad just. It could be used for so many things and I think it's underutilized because we're so used to trucking everything. What does the railroad think about it?
Speaker 2:They're all on board.
Speaker 3:So they've authorized us to do four spurs up to four spurs. Obviously, it's going to depend on a developer to come in for that.
Speaker 2:The city's not going to front the millions of dollars the company and business Right I got about 30 bucks.
Speaker 1:Is that helpful, Right? Or, if you like, share and subscribe. Maybe I'll get $32.
Speaker 3:Sure towards Isani. You know if we could bring in some more jobs and you know it's known as a bedroom community, like people sleep there and then go to work somewhere else. But it'd be great if we could, you know, grow it to something on its own, like not with a bunch of taxpayer dollars or anything like that, but just have natural growth and provide opportunities for people to work.
Speaker 2:Sure, and just for the listeners and viewers out there that don't know what a spur is, what is a railway spur?
Speaker 3:So it's basically just a hook off of the main railway. You know it's a couple hundred feet long and there are a lot of companies that use them. They generally send up like a three or four car train it's a short train and then the train just directs off onto the railway spur into the business. They unload, offload whatever they got to do and then it just goes back. So it's nice, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty cool. I think it'd be a great opportunity.
Speaker 1:Is that something and this is you know I'm bringing you know, local infrastructure, not infrastructure, but just ideas here and there. Is that something that maybe even like Evercat, would you know, like an expansion on that, or if they kind of you know, just because I mean, fuels are fuels and you know wherever it is and I know that they do a fair amount of business, but they're right on it.
Speaker 3:They're out of business now. Oh really, they just went out about four or five months ago.
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't know that. I feel like I drove by it just recently, yeah me too, yep.
Speaker 3:The state legislation on the Green New Deal totally killed their business. So them and pretty much every other biodiesel plant in Minnesota Wisconsin just quit. So them and pretty much every other biodiesel plant in Minnesota, wisconsin just quit. Yeah, there was a lot of poor legislation. You see that in tons of aspects of business and governance right now just piss poor legislation from the state killing things, and I think it was a great thing. It's biodiesel. They recycled stuff that was just going to be thrown away or having to be disposed of and they make it into biodiesel which can be used to transport more goods. So it was kind of productive or improductive. On the Green New Deal Well, you just got rid of a green energy source.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that was a big bummer. I know their building is for sale, but yeah, that was a pretty good location.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a pretty good location for a company, I think, or a business. And I think the biodiesel thing is neat because my wife owns a towing company. Her family doesn't. For a long time they made their own biodiesel for their trucks and actually they still collect vegetable oil from restaurants all around Minneapolis, st Paul, the Mall of America. We get all their oil, sure good, and we boil it down. We don't make it anymore I shouldn't say we, because I have nothing to do with the company, but my wife and her family and they do that and sell it off, once they boil it down, to companies that do make biodiesel and use other things for it.
Speaker 2:So it's a neat thing. It's a neat thing, yeah yeah, that was a sad one for us.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, bummer, I knew a guy that worked there. Yeah, I do too. I used to play baseball with that guy.
Speaker 3:My neighbor was the head maintenance guy there since they opened, so it was crazy they only got notified like eight days before it was going to close.
Speaker 2:No idea what a bummer.
Speaker 3:Nobody really knew Wow, just bad legislation. That's why we got to fight for our state and fight to get it back Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. Well, now I got to come up with a different business idea to be able to take that over there. I've got all these million-dollar ideas. I'm just going to make IPA by the VAT.
Speaker 3:I mean I think Coors Light or something could use that railway.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go, there we go, there we go.
Speaker 3:I don't know why the hell they want to come to Minnesota.
Speaker 2:We can make a two-guys-and-beer beer that we talked about and haven't made yet. I love it. Danny's got hops out there on the silo.
Speaker 1:We could source everything right here be able to do that. We're going to get Brandon connected in on that. We'll make that happen. Then just start releasing it out everywhere. We'll start handing it out at parades.
Speaker 2:It'll have a.
Speaker 3:Coke label over the top. Yeah, that's an idea.
Speaker 1:Never even know. So just a couple of quick things. I want to kind of go through this just because it was here, the beer and Sean did a great job getting me some prep work. So some key facts. Founded in 2015 by two friends that have a passion for craft beer. That is something that we've heard fairly often, passion for that. You know. Of course, it came from the Chicago's Fulton Market District, which we've had a couple of different Chicago beers that we've done over time and such a great area for beer, I guess for the longest time. Obviously, wisconsin I don't know about the craft beer, but Wisconsin is known for beer.
Speaker 3:Or just drinking beer anyway, exactly.
Speaker 1:And Colorado a huge beer drinking scene and Minnesota is a massive craft beer capital. I guess I never really, until we've done more, never really realized that Chicago or that Illinois area, Indiana, was such a huge craft beer area. But the more we've done it it's quite amazing. With that, they do a lot of collaborations, including with War Pigs, which is one of my favorite beers, War Pigs is a good beer, war Pigs is fantastic All Rise Around the Bend.
Speaker 1:So that's a. It's actually the brewery is Great Central Brewing Company and Hulk Hogan's Real American Beer is one of the collabs with them. So that's kind of where that comes from. That's who actually makes that, or whatever. So 2024 is when it started Limited US markets expanding through 2025. So they're ever growing, but sold in patriotic cans, as you can see with the red, white and blue. I don't see an eagle anywhere on there, so we're going to have to talk to their marketing team.
Speaker 1:Click feedback and send it in. Going to have to talk to their marketing? Yeah, click feedback and send it in. But even uh maplewood brewery and distillery is uh something that they collab with, so a lot of collaborations with that and uh kind of a cool deal. So, yeah, that's a lot of uh stuff with uh the great american beer at great central brewing company. It sounds like they don't really have at least what I could tell, unless I just missed it. They don't have like their own tap room or kitchen. It's more of a brewery that will collaborate with you know, like here I have all the equipment, come and make your thing here and then you can distribute however you want to. It's more of a kind of a contracting kind of thing, a lot of contracting.
Speaker 1:they do yeah, which is good. I mean, there's a place in the market for that, I guess. In my opinion, you know, then you're not spending, you know tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and then the building and all of the different stuff. You know you can, if nothing else, I mean, maybe eventually you do that, but that way you're not fronting all that money. You can get into it a little bit and like, hey, people like my stuff, I'm going to go ahead and do it up. So but yeah, that was kind of a cool thing and a great place to be able to do that in that Chicago area. Again, just more Chicago beer, but I don't know Real American beer Bringing people together like us Bringing people together Like us fine fellows.
Speaker 3:Have you guys ever heard of microphone brewing outside of Chicago?
Speaker 2:We did an episode.
Speaker 1:We did do an episode on that one I want to say it was with the Three Nozzle. I don't remember the name of the beer, it was something like a double or triple IPA.
Speaker 2:He's got a lot of flavors in all of his beers.
Speaker 1:And they change constantly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really nice place yeah.
Speaker 3:I was out there for a car show Boy I think it was right before COVID hit and I'm friends with the owner on Facebook and he messaged me. He's like hey, you should come out and check out the place. And I was like oh hell yeah, oh nice. I love craft beer. So I went out and checked, you know, looked at all the stuff and and labeled and everything, so that was pretty cool.
Speaker 3:He sent me home with a bunch of different kinds and I was like I was really impressed when I got home and tried them.
Speaker 2:I was like holy hell man.
Speaker 3:Too bad, you're so far away, I can ship.
Speaker 1:I bet yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 3:Their flavor was really good in all their stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't remember. We had a few beers from them, a couple and they were super good. They make good stuff. Was it the Depot? Is that where we got it? Or Amanda picked it up at the Depot? I don't remember if it was the Depot. They have the weird off-the-ball beers you'll find anywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Gabler Depot on West 7th. Yeah, okay, yeah, I don't know what that's called it was either there, or it was down in Rochester, or no. Mankato I think there's another craft there or whatever. That, just that's all they have. They don't hardly have any, you know, course, later anything there, it's just walls and walls of stuff that's cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he's a great guy. That place was really cool too. It had a bunch of like like amplifiers cut in half and mounted on the wall and also it was more music based like mike his name's mike, so it's microphone brewing. I thought that was pretty awesome yeah that's awesome he had some nice drink wearing stuff that I him. His apparel was pretty cool. He's a hot rod guy, so oh there you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, perfect Him, and I are like two peas in a pod man so. Well, now that we have a contact, maybe he wants to we can do an episode.
Speaker 3:We'd probably have to travel.
Speaker 2:For that one, though, sure, because in the future we're talking about doing That'd be pretty awesome Once we get more established a little bit, or mobile equipment at least it's part of our great road trip.
Speaker 1:Yes, great two guys and beer road trip across America.
Speaker 2:Well, you said Chicago's good. You said Chicago's good, so here with you. Just make sure you carry.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of them there, make sure you carry while you're there and you'll be all right, there we go. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Well, technically we're not.
Speaker 2:And I just carried through there last week, so you forgot. I kept it in my truck, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want to go downtown Chicago at all, nope, nope, just going there to the ball game that we went years ago. How long ago was that? That was 2010? I don't remember, it must have been 2010.
Speaker 2:Everything feels like it's yesterday to me. It could have been 20 years ago. Yeah, we did that the other day. No, that was 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:It was 2010 because it was when I actually lived in I-Sanity. We were watching the Twins. On a Friday night they were taking on the White Sox. I'm like God, that would have been a fun series to be able to go to, as this game started to go into the late innings and it's tied and we're getting to extra innings. We're like so what are you doing this weekend? Should we just go? And so Sean left. I think the game went to like 13, 14 innings or something like that. I think Sean left my house at like midnight or 1 am 6 in the morning and he's bam bam, bam, bam bam. You ready to go.
Speaker 2:We're road tripping to Chicago, he's like we're out of here, man, yeah, why not Ran down there, watched two games.
Speaker 1:I think, amanda, we were dating at the time and she'll hate me for telling this story, but we were dating and she called me I wasn't on that Sunday, I think before we came home, or whatever and she's like what are you doing? You want to go get dinner? What do you want to do? And I'm like, well, I'm in Chicago. And she messaged me. She's like I don't know if this is going to work. You are way too spontaneous.
