With the time nearing midnight and the House already adjourned for the Minnesota Legislature’s marathon, one-day special session in June, 83-year-old Ann Rest stood up on the Senate floor and excoriated her fellow lawmakers for holding budget working group meetings in private.
“People want to call it private meetings but they’re secret. And you know that they’re secret,” Rest said, seething. “And we don’t do that in the main tax committee. And we didn’t do it in our tax working group either. And if you think people are nasty in public meetings, well, just imagine how nasty they are to one another in so-called secret meetings.”
Then, as the New Hope DFLer and Taxes Committee chair discussed the omnibus tax bill that the Senate was about to approve, per a preordained agreement between Gov. Tim Walz and legislative leaders, Rest pivoted to deadpan humor.
“I held a contest. Some of you know about that. Which [provisions] really are the neatest ones here.”
Rest nominated Sen. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, “who became the woke flower child of the Senate tax committee” for putting together “provisions on market farming and floriculture.”
The yawns seconds ago from colleagues seated behind Rest turned to laughter.
Rest announced last month that the 2026 legislative session will be her last after 42 years in the Minnesota Legislature. Senate colleagues describe Rest as honest, sharp and pragmatic.
“She is the tax guru while I’m often legislating with emotion,” said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton. “She has been very bipartisan and very concrete.”
Added Kunesh, “I feel like I’m learning from her at every turn.”
Related: Sen. Ann Rest among state lawmakers credited for bipartisanship, report says
But Rest’s voice rises when she discusses what she sees as an increasingly opaque legislative process. And while she mostly does not legislate with emotion, Rest’s undying love for the Minnesota Twins nearly ended her political career.
In June, Rest made national news when she said police informed her that Melissa Hortman murder suspect Vance Boelter parked near her home right after shooting Hortman.
Here is a look at Rest’s contributions to Minnesota public life and her goals for her last legislative session.
‘Exercise your vote’ in 1984
Rest’s father was a middle manager at Swift & Co. meatpacking plant and repeatedly moved his family because of job reassignments. Rest was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and later lived in New Orleans and the Chicago suburb of Rich Township where she graduated high school in 1960.
In a 2008 letter to the Park Forest Historical Society, Rest said that in high school, “My values were formed, particularly those concerning social justice and affirmative action.”
Rest wrote that her classmates “challenged every social stereotype even as we lived in an all-white Chicago suburb.”
Rest graduated from Northwestern University and embarked on a career as a high school Latin and English teacher. Though her father once refused a transfer to South St. Paul, because Rest’s mother said it was too cold, Rest moved to Plymouth in 1970 due to her husband landing a psychology professorship at the University of Minnesota.
In 1979, Robbinsdale High School laid off Rest amid the school’s declining enrollment. In response, Rest became a certified public accountant and grew intrigued with tax policy.
“I was curious about the Legislature and so I went to a tax committee hearing,” Rest said in an interview in her third floor State Capitol office. “I sat in that hearing and I listened to them and I said to myself ‘I can do that.’”
She also wanted to expand women’s role in politics. Rest’s run for the Minnesota House in 1984 coincided with Geraldine Ferraro running for vice president, and a belief, Rest said, “that the women of America will lead us to a safe and sane future.”
Rest’s maiden campaign is spectacularly preserved by the Storer Cable Community Access video “Ann Rest – A Race for the House.”
The video begins with a League of Women Voters parody of the movie “Flashdance” and exercise videos of that era (“Don’t be a dumbbell – vote” and “Exercise your vote in 1984” are but two of the League’s mottos as Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” pulsates).
Then the camera gets to Rest, who is very much not in workout gear but at a desk and reading Hubert H. Humphrey’s “The Education of a Public Man.”
“I thrive on hard work,” Rest said in the video, a slight Virginian accent coming through. “I intend to be an active legislator studying the concerns of people and translating my concern and my background on the issues into legislative proposals.”
Rest defeated the incumbent, Dorothy Hokr of New Hope, by 60 votes.
Getting deals done
Rest rose to chair the House taxes committee in 1995 and also sponsored high-profile measures including indoor smoking restrictions.
Tom Bakk, a retired Iron Range politician first elected to the state House in 1995 and later Senate majority leader, said Rest taught him that “sometimes the best outcome you can get is a deal where everyone is walking away and grumbling a little bit.”
Rest was master of the compromise, Bakk said, once assuaging his concerns by convincing the Education Finance Committee chair to put in $32 million extra to Iron Range schools.
Related: Former smoker Sen. Ann Rest helped lead Minnesota toward smoking restrictions
In 2000, the Star Tribune gave a glowing endorsement of Rest’s first Senate run, which she won, calling her “one terrific legislator” with the “rare distinction” of endorsements from both labor unions and business interests.
It’s a reputation Rest enjoys to this day.
Sen. Bill Weber, R-Luverne and ranking Republican on the Senate Taxes Committee, said that given their ideological differences, “The folks who work at the Taxes Committee were surprised by Sen. Rest’s and my ability to work together.”
Rest did favors for Weber too, including shepherding funding for affordable housing in Windom after the 2023 shutdown of that town’s HyLife pork packing plant.
“She is one of the remaining members of the Legislature who knows how to work across the aisle,” Weber said.
Striking out
Rest risked it all to get a new Twins stadium.
In 1997, Twins owner Carl Pohlad threatened to sell the team to North Carolina business executives unless the state helped pay for a new ballpark.
Minnesotans were cool to the idea in large part because the Twins had moved into the Metrodome just 15 years before. But to this day, Rest believed that the dome doomed the Twins.
