On Saturday, April 5, Rep. Tom Dippel (R-Cottage Grove) held a town hall at the HERO Center in Cottage Grove and spoke to issues ranging from the budget deficit to PFAS to federal changes appearing at the state level.
The event was a chance for constituents to hear from the representative and ask questions. Rep. Dippel styled it as a chance to “find out what’s happening at the capitol and what I’m doing personally.”
Dippel spoke broadly on various bipartisan and partisan issues, speaking first to the tie within the House of Representatives that has led to committees switching chairs back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. Dippel called it “a halfway decent process” that necessitated bipartisanship.
To that point, Dippel spoke to a bipartisan bill that increases penalties and establishes minimum fines for repeat violations of driving without a valid driver’s license.
Dippel also spoke to various partisan issues including two GOP bills that would end tax on baby products (H.F. 15) and add funding to pregnancy centers which was previously cut (H.F. 25).
“We provide funding for crisis pregnancy centers, all of that funding was stripped away in the last session, or just general pregnancy centers […] that will help women that are pregnant and they don’t know what to do, they’re afraid, and they need help,” said Dippel.
Opponents of H.F. 25 cited a gag order within the bill that mandated that centers “must use the grant funds for programs and services to support, encourage, and assist pregnant women in carrying their pregnancies to term,” according to the bill.
“Minnesotans deserve unbiased, medically accurate care—not restrictions on their options or risks to their privacy,” according to a Feb. 27 statement on H.F. 25 from Unrestrict Minnesota, a campaign for protecting and expanding Minnesota abortion care.

PFAS
Dippel currently has four bills that would allocate funds to Hastings for PFAS water treatment plants (WTPs). They are H.F. 1192 which would appropriate funds from a future bonding bill, H.F. 1193 which would appropriate funds from the general fund, H.F. 1682 which would appropriate funds from the state’s Clean Water Fund, and H.F. 348 which would move funds from the 3M settlement fund to Hastings.
Each of these four bills is still in committee at time of writing.
Despite authoring a bill that would appropriate money from a future bonding bill, when speaking about the budget deficit, Dippel spoke out against bonding: “I don’t like the bonding. I don’t think the state should have a credit card when you have a $50 billion budget already.”

Budget deficit
A consistent talking point from Dippel has been the looming $6 billion deficit facing the state in the coming biennium.
Dippel spoke to the GOP proposed budget that presents some $600 million of cuts: “Personally, I think it should be more because I don’t think we are on a sustainable path even with that budget,” said Dippel.
Dippel criticized Gov. Tim Walz’s proposed budget which includes just under $250 million in cuts: “He wanted to cut things like special education funding or really went after non-public school funding.”
Dippel referenced the constitutional amendment H.F. 4 authored by Rep. Wayne Johnson (R-Cottage Grove) that would “set aside surplus tax revenue that must be returned to the taxpayers of this state each biennium,” according to the bill. While the bill failed in a March 13 vote, Dippel commended the bill: “As everybody knows here, if you have a budget, you need to keep it.”

Federal issues
Several attendees leveed questions to Dippel concerning changes at the federal level including the largescale cuts being undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk.
Dippel largely didn’t comment on federal issues, especially those coming from DOGE, focusing instead on issues at the state level: “As a state legislator, I can’t call Donald Trump, you know? I can’t really even call anybody in congress, they are just not going to listen to me […] but I am trying as hard as I can on the state level to balance out what is right.”
Dippel did, however, speak to his bill H.F. 2895 Education Empowerment, that sets up a system of individual education empowerment accounts for students upon a parent’s request, similar to a school voucher system.
Dippel directly tied the bill to the Ja. 29 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that directed federal agencies including the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services to provide guidance to states that want to support educational alternatives, “including private and faith-based options,” according to a White House fact sheet on the order.