Speaker 2:It wasn't even you, andy's, too wild.
Speaker 1:So I liked to heckle her about that a little bit. So I brought her back a white sock sweatshirt, mostly because it was like 12 degrees there. I had to buy it because I was cold. I didn't pack and plan very well for this trip. I ended up in some random hotel in Indiana or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think we went to like a Walmart to get some food or some snacks or something like that or whatever, and that was a scary opportunity, I thought for sure it was going to happen. We felt like it Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Last time I was driving to Chicago I don't know, it was probably two or three years ago I was on like an interstate, probably I don't know 15 miles out of town or whatever still, and there was a huge brawl with like 50 people on the side of the interstate. I was like what in the hell, Just driving past, Like what, the Perfect?
Speaker 2:spot for a brawl.
Speaker 3:It's just so weird. I'm like what is going on out here.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, that's a whole different animal down there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, it can stay there. I'll just get to be remotely. Maybe we'll meet Mike in Milwaukee or something in the Miller Park parking lot or whatever. It is now State Farm Park or whatever.
Speaker 2:Whatever they call it.
Speaker 1:I'm going to call it Miller Park forever, kind of like. The XL Energy Center is now going to be the Grand Casino.
Speaker 3:Arena it is. They announced it this morning. Oh, that's pretty lame.
Speaker 2:Everybody's going to call it the X anyway. Oh, 100%, wow the fact that the casino took over. They paid for those naming rights. That's very strange too. Nobody's going to call it Grand Casino or whatever. They is going to call it Grand Casino or whatever. Oh, we're going to the X.
Speaker 1:What would be the nickname for that? We're going to the jackpot. We're going to the slot machine. We're going to the pull tabs. I guess we're going to work in blackjack. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what you'd call it. I'm sure they're going to have come up with something. Somebody smarter than me is going to have like a page full of one-liners. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:Put it in the comments below. Let us know what you think Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, give us feedback, the best one. What we'll do, we'll send you a Real American beer yeah we'll send you some real American beer. So the best comment wins.
Speaker 2:And there might even be beer in the can too, if we send it.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, I didn't want to overpromise.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Shipping's getting expensive guys, it's true, if you're local, we'll just drop it off on the way to work or something. So the other part. So not only do we have the beer, but we also have, as I said, the interim mayor and candidate for mayor of Ice Shanty, minnesota. So we'll bring you I mean kind of already been in the fold here no, no, that's great, we'll bring you a little bit more in on your side of things. We talked a little bit about some of the stuff and you know, with like Evercat Fuels and like some of the other stuff going on in town. Let's get a little bit more information. Let's go deep into not into your eyes we're not going to be weird, I haven't had enough beer for that yet.
Speaker 3:A little bit about yourself and where you're from and just kind of the Reader's Digest version of your autobiography. All right, sure, all right. Like I said, I'm Luke Merrill. I graduated from Cambridge School System in 2010. I went to UMD. I got a bachelor's in psychology and a bachelor's in economics, with a minor in finance and a minor in marketing. I really I went pretty hard those four years. It was like 200 something credits in four years. I was on a. They had this, you know, a credit system If you took more than 15 credits, everything was free and everything after that was free. So I just went ham on it.
Speaker 3:I grew up in a low income house. My parents used to be meth heads and I had a little bit of a rough upbringing, never had any money, so I've always kind of been been able to get by with not much. So that was my what I did in college. You know I worked hard and worked my ass off. I was the president of the Economics Club. I was on the Dean Student Advisory Council. I did a lot of leadership type stuff.
Speaker 3:I really want to get immersed. I wanted to, you know, set myself apart from everybody else in the schools. I had a goal of being like a you know a manager at somewhere. There are a lot of good opportunities and when I graduated I was one of the top prospects of the business school. I got three job offers but my dad was really sick at home. So I decided, you know he was given like six months to live and I decided, you know what, I'm just going to put this stuff on hold, go home, take care of my dad. I turned down one really good job. It was almost $200,000 a year, starting down in Austin, minnesota. I turned that down to just stay with my dad. Family comes first. Money you can always make later.
Speaker 1:Family's number one Yep.
Speaker 3:And here we are. You know, 10 years later he's still kicking somehow, no-transcript. So that was really cool to be able to do that, you know, and stay at home and take care of my parents and kind of wrench on stuff, stuff I love. So that was, you know, that was really nice. And then I started seeing some very poor fiscal management in the city that I love, isani and my parents, like I said, have always been low income and taxes have been a big hit and there's been years where they get their tax statement they don't know how the hell they're going to pay it. And in probably 2016, I started noticing a bunch of semi-corrupt things seemingly going on in Isani and they gave like $1.2 million of money to a hotel project a subsidy, basically directly out of taxpayers' pockets to bring in a Best Western, which, to me, I believe in the free market and the free market always wins. If there's a demand for this, the free market, the businesses will come in and they will their business. They don't need the cities to subsidize. You know, I was at every meeting pointing out there was a lot of things that were fraudulent and not right about it. So I was at every meeting. Pointing that out Went on deaf ears, and city council at the time was just really. They were just really complacent. You know they didn't think long term. There's just a lot of little things and it's like, well, I don't like what I see in here, so I'm going to actually get involved. You know there's some people.
Speaker 3:I got on the Economic Development Authority for the city and then I got on city council in 2022. And then, technically, 2023, I started and then our great mayor, jimmy Gordon, got elected to the state house. So the guys are. I guess we needed to find somebody to fill that mayor seat so we could have a special election, and they all voted for me other than one guy. So I ended up in that seat.
Speaker 3:I kind of fell on the sword because I want to make sure that our city goes in the right direction. There was another previous mayor that wanted that seat back and during his previous four years taxes went up 44% and that's not acceptable to be increasing taxes an average of 11% per year. So I got on there. You know I'm the interim mayor right now. The last two years we cut taxes almost 18% and I'm hoping for another, hopefully double-digit cut this year. So, yeah, my biggest thing is, you know, try and keep taxes low. People should decide what they want to do with their money. The government shouldn't be deciding what they want to do with their money, unless it's for essential infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely to that, did you just not care? Just like, whatever I, I'm too busy working on hot rods, right going to college and taking care of my family. No, just like, what is this all about? And then does that just kind of suck you into it then yep, yeah.
Speaker 3:So in college I didn't even know what I was. You know, we would talk about like politics, and it's like I don't even know what I am. And true, one of my roommates, like you're definitely libertarian because you're like anti-government spending, I was like, ok, I'll take that, I'll take that that role. But I really didn't. I didn't know what Republican was, I didn't know what Democrat was, I really didn't care.
Speaker 3:At college, you know, I was one of them guys. I just want, I just want to learn everything I can about things I care about, and kind of be specialized in what I know, and and then just coming home and impact on, you know, families and my parents, especially on taxes, that you, that's big time, you know, and it affects every single person. And to me it's like, well, if I can make an impact here and and help every single family in the community, that's big, you know. And then I'm still taking care of my dad. I mean, what am I? What else are you going to do when I say any? That's kind of how I saw it and it was just. I guess I just got motivated to do it and whenever I find something that I'm interested in, I go 110%, I don't give up.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, that's a way to be able to do. You know stuff. I mean agree, disagree with this, that or the other thing, or whatever, but to get involved at all, like that's. You know, like you said, it's easy to be a keyboard warrior, it's easy to just sit back and complain about it over a beer, but you know, at the same time, like getting digging in, doing the thing, doing the work, having an opinion, working with people on it. You know what I mean. It's not, sometimes it's being the leader, sometimes it's working with people, sometimes it's a combination of that, but it's doing something.
Speaker 2:Something's better than nothing and how many people don't get involved? You know it gets it's mind numbing. I always. I don't complain about politics much anymore but I've been knee neck deep into it forever. You know a long time and I have my opinions and preferences and who I vote for and whatnot. And I think 99% of all senators and congressmen on the state level, federal level, they all suck anyways. You know it's like those are the people you don't want to run, like the people that you really want to run, regardless of party, that actually are principled and honest.
Speaker 1:They don't want anything to do with it.
Speaker 2:They want nothing to do with running the office. I can't blame them. The people you get running for office are in it for themselves. And kickbacks and special interest money and well I suppose you could say APAC money or whatever you want to say. You know it's. They might go in with the intent. Then they get sucked up by everything and then they're gone.
Speaker 3:You know it's really hard to and it's such a thankless job to. When you're local politics, it's great because you're you're representing your community, but on one decision you're going to have half of the people that are really happy and the other half that are pissed. Or you know, you try and make the decision for the majority and you try and make the most people happy but you're still going to have people pissed off and it's basically volunteer work. It's next to no pay and who wants to put aside their whole family life to do that? It has to be a certain type of person, you know, especially on the local stuff. But then what's really sad is the senators and house members and whatnot. They make a lot of money but nobody holds them accountable because they're kind of far away, in a sense Versus, like the mayor, even though the mayor is really not that big a deal. The mayor and city council get all the heat for everything. Even if it's not a city related issue like a county related issue, the mayor still gets the heat for it.
Speaker 1:It's like and then it's a tangible thing You're a real person that I can see and I can yep, you're really, really there especially if you're more accessible.
Speaker 3:Like I've tried to focus on being very accessible for people, because in previous years I've seen where the politicians the City Council, mayor aren't accessible and I don't think that's right. You know what I mean. If you're gonna actually go out and and be that person, you have to be accessible. Facebook message call, however the person's comfortable, you have to be accessible. Facebook message call, however the person's comfortable, you have to be accessible. And I think a lot of senators get complacent because they're not held to that standard by the people. Like, if I make a decision, that's like people think it's a bad idea. Well, I hear about it, you know, and it's like well, then I listen to what they say and I try to just continue to be informed on what the community wants. That's all you can do. But senators and you know even the president, all that stuff they kind of lose sight of that because the job is so big.
Speaker 1:It's such a disconnect and that's I don't know how you fix that. I mean that gets into a way bigger conversation that I don't think we need to have right now.
