August 5, 2026

By Sara Millhouse

Photo submitted by Teri Preisler

In 2022, Dave Preisler of Le Center, Minnesota, retired after spending 28 years as the CEO of the Minnesota Pork Producers Association. “My career focused on serving others, problem solving, budgets, development of policy, and advocating at the state and federal level, ”he said. “I really value our rural community so decided to run for county commissioner.  It has been a good fit.”

As a Le Sueur County Commissioner, Preisler has learned and studied deeply about the details of county services, from  roads, law enforcement and public health  to the recorder’s office and GIS mapping. “We’re responsible, ultimately, to the taxpayer, and we’re responsible for implementing programs at high levels of accountability,” he said.

In Le Sueur County, commissioners  maintain more than 300 miles of drainage ditches that move water off soggy farm fields and keep small-town stormwater and wastewater discharge flowing downstream. Most of the ditches are more than 100 years old.

Preisler loves this little slice of Minnesota. “We’ve lived here 38 years, raised our family here,” he said. “It’s quiet, safe, relatively affordable. We’ve got winter, but so does the rest of the state, and having all four seasons is something I enjoy.”

Many of the 30,000 people who live in Le Sueur County travel to Mankato or toward the Twin Cities for work. “We’re a mix of an agriculture, local business and commuter county,” Preisler explained. “We don’t have a stoplight in the county, but we have two at a border we share with another county.”

In Le Sueur County, about 550 families qualify and utilize the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), supporting local grocery stores and businesses as well as putting food on the table for Le Sueur County residents. And in Minnesota, county human services departments directly administer the program to local residents, instead of providing services through statewide administration.

The budget law passed by Congress and signed by the President last year shifts the responsibility of SNAP administrative costs from the federal government to most states. In Minnesota, this shift will be felt directly by property owners on their county tax bills.

“If I am sitting in Washington, DC, I get to claim this shift as a cut,” Preisler said of the SNAP delivery cost-shift.

Sitting in Le Sueur County, “we end up having an increase in costs with that shift.”

Most of Le Sueur County’s tax base is residential and agricultural, so property tax burdens are largely shouldered by homeowners and farmers. “Anyone who has family or friends in the farming business today knows that margins, well, to say they’re tight would be an understatement,” Preisler said. “So to expect to put a lot more on a system that’s already struggling financially is  unrealistic.”

Preisler worries that this cost-shift is an indicator of things to come. “SNAP is just one of the shifts that we’re looking at out of a whole host of different things,” he said.

Preisler estimates the cost of SNAP delivery administration in Le Sueur County alone at $192,000, which would represent an increase of about two-thirds of a percent of the county’s total levy. “SNAP is a mandatory program, so cuts may have to come from other things,” he said. “We really are conservative here, budgeting wise, so there’s not much fat to trim off.”

Soon, Preisler and his fellow commissioners will sit down with county department heads to pore over the next year’s budget, line item by line item. They’ll try to separate the needs from the wants, from road maintenance to sheriff’s services to early intervention programs, just to name a few areas.

Preisler recognizes that Le Sueur County is still better-situated to handle this burden than some other Minnesota counties. “If you’ve got an older population, if you have a lower-income population in a property-poor area, that’s kind of the trifecta of having increased costs with just really limited areas where you can find the funds to meet the needs and mandate,” he said.

The Minnesota state legislature has allocated funding to upgrade software that slows SNAP benefit processing, but those improvements won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, commissioners like Preisler are advocating  for a one- or two-year delay in the shift of SNAP administrative costs to state and local governments.

A delay could allow for technological improvements as well as more information on administrative costs in the face of new Congressional mandates. “Then we’ll at least be making a decision based on knowledge and not just making a decision, and then seeing what happens,” Preisler said.