Next Tuesday, we head to voting booths in this community. On the ballot will be a whole host of important decisions about who will speak for us at all levels of government — city, school, county, state and federal. There are many candidates to sort from each other and many issues will be on voter’s minds.

When it comes to voting for who will represent us in the Minnesota Legislature, I urge you to vote for Terry Gjersvik. I have known him for nearly the whole time I’ve lived in this county, and we often ran into each other at events involving each other’s children, from Sibley through Southwest, and Albert Lea High School.

Even before he was a candidate for District 27A, I witnessed how Gjersvik identified key issues with an impact on the people of this community. So when he did decide to run for office, it was not because outsiders told him issues like child care, education, health care and affordable workforce housing were important; he already knew that. He knew these issues were important because of his own experience working with children, with families, from working the fields as a farmer and from listening to people in the communities where he lives and works.

Gjersvik embodies a “one Minnesota” model that is truly bipartisan, and he recognizes we all need to work together — progressives, conservatives, independents — instead of against each other, if we are going to be successful as a community or as a state.

Is he progressive? Well, of course he is. Progressives believe in change, not in holding on to the status quo. Whatever else we might say about each other, at this point we all should agree that actively working to keep everything exactly as it is right now (or used to be when we were kids) will leave us where we are now, trapped, divided and paralyzed.

And despite what shows up each day in many of our mailboxes — meaning those nasty mailers from the state GOP — he is not the kind of person who’s going to give up this district’s needs and priorities, or his own integrity, to make it easier for a political party to retain power by any means necessary.

Terry Gjersvik is the kind of representative who will work with those who have different opinions to make sure important decisions get made, and we don’t have another legislative session end with obstruction, ideological litmus tests and legislative stalemate.

David Rask Behling

Albert Lea