Speaker 1:But it's just because I mean, when you're a half a country away, you know, or I guess to be, if you're in California or Oregon or something like that, you're a full country away. It's such a disconnect. And so you said such a bigger thing that like, ok, well, here's this bill that's this big, that has billions of dollars in it, Like, how do you even begin to try to? This is going to affect these 12 people. You know it's local. Politics are really where you can have that change, but it's such a disconnect and just because that's what it is, I don't know, like I said, I don't know how you fix that or change that or whatever, but it's definitely such a hard thing. You really got to drive that local so much more.
Speaker 3:It all starts local. You know the Sandy County Republican Party has really been rejuvenated the last couple of years. There was some bad leadership in there before and they were skirting the legality of the whole process and basically recommending themselves for seats for, like the House member seats and stuff like that. So it was taken over, thankfully, and the I-Sanity County Republican Party has done amazing work trying to get new county commissioners and city council members and mayors into place. Because it all starts local and if every single local jurisdiction does what their local people want, then you have an accurate representation of your people.
Speaker 3:And I think if we're really going to be serious about it, I think we need to get past all the state oversight on a lot of things. You know they like to preempt a lot of things and make rules that don't work for everybody, especially our shitty state leadership down there. They make rules for the Metro 7. You know they think about the Metro 7, but then they forget about all the rocks and cows. You know what I mean, and that doesn't work for us.
Speaker 3:You know they just passed new legislation for the legalized cannabis stuff. Well, the city was supposed to get a large portion of that tax money. Now they pass legislation where not only did they up the tax cost to the business owner, but they took all of it away from the city. So now the state gets 15% tax all down to the state and chances are we're not going to see a dime of it, because the way they allocate their money down there just doesn't work with rural Minnesota and that needs to stop. Government preemption, federally, statewide, everything needs to stop and I think if we just make it on every little municipality, county to do their own thing, I think the world would be a better place. So get rid of the senators. You know there's no accountability for them. But how do you do that?
Speaker 2:Right, there's got to be a way. Who knows?
Speaker 3:Omnibus bills got to go. That's another thing. Those omnibus bills are total bullshit.
Speaker 2:They need to be one item, one bill. That's the simple way.
Speaker 3:It sounds infeasible, but maybe they need to work a whole year instead of three months. Right, so be it.
Speaker 2:You can do 30 bills in a day. Here's one bill. Vote on this.
Speaker 1:Next, next one in front. They can do it, they just don't want to. Yeah, you heard the different things that have been brought up, or whatever even about like, if you can't feasibly read or review that bill within a normal time frame, it should be failed. You shouldn't even be able to bring it to a vote. You know, like which? I think I mean again, we can get into the whole political side of that, of what you should or not. Like that, I think that if you can't read a bill, how can you vote on it? Like, how can you have an informed opinion about that? I'm not saying we need to give everything, like you know, six weeks where you can go back to your. In theory, you should be in tune with your own jurisdiction. Or you know voting members, you know your people in your area To have an idea. When that you don't, you don't need to do like a poll of everybody every single time. You have something, but right, you should at least be able to get past the cover sheet.
Speaker 3:And that's why it's important that people get on vote. You know that's there's a large percentage of people that don't vote and their votes not heard. You know, if you have, say, 50 percent of the population that doesn't vote, what's that other 50 percent thinking? You know you have to. People need to get out and vote and then their vote does matter. You know it's after 2020 and you know other issues with elections. It's hard to say that and hard for people to believe it, but at the at the end of the day, if you don't get out and vote, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Right and you need to get out and vote in your local elections not just for president.
Speaker 2:Like yeah, like realistically, if everything was followed the way it should on every level of government, it doesn't really matter who the president is, because they really don't have power. They have power over foreign policy. That's directly what they're supposed to affect. So, which is kind of crazy. So if you vote the right members in the House and Congress, you wouldn't have. It would really wouldn't make a difference, you know, because they can stop anything the president does. But what I was trying to get at anyways, I was getting off the rampant ears. Local elections matter the most.
Speaker 1:The grassroots.
Speaker 2:Your city council, your mayor, your school board and stuff like that needs to start in your hometown first, before expanding elsewhere, county commissioners, that's another big one that people don't realize.
Speaker 1:That's a huge one.
Speaker 3:Every district in the state has a county commissioner and that county commissioner is almost like your mayor of your county district and if you have an issue in your county district you need to go to the county commissioner because they're the bosses of the city officials, you know, in a sense.
Speaker 3:So you know that's one big thing that I think people need to know more of is reach out to your county commissioner. They kind of pull the strings for your whole district and that's big time too. And I think the I-Sanity County commissioners it's a really great group. Now. We've worked really hard and the Republican Party has worked really hard to get good people in there that are fiscally conservative and think about the people and think like the people. You know like 72% of I-Sanity County is Republican. You hate to throw a label on it but at the end of the day, if you have Republicans in there representing the 72 percent, that's the best you're going to get. So you want to make everybody happy but at the end of the day, if you have the core values that match your, your community, that's what matters going through the finder.
Speaker 1:Apparently I didn't have enough real American beer on that one. That's what was going on there. So we've kind of gotten big grand picture with a lot of stuff or whatever let's drop back into local. So you're the interim now. So I'm guessing it's probably similar to what the actual role would be. But what is there any differences right now with that, or is it basically all of the things?
Speaker 3:So the interim mayor is. Everything's still the same as regular mayor. You still sign the checks, you still run the meetings. The mayor really doesn't have much more power than that. You can decide when to lower and raise the flags for like half staff, otherwise the mayor is just 20% of the vote. You know I signed the checks. I can call a special meeting on my own if I want to, without the rest of council majority agreeing to it. I haven't done that and I probably won't, but you never know when you have to do that. So it's just as much responsibility, just as the word interim in front of it.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, and I'm in that role until I think it's well. August 12th is the election, but I don't remember if there's like a week after that or when I'm actually out of it. But hopefully I'll just stay in it. We have really good, a really good team right now. The five of us work fantastic together. This has been the most open and most conversational and educated city council board I've ever seen. And I say any hands down, not even close. We've done a lot of things and dove into pretty much everything, because we're kind of trying to run the city like a household. You know, households are going to be efficient with every dollar. They're not going to go out and say, hey, oh, we have the money here, let's just go spend it on a truck. You know, it just doesn't make sense. So we've been trying to run everything like that.
Speaker 3:You know, households convers time is what we're going to do.
Speaker 1:So if it doesn't go to that, would you revert back then to like a city Cause you said you were on the city council. Okay, do you have to resign that position? Okay, I wasn't sure how that worked or if it's kind of like a dual role. I suppose then you'd have like 40% of the vote instead of 20%.
Speaker 3:You'd wield a big stick, then that was a really hard part of that decision. You know people wanted me to run for that mayor seat the interim mayor seat and you know council appointed me. I mean it's I don't know, but it was really hard for me to decide because I really liked being on city council. I like being able to be vocal and being able to be that strong conservative is. And now it's just different with the mayor seat. You know you have to try and you have to try and play the middle more, which is fine, I'm good at that too, but it's just different and that was a big part of me thinking.
Speaker 3:It's like well, do I really want to fall on the sword and lose my council seat to be the mayor? I really don't. I don't need or want the mayor role or like the mayor, I don't know stigma. I just want to be a normal dude and that's kind of how I'm running it, you know, just a normal guy trying to do the best for the community. But that was tough. So I gave up the council seat. We appointed someone in that seat and he's great Nick Peterson. So he's taking my seat and if I happen to not get in then I'm just out for now and knock it in, then I'm just out for now and I can build hot rods or do whatever I want. If that's the case, obviously I'd like to stay in there, because we've made a lot of really good changes and a lot of good headway on taxes and I think we're going to see a good decrease this year. So yeah, nice.
Speaker 2:I'm excited about it.
Speaker 1:You can still show up to the meetings and bang your fist on me. Yeah, be that guy.
Speaker 2:I can show you some decrease in taxes that are on my property. Unfortunately it's not in Isani County or the city of Isani.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, everybody, you know you just look at what counties and cities and even schools, what they're doing with taxpayer dollars. It's like they've totally lost sight of how households work. You know, and it's just mind-boggling to me when you see, oh, this is 3 million. Well, what a lot of people don't do in leadership is you need to divide that 3 million by the amount of residents you have. So that's a big thing.
Speaker 3:I always think like, say, if a splash pad, for instance, that was a big one that the previous administration and the mayor I'm running against, previous mayor I'm running against it's a big thing for him. But that splash pad ended up being like $1.5 million and we had to put a Knicks day on it because it got so crazy. Think about that $1.5 million divided by 7,500 residents, and then there's three residents per house, so you can divide that 1.5 by 2,500 houses. That's a shit load of money. That is that's like. That's like that's what is that? Six or seven hundred dollars per household just to pay, just for in the tax money to pay for that splash pad?
Speaker 2:and that's not ongoing maintenance costs, I suppose that's just initial in your water usage.
Speaker 3:Yes, and and and. We're actually getting heat from the dnr because we have grown so fast as a city but so is our water usage. So we're actually like just at the top of what the dnr even allots us to have. So if we had that splash pad they can start sanctioning us and fining us for being abusive use of water. And we looked into like water circulation systems but to like to follow the epa and the health, the health board standards it that was like another 600 000 bucks for recirculating, because you have to treat the water.
Speaker 3:Because there's kids, you have to treat the water as there's kids, you have to treat the water as it goes in. So you basically have a mini water treatment plant so it just got out of hand. It's like that's not feasible at all and you have to think would the average household think this is worth $600 or $700 per household? Sure, maybe 10%, 20% might. But what about the other 80%? That's like oh, we don't have any kids, we're not going to use that. That's silly.