“The stadium was dual purpose but it was actually a football stadium in which we played,” Rest said in her office adorned by Twins memorabilia, including two Wheaties boxes from World Series wins in 1987 and 1991.
Rest’s passion partly came from her Virginia childhood when she rooted for the Washington Senators, which moved to Minneapolis and became the Twins in 1960.
In 1997, she proposed taxes on everything from sports memorabilia to rental cars in the hope of some bill, any bill, for a new stadium gaining traction.
The media said her crusade came out of left field.
“Unlikely lawmaker tries to save Twins,” read a 1997 St. Cloud Times headline with the subhead, “House DFLer who abhors tax breaks for business projects sponsors stadium bill.”
Rest told the paper that the Twins are a “community asset that ought to be retained with public participation and investment.”
At Rest’s behest, Gov. Arne Carlson called a legislative special session to secure Twins stadium funding. The special session lasted 23 days and no bill passed for public funding.
Rest, who had begun winning reelection with growing ease, found herself in a nailbiter in 1998.
“In 1997, I got all these people saying, what are you doing? And you can’t do this, I won’t support you, blah blah blah,’” Rest recalled.
She beat Republican challenger Lynn Osertman by just 200 votes.
In the 2000s, when the Twins were, again, looking for a new stadium, Rest said that she was too spooked from her past experience to support her beloved team. That time around, the politics had changed and the Legislature did support a new ballpark.
Related: Sen. Ann Rest sees familiar stadium scenario playing out
The Ann Rest committee
A doctor of internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic, state Sen. Matt Klein, DFL-Mendota Heights, is not easily awed.
But when Ann Rest brought her walking cane and went door knocking for Klein during his 2016 bid for the Senate, Klein was “quite intimidated. She is a pretty authoritative figure.”
Klein found himself drawn to Rest precisely because she is “tough and acerbic” and “doesn’t tolerate fools and doesn’t tolerate nonsense.”
So, he pitched himself to join Rest’s tax committee, an assignment Klein speaks about like a motivated student describing their organic chemistry class.
“In G15, everyone talks about policy and it is serious,” Klein said, a reference to the committee’s meeting room.
Like “Fight Club,” Rest runs the tax committee with a couple of specific rules. Bill sponsors must seek a bipartisan collaborator. And authors have to read their bill before the committee.
“In my tax committee, when you have a bill, you have the author explain the bill rather than sitting there like a mummer and having lobbyists and staff go through the bill,” Rest said.
“She requires that you walk line-by-line through your legislation,” said committee member Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown.
And if you don’t know your bill, Hauschild said, Rest has no hesitation about “dressing you down.”
But quite unlike “Fight Club,” the third rule concerns transparency.
When the Legislature adjourned this May without budget bills written and passed, committee chairs began meeting in “working groups,” basically committee meetings except no votes are taken.
The Legislature passed a law in 1990 letting them meet privately so long as nothing was voted on.
Fast forward 35 years and most of the 2025 budget process involved committees meeting behind closed doors, and then committee chairs meeting with legislative leaders in private, followed by the legislative leaders meeting with Walz outside the public eye.
The glaring exception was the taxes working group, where the public could attend meetings in the aforementioned room G15.
In our interview, Rest called the private working group meetings “unconscionable” and a “violation of what we say we are going to do for the public.”
Tax committee members were not totally on board with the public meetings.
“It definitely was a little bit nerve-wracking,” Hauschild said, adding that Rest put moderates like himself in a potentially vulnerable spot.
Hauschild did say that meeting publicly showed, “We’re a serious committee.”
Klein respected Rest’s decision but did not seriously think about his own committee, Commerce and Consumer Protection, holding their working groups in public.
“We had a great amount of work to do in a short amount of time,” Klein said. That some senators felt they had to mince their words in public “created a significant barrier for doing it.”
A final session for Ann Rest
Rest did not like parts of the omnibus tax bill that Walz signed into law in June, especially increasing the tax on cannabis from 10% to 15%.
“Why aren’t they looking at California?” Rest said. “California has a high tax on cannabis as well as some local taxes on cannabis. And 60% of cannabis [in California] is bought on the black market.”
Rest also said her committee could have done more to cut into tax breaks for data centers. The final bill sunsets an electricity tax exemption for data centers, but keeps other perks like tax relief for equipment purchases.
What seemed to upset Rest the most was that her novel idea to tax social media companies based on the number of consumers they are collecting data from did not make it out of committee. The bill would have charged companies like Meta and Google parent company Alphabet $165,000 a month for every 1 million users plus 50 cents for each additional consumer over one million.
“[Alphabet-owned] YouTube gets our information for free,” Rest said, her voice rising with incredulity. “This is a new tax base that we really shouldn’t turn up our noses at.”
Rest wants to revive the social media bill this spring, and also provide help to Hennepin County Medical Center and North Memorial Health. She would also like to bring back Walz’s proposal to lower the sales tax rate but expand the base to more consumer services, such as financial advice.
As Rest dove into one tax idea after another, I remarked on how she speaks about these bills differently than a lot of other lawmakers I’ve interviewed. There are no bumper sticker slogans or appeals to partisan political beliefs, just fairly lengthy hypotheses on what a new tax might do.
Rest replied, “If you are a student of your bills, then the challenge is to speak to the interest of people. You have to take those complexities and insert clarity. It doesn’t mean dumbing down.”
The post Almost at Rest: Ann Rest discusses 40+ years in the Minnesota Legislature, her treasured Twins, and growing legislative opacity appeared first on MinnPost.
