Common sense.Wayne Johnson

Start with the two numbers on your property tax statement. The first is the levy, the total dollars your city, county, and school district vote to collect. The second is your home’s estimated market value, which decides your share of that levy. When home values climb faster than the levy, your share can grow even in a year when local spending barely moves. That is why two neighbors on the same street can see very different bills.

Relief works on both numbers. The $125 million in property tax relief Wayne backed in 2026 lowers what households owe, and he is pushing to make it permanent. Two state programs help on top of that: the Minnesota homestead credit refund, which returns money when property taxes rise sharply compared with your income, and the special property tax refund, which can apply when your net tax jumps more than 12 percent and at least $100 in a year. Both are filed with your state return.

Car tabs tell the same story in miniature. The annual registration fee lands in every driver’s mailbox, and small increases add up across a family with two or three vehicles. The $250 million in tab fee reductions Wayne supported puts that money back with the people who earned it. It is the accountant’s view he brings to the Taxes Committee: government should justify every dollar it asks families to send in.

Big road projects are won long before the first cone goes down. The $9.6 million Wayne helped secure pays for the three steps that turn a line on a map into a buildable project: the environmental review that studies the corridor, the right of way work that lines up the land, and the final design that engineers will build from. Each step finished now is time and money saved when construction begins.

The realignment matters because Cottage Grove keeps adding homes, jobs, and daily trips. A modern County Road 19A and 100th Street corridor means safer travel for families, smoother routes for the businesses that serve them, and room for the growth the city has already planned. And the funding was secured in a way that respects the people who live there: growth funded without raising local property taxes to pay for it.

Wayne knows this corridor the way only a local can. He served on the Cottage Grove City Council and the Washington County Board before going to St. Paul, so the project is not an abstraction to him. It is the road his neighbors drive, and getting it funded is what showing up for District 41A looks like.

Step one: an idea, usually from home. A representative hears about a problem and asks the nonpartisan Revisor’s Office to draft it into bill language. HF 4017 began with concerns about unlawful shipments of infectious and pathological waste reaching facilities like Newport’s R&E Center. Wayne’s bill answers with notice, inspections, and penalties that protect the sanitation workers who handle that waste.

Step two: committee hearings. The bill is introduced, given a number, and sent to the committees that oversee its subject, where residents, experts, and agencies testify in public. Wayne serves on the Housing Finance and Policy, Taxes, and Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development committees, so he sees this stage from both sides of the table: presenting his own bills and questioning everyone else’s.

Step three: floor votes and the governor’s desk. A bill that clears committee goes to the full House for debate and a vote, then repeats the journey in the Senate. If both chambers pass the same text, it goes to the governor to sign into law. Wayne sponsored 28 bills in his first term, from HF 1195, funding trail lighting for Cottage Grove Ravine Regional Park, to HF 3400, funding a new interchange at Highway 36 and Lake Elmo Avenue. Every one of them started the same way: a neighbor with a problem worth solving.