Speaker 3:And that's where I think government loses sight of things. And they get these pet projects in their mind like, oh, that would be really cool, I want to have my name on that, but then people are paying for it forever. And then another thing is like the maintenance of that. So you have, if you had an amenity, say, a basketball hoop, a basketball court, and so it's like a. It's a multiplicative effect and we just need to bring it back and hold it and provide the essentials, provide great parks, all that stuff. But there's frivolous things that that couldn't be done without and I think households agree with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think they do too mostly, and I do a lot too. I always wonder it comes back to these people that want those things. Sure, they're nice amenities to have, but if you can't put it in your own house with your own money, why are you expecting everybody else to pay for it? Why should somebody like me, let's say, pay for a splash pad? I will never use it, so why do I have to help fund it If you want it? Why don't you privately fund it and privately build it and somebody can privately maintain it or something which, for a splash pad, probably wouldn't happen, with private donations and ongoing maintenance and stuff.
Speaker 2:But whatever happened to that? Why does everybody expect the government to buy all these things? Like Cambridge has been wanting a YMC forever, why should the government and the taxpayers pay for that? It's not a responsibility of a collective to build a gym so somebody can go play basketball or lift weights or run around a track. You know, like that mentality is just goofy. To me it's very goofy. Everybody wants something from the government. Oh well, it's federal dollars, it doesn't matter. So now somebody from California is paying for your splash pad and I say, hey, Minnesota, why?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's the thing that I think gets forgot sometimes is like, okay, well, it's money from the government, so it's like free money. No, you repaid for that yourself, so it's some of your own money that came back in through that. Yeah, we had this conversation. I was a friend of ours that we were discussing this is and we could get into the school referendum and stuff like that or whatever if we wanted to. But we were discussing one locally this is probably four or five years ago now and it passed and it had a lot of stuff that did need to get done and you know the things with that. But the discussion was well, why wouldn't you vote on that? And he's like, well, I don't have any kids. Like, well, you don't want it to be better. It's like, well, I want it to be better.
Speaker 1:But he was a farmer that had like a thousand acres of land and it was like, well, it's only like thirty five cents an acre or something like that. And it's like, well, yeah, but now I'm paying like ten thousand dollars and I don't have any, like, not that you don't want it to be good, but it just be. You know, and I mean I think he ended up voting for it because I think he supported what it was at the time and what it was supposed to do. They were still in school or just out of school. That lived in town, that had like a little quarter, you know corner lot with half an acre or something like that. Oh, don't worry, it's this amount of money spread out amongst all of this, like, ok, well, now you get 10,000 acres worth of land that that person now is doing something with it Don't have kids or whatever that you have to consider everybody to get one vote on that instead of 10,000 votes Right.
Speaker 3:And I always say, like, one of my favorite things to even just think about is the government isn't here to be your friend. They're not here to provide the things for your family that you should provide for your family. They're here to provide essential infrastructure roads, water, police, fire, some parks OK, sure, but we're not here to have social programs where we pay for you to sit on your ass all day. That's just not. That's not how government should work, you know, and that's that's where we're kind of going astray, I think, in this state especially. And the government's not here to be your friend. Go and make friends on your own if you want to raise money for something that you believe in. Great like we have.
Speaker 3:Uh, illuminate isani, which is a light show that was started by the previous administration and the candidate that I'm running against and it was very poorly planned from the start. They took like $100,000 of taxpayer money and bought lights and they really didn't have much direction with it. And you know, we, when I got in, we kind of had this, this burden, every year If we wanted to keep this event going. It's 50,000000 to run it, $50,000 to run it, and we did it. We tried to switch it up every year and finally I pushed really hard to get volunteers, because I think it should be a volunteer-run event and fortunately there's a great group of people that have offered to volunteer and now we've authorized $15,000 this year and they're raising money and they're almost already at 15 grand and all that donated money they get back goes right back into the city's account. So now we have it structured so a volunteer group provides this amenity, which is, I think, how it should be.
Speaker 3:For the more frivolous items, if a volunteer group, if the community thinks it's that great and they can get people to do it, awesome, get them the tools they need to do that. You know, if we got a front 15,000 bucks to run the event and then they give it back after donations, great. I think that's the way it should be ran. It shouldn't be ran with taxpayers' dollars when they don't have a decision on it. This group decides if they want to volunteer, taxpayers don't decide if they want to pay. So that was something that we've been working on really hard and I want to give a shout-out to iSaniTogether, the organization that started that, or started the volunteer group, and I think that's how most cities should be ran. You know, get the people in the community. If they think it's that valuable, they'll help. So yeah, I'd like to see more of that in all levels of government.
Speaker 1:Let me, I'm going to ask you a question. This is going to sound like I'm pushing back, but I promise I'm not pushing back. This is me. Just I'm asking for curiosity because I don't know the answer and so sometimes I like to, I just want to pick your brain, I want to, you know, find out. So let's take that, the Illuminate, just as an example. We'll take something like that or whatever From the standpoint of okay, so you have this now amenity that brings, maybe, people to town from other areas.
Speaker 1:The argument on the other side of something like that is usually the tax base. Or you're bringing people into town and they're going to spend, you know, fourteen dollars more, a quick trip or something like that, you know, or whatever the reasoning is determined, or what are your kind of thoughts like on when it becomes kind of like this is a thing that really does provide that benefit? It may be kind of frivolous and whatever, but there's a lot of people that come to town for it. You know, you've seen it with, I mean, I think illuminate it's kind of like the bentleyville, you know there's yeah, yeah hundreds of thousands of people that go to that yep, or even like the, the bmx track and things like that.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, the jewelry days, yeah, things like that. How do you determine where that line is? Or how do you even research the amounts? You know what I'm saying? I'm not trying to push back, I'm just how do you determine that? I guess that's where and that's why you're in that position and I'm here drinking beer.
Speaker 3:So that's a great question. We this year and I think last year, we got I think they call it streetlight data from Google, so it tracks everybody's phones and we can tell where the people come from, where they go afterwards. All this stuff and the number one visitor after Illuminati was Walmart in Cambridge, which is great, and that the argument is you know, you bring people into town and it spends more money in town, but in real life for Isani taxpayers, that does absolutely nothing because these businesses aren't taxed on what they sell or how much they sell or their volume. Obviously, they want to sell a lot of stuff, but they're taxed on their square footage. That's it. So when you have, when you have events in town and you bring in people, it's great for those businesses.
Speaker 3:Obviously I'm very pro small business and I love to see businesses thrive. But the argument that it actually does anything for taxpayers is it doesn't do anything. You know it doesn't. Directly, you don't get any sort of tax benefit back, nothing. So you know that's the argument that's always used for more social type programs and it economically it doesn't make sense. Now, obviously, like socially it makes sense like, hey, let's get everybody some more business. Yeah, it's great, but that's not a very good fiscal argument. So it was. It was interesting to see you know the streetlight data and see where people spend their money. Quick trip on isani was one of them. Fun fact that quick trip in isani was the number one quick trip in the country. Oh wow, in like 2023. That's a big time sales pitch. The coburns in isity was the number one cook trip in the country in like 2023.
Speaker 2:That's a big time sales pitch.
Speaker 3:The Colburns and I-Sanity is the number one Colburns, oh really.
Speaker 1:That's a great spot too.
Speaker 3:I-Sanity our liquor store is doing amazing and the municipal liquor store. A lot of people don't realize that all the profits from that go back into reducing taxes for residents. So every year we take roughly $500,000 of the profit from that and we put it towards decreasing the levy. So every household saves at least $200 a year on their taxes from iSandy, just from the municipal liquor store. You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Yes, I have contributed to that.
Speaker 2:Thank you, cheers, real American beer.
Speaker 3:Yep, so that's a big one, the municipal, and you just have to think of everything in a financial light. That's how I think of it. I guess you don't have to, but that's how I see. You know, that's how I see government and finance. I mean, it's kind of my background, so it's it's fun for me to try and find where we can be efficient for taxpayers.
Speaker 3:And you know, looking at that data from Illuminate Isegni and seeing you know where people come from, how many visitors, and then we even saw you know, I just did it in my head, quick. I don't remember the exact visitor count, but we did the math and it basically, if every resident, or if I'll say that there's 5,000 people come I think that's what it was and it costs 50,000 bucks to run the event, that means it costs the city taxpayer $10 per person. Now, does the average person value that at $10? Maybe, I mean probably the people that attended, but what about everybody that didn't? Yeah, so that's where it comes down to for me. You just always think of per capita or per house, and does it make sense in that light? Sure, now, what about I?
Speaker 2:don't know if you have access to this kind of data. What about how many residents of I-SANI attend specifically I-SANI? What if the 80% of the populace of Sani attended the event? Then would it make a little more sense. Or is it only 10% of the residents of Sani?
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, that makes total sense. We looked at that. I think it was around 50%, if I remember correct there was 15%.
Speaker 2:That seems decent. Yeah, I mean it was fair.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I don't. You know. I personally love the light show. I think it's awesome. I love driving around. You see it and I love it, I'm all for it. And you know, if I wasn't a fiscal conservative and caring about taxpayers, I'd say, yeah, we should do this every year. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love it myself If it's somebody else's money, yeah, but I don't think like that.
Speaker 3:So that's right and that's how government shouldn't think, because then you get in a there, but they're going to have some serious problems in the next five to ten years. They're subsidizing developers and they're blowing money left and right and their taxpayers are starting to feel it and they're really going to start to feel it in the next five years and we're actually going the opposite way. So I mean, and it makes iSANI more competitive. We have businesses moving from Cambridge to iSANI because the taxes are lower. We have a lot of businesses moving from the metro to I-SANI because the taxes are lower, crime is lower, the people are better. So you just make yourself more competitive when you have a good group of leadership and then, when you're more competitive, you're going to get housing developers that want to come in and develop and then you have economies of scale because you're building more people to pay the taxes and you do it organically. You don't push it, because organically it always works. The market works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't push it because organically it always works, the market works, or build those spurs like we're talking about the spurs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, Not the.
Speaker 1:San.
Speaker 3:Antonio spurs, that's a different conversation. But only if the developer will front the money for that, because otherwise, you know, you look at that, if it's a million and a half bucks and over the next 50 years they're going to give a million and a half bucks of tax payback to the city, well, does that really make financial sense? Probably not. So you have to think about every decision like that. What's the payback period, you know? So it's like investing in the stock market.
Speaker 2:The market? Sure is yeah.
