Jay Backer said Friday he's not afraid to skip across the aisle and wander outside his party to vote for something that's in the best interest of his district.

Backer, a Republican from Graceville, has announced he will challenge DFL Rep. Andrew Falk for the House District 20A seat in this year's election.

District 20A covers Big Stone, Lac qui Parle, Lincoln, and Swift counties and the western half of Yellow Medicine County.

"We have to have someone who will represent the values of the district, not vote with the Minneapolis party or the party leadership," Backer said. "When you know it's important to the district, you're going to have to break away from your own party. If I have to be against leadership when something comes up that's better for the district, I'm gonna be for the district."

That's something Falk didn't do, Backer said, when the Appleton prison shut down. The closing of the city's largest employer, Prairie Correctional Facility, a private prison, reportedly put more than 120 people in the 2,700-population west-central Minnesota community out of work.

"It frustrates me how jobs are being chased away in our district, like in Appleton," Backer said. "It frustrates me how Representative Falk didn't do anything to champion the cause to keep the prison open. One of my main things is job creation and encouraging businesses, not working against them."

One of Backer's main campaign issue is rural jobs - creating them and keeping them by focusing on the strengths of rural Minnesota and the infrastructure already in place by creating equal funding to rural districts all over Minnesota.

"We need someone to fight hard for 20A to get people to come back to the area," said Backer, who has owned an Internet business since 1990. "More people would move to out area, but because all the jobs are in the urban areas that's where people go. We've got elected officials who are chasing jobs away instead of working keep jobs."

Education is also a key issue for Backer especially in light of the billions of dollars in payments that was delayed by the Legislature in this year's session. Backer, a graduate of Beardsley-Valley High School and St. Cloud State University, and former member of the Minnesota Rural Education Association Board, says the fact that students in rural Minnesota receive less state aid per pupil compared to school districts in Minneapolis and St. Paul should make parents and grandparents in rural Minnesota cringe.

"We need to not delay the pain, we need to correct it," he said. "We have to work to have equal funding. It's important for our kids to have a good education. In the eyes of God all children are created equal, but not in the eyes of St. Paul. We need to find ways to reduce the size of government, streamline it and look at how programs are implemented.

"We have to set priorities of what's important to the entire state, cut waste in programs and, obviously, tighten our belts," he added. "I've done that as a business owner when we had lean times. I've done it on a school board during lean times."

Backer's identical twin brother, Jeff, is a three-term mayor of Browns Valley and is running against longtime DFL Sen. Keith Langseth in Senate District 9.

Falk, who filed Thursday, is seeking his second term. He unanimously received the DFL endorsement in March along with 20B Rep. Lyle Koenen and District 20 State Sen. Gary Kubly.

Written by Per Peterson and reprinted from The Marshall Independent, Southwest Minnesota's Daily Newspaper.