ELY — Aaron Kania has worn a lot of hats: district ranger, federal law enforcement officer, father, outdoorsman. Now he’s trying to become DFL candidate for Minnesota House District 3A.
Kania, 51, who retired from a federal law enforcement career at the end of 2025, spoke to the Ely Tuesday Group this week, offering what he described as a progress report from a two-month listening tour across the sprawling Minnesota district.
“I really want to report out what I’ve been hearing,” Kania said. “This is not set in stone. This is pertinent through today, and I fully expect that with more conversations and more listening, this will adjust and shift.”

What he’s heard
After five county conventions and countless coffee shop conversations, Kania boiled his listening tour findings down to three core concerns: the cost of living, building the economy, and the health of the region’s forests.
On cost of living, Kania pointed to recently arrived property tax bills, rising health care premiums, and increasing gas and grocery prices as recurring themes. On the economy, he said jobs, particularly union jobs, came up “over and over and over again,” alongside tourism and mining.
Forests, he acknowledged, may reflect his own background as much as his constituents’ concerns. But the stakes are real. International Falls alone has more than 600 direct jobs tied to its paper mill, with hundreds more in logging, trucking, and forest management.
“When you look at the state of our forest, we’re kind of unique in Minnesota,” Kania said. “This is a unique piece of the state, and that’s where my background is really well suited.”

Tax redistribution and forest markets
On policy, Kania said two tax distribution issues needed to be addressed.
The first involves seasonal property taxes, the revenue generated by lake homes and second properties across the region that currently flows south rather than staying in local communities. Kania argued that redirecting those dollars to fund local schools, roads, and infrastructure wouldn’t raise anyone’s taxes. It would simply keep the money where the need is.
“When all of those people are up here enjoying their second home, guess what? You need ambulance service, you need fire service, you need roads, you need water lines,” he said.
The second issue involves school trust fund revenues. Kania said that about 90 percent of the state’s school trust fund originates from the Minntac area and U.S. Steel operations in northeastern Minnesota, but only about 2 percent of that revenue is returned to the region.
On forestry, Kania said the most consistent message he’s heard is the need for new markets for forest products, markets that he argued could be developed without disrupting existing businesses.

Committees and
coalitions
Kania said he intends to translate those priorities into results. Committees, he said, are where legislative work actually happens, and he’s already spoken with DFL leadership about securing seats on the Environment and Natural Resources Committee, the Legacy Finance Committee, and the Capital Investment Committee, which funds rural water, sewer, and infrastructure projects.
He also emphasized the importance of bipartisan coalition-building in a Legislature where the house is evenly split.
“A lot of the rural areas are represented by Republicans,” he said. “We have common ground just because we’re rural. To help bridge that rural-urban divide, to be able to speak to Republican legislators about things we have in common — that’s how we get legislation passed.”
Kania highlighted the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Industry Transition Initiative, or MITI, as a promising vehicle for consensus-building, bringing together industry leaders, environmental groups, tribal leadership, elected officials, and universities around shared priorities.

Health care and Medicaid concerns
When audience members raised health care, Kania discussed a recent conversation with Keith Harvey, CEO of Scenic Rivers Health Services in Tower. Harvey told him that proposed Medicaid changes could leave more than 1,000 people in Scenic Rivers’ service area without coverage.
“They’re going to show up as a crisis for our already overtaxed ambulance service, and their health care is going to be extremely expensive, because it’s gonna be a crisis,” Kania said. “And guess who pays for health care when the patient doesn’t pay? We all pay.”

On guns and mental health
Asked about gun legislation, Kania drew on his law enforcement background to reframe the debate. Mass shootings, he said, represent roughly 1 percent of gun deaths, while suicide accounts for the largest share.
“We spend almost all of our time talking about 2 percent of the problem,” he said, referring to mass shootings and defensive gun use combined. “Nintey-eight percent of the problem kind of falls in the middle, and nobody really wants to talk about that.”
His prescription focused less on firearms restrictions than on mental health infrastructure, which he called a priority that could command bipartisan support.

The road ahead
Kania is currently the only DFL candidate on the House side of District 3A. The Senate District 3 endorsing convention is scheduled for April 25 in Two Harbors, where delegates who participated in precinct caucuses can formally endorse candidates. A filing period opens in late May, followed by an August primary and the November 4 general election.
He said the question he struggles with most on the campaign trail is how things are going.
“I have to say I’m biased, and I recognize that I’m biased,” he said with a laugh. “I feel like it’s going very well.”