Speaker 1:So we talked a little bit about like the spurs and things like that. So we talked about the negative that you know, if you don't get that now it's positive Sunshine or rainbows here we go, you're elected.
Speaker 2:You have like nine hundred and seventy four percent of the vote yeah, I don't know where all these other people came from, but you know, you've won it.
Speaker 1:You've won a landslide. It's new records everywhere, and so now you have this term. What is it so? Is it a partial term? Then? Is it OK? So what would that term?
Speaker 3:be. So. It's a year and four months, so I'll have to be running again, campaigning again for next year.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're kind of like right back into the fire. You know, unfortunately that's there. You go Handing out cans of beer at the parade. No, that's not okay. Okay, so let's say we'll change it and we'll say you get that one and then reelected because you won so big that time that they're just we're not even going to have the next election.
Speaker 3:I don't think that's going to happen in five plus years.
Speaker 1:So let's you know, like on the list, let's take that five year kind of like outlook. You know we talked a little about some of the stuff or whatever. You talked a little bit about the Spurs potential commercial area, things like that. What are kind of your thoughts in that time frame?
Speaker 3:So there's a lot of smaller ideas and I've always said, you know, like I don't think government should have an agenda, I don't think people should have pet projects, because then you just get in it, get it like the blinders on and you want to just have this pet project. Another example is the amphitheater in Isanian. That was 300 grand and it's only been rented once in the last five years and that was a bad investment. Oh, is that?
Speaker 1:kind of by the.
Speaker 3:Illuminati. Okay, I was like where is their empathy? So that was. I don't think you should go on having pet projects. We kind of take everything you know right now is when it comes to us. Does it make sense? But I would like to see more veteran stuff. We are working on a veteran memorial with the VFW, so that's something that I think is really good. I would like to work on just stuff like that Appreciating, you know, our police, our fire, always fostering that relationship because they provide an essential service to our community.
Speaker 3:You know, we just we just authorized take home squads. Fun fact, I say any police, all, all of our officers, except to live in the city limits. Officers except two live in the city limits. So that's really cool and we took that into account, obviously, because every day these officers have to come in and officers are really hard to find. Right now in the state of Minnesota, legislation has made it impossible to be a cop or to want to be a cop. A lot of them gone to Wisconsin just because. So we've tried to make that better.
Speaker 3:The squad take home squads, I think is a big one the fact they live in IsI. It saves them 45 minutes a day roughly doing their change out from their normal pedestrian vehicle to their squad car. It also provides the opportunity for each person to basically have their own car they're stuck with, and when you have your own car, you know the sounds and you know when stuff's going wrong, versus when you're migrating you don't know. So the maintenance it'll actually make our maintenance program easier to control, because the officer that drives that car knows the car. The officer will be cleaning his car and then also on big calls, you know, obviously, if there's a big crash and we need more police help, well it's right at their house you can call them in. They don't have to go to the hall and take that 45 minutes to change out. They can get right in their car and drive to the scene.
Speaker 3:I think it also makes people feel safer. So that was something that I think was a good amenity for us to add, for people and for our police. And we also just hired our full time again, so we just hired another officer. So that's that's good. And that incentive for take home squads was what put it over the top. Yeah, because most places are offering that, and if you don't offer that, I mean it's a pretty big benefit. And if you think about it.
Speaker 3:nobody's going to be taking that squad car for non-police related stuff. You know like a company vehicle, a lot of companies, if you do that in a cop car you're not going to get away with that.
Speaker 1:You're not just hooking up to the camper and, oh yeah, it's definitely not a work truck.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, you know I don't really have an agenda per se. I would like to see something I proposed in the last meeting. I would like to see our. So right now we do what they call a park dedication fund. Every developer that comes in they have to pay $1,800 per unit to the city for park dedication dollars. The park dedication dollars can only be used for new park amenities or replacing an old amenity with something different. So it's funny because when I got on city council they said it was only new park amenities. But I read the rules on it probably 50 times and it doesn't specify it. It can only be for new amenities.
Speaker 3:So we actually have been able to take some of that money and replace existing equipment with a newer model and it still fits the mold. You know, I argued with the lawyer and the city staff and finally we found they figured it out and now we've been able to do that. So that saves taxpayers a lot of money. Because now if, say, a slide goes out and those slides are unbelievably expensive Like you would not believe, a slide is $50,000. It's crazy, wow. It's unbelievable expensive For one plastic spiral slide. It's unbelievable what they make. So now we can take this park dedication dollars, which was only supposed to be for new amenities, which is good, but now we can take it and buy a new slide. But I want to go a step further, and I'm seeing all these amenities that we're buying, all these things we just put in a very expensive play park for ADA accessibility, which is great. The price tag was huge, though, and you just worry about the long term maintenance of that right.
Speaker 3:So I would like to get rid of the park dedication funds or park dedication dollars that the developers pay and do like a park maintenance instead, because right now we have we are twice the acreage per capita for city parks that almost every city in the state is, so we have twice the parks per capita that almost every city in the state does, and if we have these dollars to just buy new parks or just add new amenities, it's just going to snowball. Every year. We're going to have more and more maintenance, more and more upkeep on everything. So if you say, if you spend, you know, $500,000 now, it's going to cost you a million bucks over the next 20 years at least.
Speaker 3:So I would like to, instead of buying new amenities or new playground equipment, I would like to put money aside just for maintenance, because the maintenance is what the taxpayers are hit with. So the average taxpayer pays I think it's. I did the rough math it's like $300 per year in park maintenance and that's a big amount. When you're only paying $1,500 towards the city or whatever it is on average, that's a big amount when you're only paying, you know, $1,500 towards the city or whatever it is on average, that's a fairly substantial margin. So if we can have developers who are already paying in some money, instead of paying into that account they pay into a park maintenance account, that would make a lot more sense for taxpayers, because then you're not taxed for it, just the developers are paying for it.
Speaker 3:And obviously developers pay for it because new people want parks, you know, but we still have great parks and you're still providing a park service.
Speaker 2:So I have a question about this those developers that build their apartment complexes or whatever they're developing, do they pay a yearly fee in the department? It's just a one-time thing.
Speaker 3:And that's the problem with the park dedication dollars. We had like $700,000 in it and then we did that playground and now now we're at like 300,000. So that tells you how much playground is. So now, once that developer's in and their money's gone, we'll never see it again and eventually I say he's going to run out of land to sell to developers or to develop on, and then everybody that's paying taxes has to pay a huge amount of taxes to keep everything maintained because you're not getting any dollars coming in. So then what is to keep everything maintained because you're not getting any dollars coming in? So then what you know we're thinking I'm thinking 50 years down the road and I did the math. You know, 50 years from now, if we even just if we sustain where we're at in maintenance costs and everything else, you're over $100 million in 50 years in just park maintenance. That's big towards our taxpayers. You know, you divide that by 7,500 again residents, 2,500 again residents, that's big money. So that's only 50 years. That's 100 milli. Where are you going to get that?
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of numbers. I love the numbers, but you have to have projections Not getting in pull tabs.
Speaker 2:I was thinking what if you took that, so the developer pays, and you put 20% for new equipment, 80% into the maintenance account, or something, because then you can still upgrade once in a blue moon too, or something, because then you can still upgrade once in a blue moon too, you know, yeah, so that's just Do a little bit of both.
Speaker 3:That's something I pitched at the last meeting. Of course I got a lot of heat on it from people that don't understand on the internet. Sure, you know, if we can do it, if we can, you know, kind of break the mold and do something a little more creative to save people money and just set yourself up. You know that's just spitballing the idea and trying to get it in city staff's head, get it in front of our attorney and see if that's something we can even do. I mean, maybe there's I was told there's strict development laws and we can't do it. But I've been told there's a lot of things we can't do.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:You got to push and shove.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's worth having the conversation. Ask the questions Every meeting. Ask the question can we do this any more efficiently to get better bids on things? You know, and we have seen a big payback on that type of stuff. You just ask the question and get you know. It's a great group of five of us working together. I ask one question, somebody else has a different idea and then we go with that idea because it's awesome. You know, and you just have to ask the question and communicate and work well as a team and that's what teams should do. You know a team shouldn't just come in as council groups and just vote aye on everything, or just vote and get through the meeting in seven minutes. You're there to talk and you're there to make the best informed decision for everybody.
Speaker 1:And that's. I mean, that's Andy on a little soapbox here. I'm usually the happy-go-lucky, fun-loving beer-drinking guy, but if that's one of the things we talk about, ask the question. Everybody should ask the question in just about everything, and if somebody isn't going to give an answer, if they're going to get angry or defensive about it, then there's maybe something to that question. But really it should be like a I understand your question. This is what we have for the information.
Speaker 1:And that's why I say, like, when I ask the question, like I'm not asking because I'm attacking or anything like that, it's just I want to know the answer. And you had an answer, and that was that. I love questions. It wasn't an argument, and that's. I feel like we've lost the ability to have conversations.
Speaker 2:That's on a different page. Here there's a lot of that.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that, you know. You try and have a conversation and somebody gets offended because you flipped one word around or spelled something wrong Like come on.
Speaker 1:Everybody feels challenged with everything.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:Well, can we, can I ask the question and you can give me your answer? Right, I might agree with you. I just want to know your take on it.
Speaker 3:I love conversations. The more questions and more conversations the better, because when people are asking questions, it gets people thinking you know, and you think and you do the best work when you're questioning, when you, when you come up with a solution as a team.
Speaker 2:And then, like you already said, more ideas come about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, 100 percent from everybody involved in the conversation.
Speaker 3:I love that part of working with with the group that we got. It's freaking awesome man. So that's something we've been pushing for and I've been very vocal about it. Like, communicate guys.
Speaker 3:If anybody wants to say anything at any time, even members of the audience you know people that come in from the community I let anybody speak at any time because they have the technical open forum or public comment section. I think it's bullshit. If you want to talk and you have a question during a meeting, you should be allowed, as long long as you're respectful, to come up to the podium and offer your suggestion, because sometimes we get a great idea from that person and all of us are like holy shit, you know, that's awesome. So I think we need more of that too. You know and Cambridge has done a really piss poor job of that with not letting people get their voice out and not listening to their people and I just want to break the mold on that too and be open and let everybody have a voice on that too, and be open and let everybody have a voice.
