MEET STEVE

ABOUT STEVE

Steve was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2018. Now in his third term, Steve is serving on five committees: Transportation, Health, Taxes, Property Taxes and Veterans. His current District 50B lies entirely within western Bloomington.

Steve and his wife Judy have lived in their Bloomington home for almost 40 years. Their now grown daughters, Michelle and Danielle, were raised here and both attended Bloomington Public Schools. Steve and Judy have long been active volunteers in Bloomington, working to make our community a better place to live for over three decades. 

Steve studied economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He worked as a transportation economist in the airline industry for the first 15 years of his career. Steve and his family moved to Bloomington in 1985 when Steve was tapped to lead the Pricing Department at Republic Airlines. When he left the airline industry in the early 90s, he wanted to stay involved in transportation policy, so he began his public service career by volunteering to serve on Bloomington’s Traffic and Transportation Advisory Committee and on the Bloomington School District’s Transportation Task Force in 1995. He has actively served on Transportation Policy committees for Leagues of Cities at the Regional, State and National level, serving as chair of the National League of Cities Transportation Committee in 2010. He went on to serve as the chair of the Metropolitan Council’s Transportation Committee in 2011 and is now a Vice-Chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures Transportation Committee.

He is still working on Transportation policy, today, as a member of the House Transportation Committee. Steve is an active participant in the National Conference of State Legislatures’ transportation policy programs and has moderated NCSL panels on the Future of Transportation and Road User Charges as a replacement for the gas tax in the age of electric vehicles.

Across his public service career, neighborhood traffic safety has been a focus for Steve. A pioneering advocate for street redesign as a City Councilmember, Steve has passed several bills enabling cities to reduce speed limits and promoting safer streets for all users and neighborhood residents. The recent reduction of speed limits on Bloomington’s residential streets from 30 to 25 MPH was enabled by Steve’s legislation.

Steve is highly respected by his colleagues for his visionary leadership in transportation policy.

In 2000 Steve was appointed to the City’s Planning Commission and in 2001 he was elected to the Bloomington City Council representing District 3 (northwestern Bloomington). He won three terms on the Bloomington City Council and served in that position until he was appointed to represent Bloomington, Edina, Richfield and Hopkins on the Metropolitan Council by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2011, a position he held for 8 years. Steve represented the community at the state and national level as an active participant in organizations such as the League of Minnesota Cities, Metro Cities (the association of Twin Cities municipalities) and the National League of Cities. He continued his association with our cities as Vice-Chair of the House Local Government Committee in his first two House terms and was named a “Legislator of Distinction” by the League of Minnesota Cities in 2019. As a legislator, Steve has been instrumental in passing legislation on behalf of Bloomington and its residents.

He has also been a longtime active participant in good government organizations like the Citizens League and the League of Women Voters and, as a legislator, he is active in the bipartisan Civility Caucus.

About 25 years ago, Steve changed careers and mastered the discipline of IT Information Architecture. Over the last decade of his private sector career, his work was focused on Health Information Technology, and he worked as an Information Architect at OptumHealth in Eden Prairie for 7 years until his retirement in 2018. His project work at Optum immersed him in the technology of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and provided an opportunity for Steve to work directly with experienced Nurse Practitioners on a technology project which is enabling them to provide better care to chronically ill Medicare patients. These experiences have provided Steve with invaluable insights into the nature of the healthcare challenges which have made him a valuable contributor to legislative efforts to reform our healthcare delivery system. Steve is leveraging this experience, as well as his education in economics, to lead the charge to bring transparency the pricing of drugs and healthcare services as a member of the House Health Finance & Policy Committee. In 2022, Steve chaired a federal Technical Expert Panel for the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which created a national standard format for hospital price reporting and, in 2023, he passed a bill which leverages the resulting data to enable patients to shop for expensive elective health care services on the basis of both price and quality. (Visit TurquoiseHealth.com to shop for yourself.)

Steve is also a national leader in the fight to protect consumer data privacy. Collaborating with a bipartisan group of legislators from around the country, he passed the country’s strongest state data privacy law to protect Minnesota consumers this year.

An active participant in the deliberations of the State’s public/private Technical Advisory Commission, Steve used his IT experience to shape the legislation to behind the successful implementation of the new MNDrive system now used for Vehicle Registration and Drivers licenses. Statutory contradictions that contributed to the earlier MNLARS system failure were eliminated and the replacement project’s funding ensured that the new system would be fully tested before it went live. He now plays the same oversight role on all legislative initiatives that will require a significant investment in new IT infrastructure, making sure that legislation like the new Paid Family & Medical Leave program can be successfully implemented.

Steve is a lifelong nature lover and conservationist. He is an avid gardener, birdwatcher, paddler, fisherman and cyclist. He has served on the boards of the Minnesota River Valley Audubon Chapter (MRVAC) and the Minnesota League of Conservation Voters (now Conservation Minnesota) and remains an active member of both organizations. He is also an active member of the Minnesota Nature Conservancy and the Izaak Walton League (Bush Lake chapter). He is regularly endorsed by Conservation Minnesota and the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club for this work.

VIDEOS AND ARTICLES FEATURING STEVE

Click through the Sun Current article (above) about being named a “Legislator of Distinction” by the League of Minnesota Cities.