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Read the full story here or the YouTube video of Chris's interview. Winona Daily News, Rachel Mergen, 1/21/2022 : What made you want to work in your current position?
A: “Well, if we think of my current position as being a county commissioner, then it’s because I care. “Now, being an elected official working in the community is really different than what I did for my job for 30 years. I wrote software and I was a technical expert for IT projects. And, in software, it either works or it doesn’t and it’s really not someone’s opinion, but it’s not like that in public life. Everyone has an opinion. They don’t often correspond to what you think is the thing that might have been successful. “But I will say that the drive to use data, to take whatever research, whatever information that you have and use that to make the best possible decision rather than to base your decisions on an etiology is that technical part of my job that I’ve really tried to bring to being a county commissioner. “Now, I will say that aside from that, I also believe that government is here to help people. In my job at General Mills, I traveled to India. I went to several countries in South America, places where you can’t drink the tap water and places where infrastructure like the sewage, electricity, telephone, the streets, that stuff barely works or is completely nonexistent and where people live on the sidewalks and ditches alongside of the roads. And we have so much more than that here in the U.S. Because I think that collectively, we can help everyone to be lifted up in our society. “So that is my vision that government is here to help people. And if I think about programs that we do, some of them that I’ve learned about in the time that I’ve spent with the county, it’s not just that they’re the right thing to do. It’s not just that they help people. It’s that they also have a positive return. By giving somebody help here to get off their addiction, you save so much later in terms of services that they might require and not just pain that they and their families might experience. So my goal is really that I want to be wise but also compassionate in the use of our resources.” Comments are closed.
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