Speaker 2:Just because we're elected doesn't mean we're the only voice, right? Yeah, okay, you're a representative of the community. Yep, the community, the community drives what you do yeah america america
Speaker 3:that's right. That's what it's fun to found it on right hulk hogan said it best what was punchline? Didn't he have like a? Wasn't it Booyah or something?
Speaker 2:I can't remember what Hulk Hogan's was.
Speaker 1:All I keep thinking of is Jim Duggan with the hill, but that's a whole different, you know.
Speaker 2:All I can think of is Randy Savage, you know.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, oh yeah, Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Woo, but I didn't really watch wrestling back then. I watched it when I was in high school so I was watching Diamond, dallas, page and the Rock and stuff like that. So I really didn't get into wrestling quite back then. Okay Same.
Speaker 1:I think I watched a little bit of like the old Saturday Morning because it was on, but I don't know that I followed Other than Hulk Hogan I don't think I could have named hardly anybody at all. Well, other than Hulk Hogan, I don't think I could have named hardly anybody at all. So probably was it Mean Gene. He was the guy that did all the interviews.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he did a lot of interviews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'd be about it, but that's because he was there all the time, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's before my time too, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was kind of going. We're going to back the truck up a little bit because you got me thinking a minute ago, you know, with you talked about that amphitheater that everybody, the government, wanted. I don't know if the residents wanted it or not. I'm sure there is a portion that may have, I don't know. Yeah, but one thing I wish would get more involved. Like you said, there's that volunteer group, yep, that's doing things. Now I wonder if they might be interested in trying to run fundraisers for those type of things. Correct, and I want to bring that back to Bram, because I was a Bram resident for 12 years before I moved just outside of Cambridge and just the Tucson Tack alone raised $1.2 million. It took them like 12, 13 years but they built a whole city center a whole community center where weddings are.
Speaker 2:Comedians have been there, like Louie Anderson.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's how they prayed for the Bram Event Center. Yeah, it was completely fundraised.
Speaker 2:I was always wondering about that, yeah and most of the money came out of the little thrift store Tucson Tac. That's awesome. It was all community-raised, it took them 12 years but, hey, not a single penny of, to my knowledge, no taxpayer money, which it was all funded by. You know the thermometer is slowly going up, you know, from donations. Yep, like it'd be nice if people like the community members that want everybody to have everything they have, to start donating that way. Or put a little group together to hey, we're going to fundraise every business. Can we put a bucket there? All this money is going to build an amphitheater in the park. Yep, you know. Then the taxpayers aren't paying for it year and the ones that don't want it aren't paying for it.
Speaker 3:Correct. And like I said earlier, if you want it, go get it. If you think it's that important for your community to have it, put in a few hours, 10 hours a month or whatever. You know what I mean. Everybody wants things but nobody wants to do the work for them. But at the end of the day you're having to work to pay the taxes to do it. And everything with government is more expensive because all these companies inflate their bids 40 to 50 percent, because they think oh, is it that high?
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 3:Because they think the city is just going to pay it, because historically that's what government does. They just say, yep, motion to approve, motion to approve. But you have to start breaking that mold and save your people money, and that's a great way to do it. I'm super stoked on that volunteer group, you know they're, I think they're going to do awesome and you know I think illuminate isani will be sort of the introductory. You know, run to see how well it goes and then maybe after that, maybe it balloons, and that's why they named it isani together and not just like illuminate isani together. They try to keep it vague so that they could, in the future, go on to other things, and that's freaking awesome, awesome, yeah. So that to me is big time.
Speaker 2:How many people are involved in that. I Sani Together program.
Speaker 3:Their goal was 50. I think they're at somewhere around 30. They usually have like six or seven at every meeting, even 30 people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a pretty good amount. A lot of people yeah.
Speaker 3:And there was a lot of negative press about Illuminate. I, Sani, and you know, I said over and over if we don't get a volunteer group, this is going to go away, this is going to go away. And I took a lot of heat for it and people were just motherfucking me to everybody. But at the end of the day it got people thinking, hey, maybe we should start a volunteer group. You know, and that's what leaders do they get the people initiated to do something. And now we have something great for our community, Sure.
Speaker 1:So for our community. It makes sense, because if you just have it as like, oh, here's a project, the people aren't invested in it, right, I mean, it's just that we're going to put up the lights and like, okay, here we go, come on, let's go. But if you get somebody you know, volunteer groups, something like that, like people that are invested in the success of the thing, they're going to be doing a lot more just to make it go, you know. I mean, you can tell somebody that's invested in cares and is passionate about something, as opposed to somebody that is there because it's their job.
Speaker 3:Definitely. Yeah, I'm super stoked on that project. I love Illuminate Isania and just the money alone is going to be. It's not sustainable, you know.
Speaker 2:So would you consider that movement together, I say kind of like your biggest accomplishment you think, in city council or as interim mayor, or do you have like any type of big accomplishments you think you've really worked hard on for the people of Asante, Aside from the beard?
Speaker 1:That is probably it.
Speaker 3:Oh thank you. No, so my biggest goal is always, always and always will be taxes and getting more efficient bids on projects. You know we've reformatted a lot of things, especially in the last year or so, because I was seeing these bids come in and I was talking to contractors. I was very thorough on what can we do to make this bid process easier for you guys. This bid process easier for you guys, because there are bids where you know you have a $100,000 project and they have to pay an attorney $5,000 to even put in a bid because they don't want to. You know, short, string themselves on something that's in the contract and miss it Sure. So these contractors were having to pay out all this money but nobody wanted to pay a $5,000 to put in a bid for you know what I mean. So we've worked really hard to restructure our construction projects road projects which are our biggest expense other than staff. So we've worked really hard to restructure those. This year we restructured a bunch of that and we actually got like three times the bids on our summer projects that we usually get and they were extremely competitive. So we had estimated for our mill and overlay projects this year roughly $1.5 million and they came in around a million. So there's $500,000 that we just saved taxpayers.
Speaker 3:We are doing another well project because our well capacity is not high enough for our growth and that was sort of an unexpected expense because we weren't projected to grow as fast as we have. So we looked into doing another well and you know, the status quo is you always build a well house where your well is. And I asked why do we have to build a well house nowadays? Because you have all this remote technology. It used to be you'd have to have a well house. You'd have meters like manual meters you could read and all this stuff. We have all this remote technology. Why are we building a well house? And that saves about $500,000. That's another $500,000. So in the last seven months we've saved a million bucks on projects just by asking questions. Just ask the question.
Speaker 3:Just ask the question and if you continue to ask these questions and continue to think outside the box. Like now, all the remote data stuff is going to be housed in our main water treatment facility, which just makes more sense anyways, because now the guys don't have to drive out to a well, they can just look at it right there and you know we're able to do that, and that's it's just efficiency from the start. You know you have to be efficient and you have to think about everything, and because you don't know when you're going to be able to eat next and I think families feel that same way and government should work the same way. So I mean, there's been a lot of great things we've done. Uh, we removed the highway 65 overlay district, so now businesses on highway 65 aren't handcuffed.
Speaker 3:It used to be that if you had a business on Highway 65 overlay district, which is basically a few acres off of Highway 65, basically the prime real estate right you have to meet a certain standard. And if your building doesn't meet that standard, even if your grandfather, even if you've been there for 50 years, like I said in your ready mix, you have to now meet city standards if you want to do any upgrades to your building. Now meet city standards if you want to do any upgrades to your building. So if you want to add on a bay to work on your truck, you have to now basically demolish your building or buy another property outside the district so you can build on. So if you look at Knife River, they have it's kind of weird they have one building right on 65, right, and then you go down Kojima Street and you'll see their second building. Well, they had to build a second building because they weren't allowed to build onto their first building, because it's in that district.
Speaker 3:So there was all sorts of stuff like that Sign rules, like Dairy Queen had to ask for an exception to have their red and blue colors on their sign. Why is that? Even?
Speaker 2:in writing, which is amazing because 65 sucks.
Speaker 3:It's ridiculous and that's bureaucratic bullshit, is what it is. So we got rid of the Highway 65 overlay district and that has been a huge welcome relief for a lot of these businesses. I mean, we have three or four of them that are now adding on what they wanted to have, investing their money in our community instead of leaving because they're mad. So when you have businesses that thrive and community members that thrive, you know we we got rid of a lot of the restrictions on people having, you know, garages, because there was zoning ordinances that were total nonsense. Like there was a guy like four houses down from me this was another reason I got on council, because it's like this is not even fair.
Speaker 3:Four houses down from me he was building a garage, his house is like 500 square feet and apparently I didn't know this until I got on council. But the city has a rule that if your house is under a thousand square feet, your garage has to be one square foot or more or less than your house. So he has a 500 square foot house or whatever. He couldn't even build a two car garage on his own property and he started building it during COVID, like the city apparently wasn't responding to his request for payment or whatever. So he started building. He got caught and to me it's like this guy wants to add value to his home, which adds value to everybody else's house. It's not an egregious request. He wants to build a two-car garage so he can park his cars inside. That's not ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Which is another, I think, policy or ordinance or whatever for improved storage for items too. There's a lot of that stuff I'm going to get fin like improved, to like storage yeah, for items too.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of that stuff so we?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go find out that I blame tanner. You're in the county, though, but it's different you know, obviously.
Speaker 3:So we changed that. So now, like blaine actually had a mold for, which is interesting you think blaine is pretty nice, yeah, but they had a, a percentage of land that's basically like built on, so like a driveway, a house, a garage, patio, deck, like it all. It's impervious, I think it's called impervious, impervious surface. So they had like I don't know, I don't know if there's 40 or 50% that you could build up to, and if you looked at what our old city standards was, it was like 15% as an aggregate. So we we upped that because then if somebody wants to build a two car garage and their house is too small, they're not handcuffed. Or if somebody wants to, if they have a big lot, like like my parents and I, we own a big lot and you know we could build a bigger garage because we have all this green space. So the the rule was originally to reduce the amount of storm water that's going into the storm sewer. So you want to have green space, grass to suck up the water. So it only makes sense if if that's why that's that way people who have bigger lots should be able to have more space built on. It just makes common sense. If you have a 30-acre lot and you have 5,000 square foot built on, that's a lot different than someone who has five acres in town that has the same square footage. It's proportionate to the lot size. And that was one thing we changed. We made the city of Isania a 2A dedicated city.
