State Auditor

RogueOn Minnesota endorses Pat Anderson for State Auditor. Pat previously served as Minnesota State Auditor from 2003-2007. She is a strong Conservative candidate with fiscal responsibility as her hallmark.

Pat Anderson is a fourth generation Minnesotan. She grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota, the oldest of five children. She graduated from Forest Lake High School in 1984 but her political education took place around the kitchen table with her parents and in the great outdoors.

Pat credits her parents for inspiring her and her siblings with the ideals of individual liberty – that in America we have the unalienable right to pursue happiness, but that happiness and joy require the personal responsibility that only self-reliant, productive individuals can know. They challenged their children’s minds and bodies with winter camping in the Boundary Waters to build mental and physical toughness. The lessons took.

Minnesotans would be hard pressed to find a more independent, responsible, hard-working person of integrity than Pat Anderson. She will fight for Minnesotans and demand the accountability that is necessary in this government position.

Pat has a long and varied career in both the public and private sector. She served as an Eagan city council member from 1991-1998 and was mayor of Eagan from 1998-2002 when she first caught the public eye for her running battles with Chairman Ted Mondale over who ran the City of Eagan – the people of Eagan or Mondale’s Met Council.

She built out the city’s infrastructure as only a fiscal conservative would do – by keeping taxes low and not letting the city’s growth get ahead of its revenues. City Pages named her the Best Mayor in the Twin Cities in 2002. From 2003-2007, Pat served at State Auditor where she popularized the term “essential services” to define where local governments should focus spending.

A “Watchdog for the Taxpayers,” Pat went after excessive school superintendent pay packages and local government lobbying expenses. Pat also served as Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Employee Relations in the Pawlenty Administration. She served as president of the Minnesota Free Market Institute and ran two successful innovative service businesses.

As State Auditor, Pat is committed to:

• Promoting local control of education, parental school choice and limiting the policy influence of the Federal government, the Legislature, and the Executive Branch of government. Education currently consumes over 40% of the state general fund spending on top of billions raised at the local level. Pat will make sure every penny is spent wisely and that we move back toward local control of education.
• The pro-market approach to create an overall competitive business environment.
• Reforming the relationship between state and local governments so that the state provides local units of government more freedom to do what they deem best for their residents.  
• To actively ensure that local units of government are spending tax dollars correctly and wisely and aggressively ferret out waste, fraud and abuse.
• A better Minnesota by focusing state government on its constitutional obligations and holding state government accountable to these constitutional obligations and leaving local governments free to provide essential services to their communities as they think best, without undue mandates from state government.

 Pat sums up her reasons for serving simply but eloquently. “Serving in state government is exciting for me because it gives me a chance to put into practice the ideas of the individual liberty and limited government I learned as a child at my father’s knee. Mine is a typical American story – whatever our personal joys, our personal sorrows, it is the values we pass to the next generation that is the measure of our lives.”

For more information or to make a contribution to her campaign, visit Pat’s website: PatAndersonForAuditor.com

Update: Pat was endorsed by the GOP at the state convention on April 29th.