Speaker 3:I actually led the charge on that because there was a lot of bad House files and Senate files coming down. That was one of the first things I brought forward as a council member and then we wrote a strong letter to the county on that and then the county decided to make Isania County a 2A dedicated county and that's because we pushed for it so hard. We voted unanimously on it and we pushed for it so hard and the townships got involved and you know you start that thought. You know the city of Isenia was first, the townships were second. You know Cambridge was against it but as a majority the county commissioners heard us and they made it a two-way dedicated county and that means that the county sheriff sent a letter to the state recommending, you know, no more gun legislation. There were a bunch of house files and Senate files that got nixnayed and there were, like I want to say, 37 other counties that did a similar thing and we were like the one of the first.
Speaker 3:So, you know, you start that conversation, ask the damn question, you know, and you make positive change. Now it doesn't really mean a whole lot, but there's a lot of people that you know obviously care about that sort of thing and constitutional rights are big time and this community is big time in that. So if you go around, you know 70% of the people pro 2A and that's you know. So you represent the majority and that's what you do. Obviously, there's going to be other things that come through and they just fit the people. So, yeah, there's been a lot of stuff that I was trying to think about that before this podcast and it's like, man, we've done so much. We've done so much because we've been in tune with each other as a council. Our city staff is awesome. I love our city staff. Just working with them has been great, especially our city administrator.
Speaker 2:What about the residents of the City of Asante? Have you noticed any more people trying to participate or show up at council meetings, or email ideas or I mean both positive, maybe, like all the above, it's just it's been more people.
Speaker 3:Yes, and that's been a big for me too. When I got on council they weren't doing Facebook live and it was hard to find like their their video recordings. I mean they did them on YouTube but it's not convenient for the people. So you know, average we were getting like 50 views per video, right. So when I came on, that was another idea I had we should do Facebook live. I think it's big, I think it's gonna do well for us. We initiated that. We got that in place. We had to spend a couple thousand bucks on AV equipment, which it's tough to spend the money, but now we see almost a three thousand percent increase in viewership and interaction. All right, and that's big because now you have, like every average council meeting we're getting like 2,500 views and before we were getting 50.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's, that's big.
Speaker 3:So now you have people that have the opportunity to listen from their home and if they're comfortable coming to the meeting, obviously they're welcome to come in. But some people just like, like me, if I miss a meeting, like, or if you know, I was in Europe for a couple of weeks and I watched it online and that was awesome. And then, like the park board you know I'm not on the park board for the city so I could watch that online. You know, it's just, it's convenient. People can watch it when they want. My neighbor watches all the meetings or listens to all the meetings when she's at work. She can do that sort of thing. There's a lot of people that do that and you make the information as readily accessible and easily accessible for people as possible and they get more involved. You know, obviously it brings out a little bit more Looney Tunes, people that are upset with what's going on, oh sure, and you see it on Facebook.
Speaker 3:It's kind of a lot of belligerent people that don't understand how stuff actually works, and you know. Obviously they're upset with how the political climate has become, and that's fine, I understand that. But at the end of the day, if you don't know the actual information you know, you should either vote for somebody that you think will provide better solutions for you or get more involved.
Speaker 1:You know that's democracy. So, and that's the nice thing about that access, you know access and involvement, like you said, you jump from 50 to 2500. I mean, like you said, it's going to come with, you know, like the extremes. But at the same time, I mean, like you said, it's going to come with you know, like the extremes, but at the same time you're allowing that access for people that either wouldn't or didn't, and maybe it could be even. You know access and functional needs. You know it might not, it might not just be the crazy, it could be somebody literally can't really even get out of their house, but they want to still have that.
Speaker 3:Exactly have that ability to hear their voice. You know what I mean. And like now they can feel't do anything because of the laws. But that was one thing. It's like how can we make this so people can interact with us, Kind of like they were here?
Speaker 1:Almost like a town hall kind of situation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so people can interact with us and then we can think about that idea, Because sometimes I read the comments like, oh shit, that was a good idea.
Speaker 2:But we didn you know. So why is that a law? It's open meeting law.
Speaker 3:Where does this law come from? I don't remember the specifics of it. We talked about it a lot. That was right when I got on.
Speaker 2:Can you just not do it? I'm not saying not do a law, but in this case it benefits the citizens of the city you're working for. Who's going to come in and tell you you can't do it? That'd be the state government.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, or the federal government. It's probably a federal.
Speaker 2:Why is that a problem during a meeting? I don't know the lady, but I hear once in a while in the background, you know, when you ask her a question or a council member, and then she answers the question why not every five or 10 minutes? So here we have a question right here from a resident of Asante, and then say the question to the mayor and the council members and chat about like, oh, why is that such a problem?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I pushed at that issue and pushed it. I don't remember the exact answer. I've asked a lot of questions like that, but I know that was that was one that I brought back to like at least four or five council meetings Because I'm like I want to be able to do this, no matter what. I know there was a thing with, like obscene language can't be rebroadcasted. I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff with it and then it's not fair to people that aren't watching live or something I don't remember exactly.
Speaker 2:It was open meeting law violation. Well, if they're not watching live, they're not in the building. Well then, they're not paying attention to what's happening that day. Anyways, right, they're probably watching a reality show on Netflix, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't blame them. I mean, city business is kind of boring Right. It's really passionate, like I am.
Speaker 1:So what I'm hearing is that we need to just have somebody that has the chat open on a laptop. That's like oh, a question from the gentleman in the front. And then they just have 345 questions that night, sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then also yeah. Where do you stop that, though, too, Cause you get a lot of yeah, and that's yeah.
Speaker 1:Who is it that has the discernment with that? The mayor does, because whoever doesn't like, okay, well, this one's not going to get.
Speaker 3:Well, now my voice isn't heard, or whatever, so you can get sued and you know, and if they show up and they're passionate enough to talk about it, they should get the opportunity to talk about it. And I used to go into the meetings and I actually got removed from a meeting physically one time because I asked a question that the mayor at the time didn't like, and that shit's not happening. I've been harassed my mom was actually berated in the city hall hallway at the last meeting and by three people that don't like me and she was berated and cornered by them and that's not fair. But at the end of the day, it's a public space and what are you? What are you going to do? You know, unless it gets violent, you know if it gets violent that shit's going to stop. But at the end of the day, people should be allowed to speak and that's why we've taken that policy.
Speaker 3:And it's funny because there's people that say we're not transparent, but then they smash talk us for allowing people to talk anytime in the meeting. It's like they're like that's not professional. I'm like well, you want transparency and you want professional. Like, how do you do that? You can't be more transparent than we are. We're posting everything on Facebook every day. The city posts something like we're as transparent as you can get. You can't get more transparent. So it's an interesting, interesting road because you can do all this work and all this, all this legwork for people and sometimes it just don't resonate, but you do it for the majority man. So you know, I love it.
Speaker 2:I think it's great, but it's difficult, no doubt. Yeah. Yeah, it was into politics for a long time, but the last few years I just kind of gave up with it. Not so much the local and state level maybe I should get involved more in that but on the federal level. I just ah whatever, I just drink my beer and call it a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I watch the west wing. I won't lie, that's about my level of politics.
Speaker 2:I do find it interesting. What just really makes me mad is like everything gets stonewalled and the back and forth and all the corruption and it's like these people. They get power and then it's what they want. They just get drunk with power and they don't care about why they're there anymore and they just get kind of churned out of the system, you know, and sucked in. It's like, oh, it's so disheartening, you know it's like ah, yep, what do you do, I guess?
Speaker 2:Well, you need to get money out of politics for start on all levels. That's my opinion.
Speaker 3:Right. Anyways, how is someone that makes that little money a year that rich Right? It's questionable Special interest.
Speaker 2:Both Special interests, both sides of the aisle.
Speaker 3:It's not even Democrat or Republican. I'm not talking a party, I'm just saying yeah, it's crazy Ridiculous, yep, but local stuff. You know there's accountability. That's big time. How do you get that federally? You actually should start getting people in trouble when they break the law. Sure, that would be a start. You know you, they're not doing nothing about it.
Speaker 2:Where does this come from? It's crazy, yeah, it's crazy. But if you start on the local level, like we already talked about, and good mayors show that they're good representatives, good council members show that they're good council members, and you just move your way up, you get a little bit of experience. Well, now I'm going to run for a house.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to run for Senate and state level. Now I'm going to run for federal. Jimmy Gordon, you're supporting Jimmy.
Speaker 3:Fantastic, best mayor I've seen he's ever had, like not even close. And he's a great guy and he got elected to the house and he's doing great things and he's he's for the people, you know, and yeah, that was something that it was. He told me he was going to do it and it's like man, I don't want you to leave. We have such a great group. And then he's like, well, you know, somebody is going to have to take it over. It's like shoot. So. But yeah, him down there, he's, he's very good. Mark Horan is very good. He's a senator, he's very good too.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's good representatives and there's bad, you know, and it is usually the ones that are there for too long. You know, I see it as a sixty, eight, six to eight year sweet spot. We had one mayor before that was in for 12 years and I think his first six years he was pretty good. So you know, I think six years is probably about where people start to flip, you know. So you got to move around. You know you get you get comfortable. You know it's easy to do. It was very easy to do. Everybody's got lives and families and other things to put something on autopilot and whatever else.
Speaker 1:Sign off and do the research. It's fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a hard thing, though, you know, being in public office, I mean, you saw it with what happened to the senator and the House member who were shot. You know a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 3:And that's a very real thing in politics, and it's you know people are pissed off and you try not to enrage them but at the same time you have to make the best decision for the majority of people. You know so you're going to have people that are upset and it's a very it's a thankless job. It's it's very difficult, mostly in draining not only the person but their family, everybody involved. It's not for the faint of heart. You have to have really tough skin.
Speaker 1:So I think that having the access and conversations, I think, yeah, that's really what changes. A lot of that you know like cause it's, it's a thankless thing and you'll get attacked, and you know stuff like that that happens a lot of that. I think it's just people that you know like well, I wasn't hurt, or you know like it's. I mean, I'm sure some of it is like I disagree with what you're doing, but I think that disagreement changes to like a whole different level when you know somebody's just like oh, you're not even listening at all to the other side or willing to have that conversation. I think that's when it starts to change. So I really like the only the change of the access and the change of getting a lot more people involved and listening to all the voices that you can. Listening to all the voices that you can.
Speaker 3:Definitely, and that's a very hard thing to do too. Going into it, I was on city council and I've always been very strong, vocally conservative, and now, when you're in the mayoral, you have to be something a little bit different. You know, and that's taken a little bit of time for me to get used to. I'm getting better at it every day, but it's hard because you have to represent everybody. You know nobody's perfect. I had a difficult time with it. I think you know it's just takes takes practice. But at the same time, when you're getting attacked by people every day, it sure does make it hard to not just bubble up and just do your thing for how you feel. And it's it's, it's a learning curve. So you know it's taking a little bit of time. I think I'm getting better at it and hopefully people can see that you know. Sure, yep, gotta be the voice for everybody, yep.
Speaker 1:Got to be the voice for everybody, right, yeah, yeah, you do Always a challenge. It absolutely is. So what's you know? We've been here and had, you know, a lot of conversation, a lot of really great conversation. I hope that everybody's enjoyed that and we've covered, like a wide range of things. Is there anything that we haven't covered or something that? Either that and or something that you really want people to take away from this conversation, that you really really want to put out there?
Speaker 3:You know the biggest thing is get out and vote. Vote for the people that you think are going to do the best job for you, whether you think your taxpayer dollars are most important or whether you think something else is more important. You know you get out and vote. August 12th is the vote for that mayor seat more important? You know you get out and vote. August 12th is the vote for that mayor seat. You know I'd love to vote, but I understand if not, and you know we just have to keep doing what we can for our community. Be as efficient as we can for our community, provide the essential services, you know, and let people spend their money how they please.
Speaker 3:If somebody wants a pool or a splash pad, you know, think about it this way You're saving six or seven hundred dollars. You can take that six or 700 and do it at your own house. You can buy a pool for 300 bucks, you know. So it's. It's just a little bit different way of thinking, and that that's I guess that's my biggest message is just vote for efficiency. That's what my whole campaign is. Vote for someone that's going to be real and honest. I'll tell it how it is, I'll swear. I'll just say it how I feel, how I see it, and at least you know I'm not going to try and stab you in the back or lie to you to just get a vote, and that's that's big time.
Speaker 3:You know a lot of politicians they go out and they just tell you why you want to hear to get a vote, and I'm. My belief is, if people don't want me in that seat for who I am, then I don't want it because I don't want to sell my soul to be in a mayor seat. I want people to want me there and you know, hopefully appreciate the work that we've been doing as a team and I think it's. You know it's shown we've done great work. In 2023, the first year that I got on council and Jimmy was the mayor we had the highest single year drop in taxes ever 15.3 per 1%.
Speaker 1:Wow, and that's still impressive to me If you don't really ever hear taxes going down at all, let alone like double digits, double digits down, and we didn't have to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Speaker 3:We just keep being efficient and we're going to see, hopefully this year, you know, with over a million dollars of under budget items, I think hopefully this year we can see some good decreases again and I think that's big, that resonates with everybody. You know everybody will appreciate having $200 or $300 more in their pocket for just really not doing anything other than just asking the questions and trying to be efficient.
Speaker 1:So, and if they don't, they can send it to two guys in your podcast and like. Po box? I don't know.
Speaker 3:And you know if anybody has any questions, there's been a lot of misinformation going out and I'm always open. My inbox is always open. Even if you're, you know, far left, far right, I don't really care. I'll talk to anybody and ask the question, because there's a lot of bad information out there that people are spreading and it's not fair. And if you want to know the truth, reach out. And where can you find that?
Speaker 1:Is it like the city website, an email, or where's the best way to be able to reach out or give feedback? Contact you, whether it's you or the council or anything, yep, so I guess even just government at large.
Speaker 3:So my big thing has been Facebook. You know Facebook, my mayor page, luke Merrill for mayor. Otherwise my personal page Luke Merrill M-E-R-R-I-L-L. Otherwise you can email me, luke J Merrill at AOLcom. You can reach out to the city. My phone number is 763-516-5082. Shoot me a text or a call.
Speaker 3:I'm always happy to answer any questions that anybody has about anything. Get ideas. There's been a lot of idea input that I've gotten from people and that's big. That's what I'm here for. I'm that mediary between your taxes and your family, you know, and I'm that guy. So you know the rest of council is too. But I feel like it's it's kind of my responsibility to be the leader of the group and you know that's what a mayor does. I still only have 20 percent of the vote, but I can bring stuff forward and mention ideas and just go from there. So if anybody wants to reach out, you can call City Hall and ask specific questions, like a lot of ordinance questions. I don't have the whole thing memorized, it's impossible. So if you have ordinance questions, reach out to City Hall, 763-444-5512.
Speaker 1:I feel like an infomercial we should have.
Speaker 3:Click here.
Speaker 1:Scrolling along the bottom. If you can't tell, I've talked about this a lot in messages.
Speaker 3:It's big, you know, and I get more messages and calls than I ever expected. I mean I'm talking probably almost a dozen a day. Oh wow, and that's awesome. You know, I really don't know if any other I know the rest of council doesn't get nearly that many and I think it's just being open and people know you're real and they know that they're being heard. I think it's just being open and people know you're real and they know that they're being heard.
Speaker 3:I think that's big. So, yeah, awesome, get out and vote. Got to vote, get out and vote, show up. And there's a new referendum for the school. I just want to mention that November 4th this year, there's going to be a referendum vote and I want people to know about that. People should have the ability to vote yes or no on the referendum. Whether you think it's great or whether you think it's horrible, you should have the ability to vote and people need to know about these elections.
Speaker 1:Is there a place to be able to find out, like, more information about that? Because referendums, I feel like, is one of those things that, like, all you really ever know is like, do you want to spend four hundred million dollars and build a new school, yes or no? And it's like, okay, well, what is that? Is it going to have gold-plated doors when you go in, or is it just going to be, like, you know, styrofoam doors? You know what I mean. Like I know that gets a little simplistic, but you know what I mean. Like, is there a place to be able to find details or stuff like that? Because I feel like that's all you're amount, right, and that's a problem.
Speaker 3:I hate that. When you have a special election for a referendum vote and you have like three sentences, you have a whole ballot that's empty. You could put all the information and people could read on it right then and there. But it's deceptive, is what it is, and people need to be more and more able to get that information. I know the school.
Speaker 3:I talked to a school board member a couple of them actually and they're talking about putting details on the website. I don't know how advanced that is. They recommended that I meet with the finance director because I want to know what's going on there, because there's some things in there that I definitely don't agree with. So I'm going to get a deep dive in. I don't know if I'm sure they offer that for everybody, but that's really where you'd start is the school board's website. I don't know when they'll have that up or what their plan is for that, but I hope it's as transparent as possible. You can reach out to any of the school board members Deida Moose, Brett Halverson, Mark Solberg, Becky Roby oh boy, there's a few more, but reach out to any of the school board members.
Speaker 1:Googlecom. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Reach out to the school board members. Google, yeah, and I think it's a good group of school board members. So I think most of the government in Asante County is great. Honestly, it's been a great last couple of years. Shout out to the Republican Party again of Sandy County for getting great people to want to be involved and then providing them the means to do so, you know with with contributions to your campaign or just just helping get the word out about an election, and it's big. In general, the August 12th election is going to be big and people should know to get out and vote. So communication Perfect.
Speaker 1:We should put that on a bumper sticker like a button or something, maybe on this really sweet hat, we'll do it on there instead or on the label of a can. There you go, sean. Anything else you got here tonight.
Speaker 2:No, I don't really have anything else. Luke, I appreciate you taking the time to come on. It was good to learn a little bit more about local politics, the CDI, sandy and what's happening there, kind of where you envision the city. And thanks for coming on having a couple real American beers with us on the Two Guys and Beer podcast. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:And I think that even some of the stuff that you said I think, yes, it's Ice Sandy specific to a certain extent, but I think that a lot of the things that we've talked about tonight is have those conversations, ask. But I think that a lot of the things that we've talked about tonight is have those conversations, ask those questions. It doesn't matter where you live, what city you're at, look into those things, ask those questions. I don't think that that's a unreasonable, that's not even a political take. I don't think it is. I try not to be too political. I think that's kind of a reasonable thing to be able to mention. So I think that's good. Anything else you'd like to add?
Speaker 3:No, just Merrill for Mayor August, all right.
Speaker 1:You can find on Facebook. You can find it, you know, on the city website. A lot of information out there. But yeah, that'll pretty much wrap things up for us here. The real American beer. You can find it. I don't know when do you find this Cambridge Liquor Store. There we go, oh traitor.
Speaker 2:They might have it in a.
Speaker 3:A shanty doesn't have it Really. Oh man, we have such a huge stock there Our shanty liquor store is awesome.
Speaker 1:I know that they got some good bourbon down there.
Speaker 3:Yes, the bourbon is a big one, the bourbon club yeah.
Speaker 1:The whiskey club there's a club, yeah the manager there is doing a lot of things. Just turn the camera off. We're going to. I'm loving it. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's the Real American Beer with the Great Central Brewing Company. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Of course, luke Merrill discussing the mayoral.
Speaker 1:Fun yeah, everything going on with that interim and, you know, running for and the election and all the stuff going on there. So if you have questions, reach out to him. But if you have any feedback, comments you want to reach out to us, or ideas, you know, topics you'd like us to be able to discuss, absolutely reach out to us as well. So, but otherwise I'm Andy Beckstrom, Sean Field, Luke Merrill joining us tonight and until next time, everybody Cheers you.
