Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger recalls first getting involved in politics way back in eighth grade.
“It started by being a student representative for a referendum that was going for our school,” Hemmingsen-Jaeger said in an Aug. 2 interview, “and then continuing some advocacy for many other issues.”
Hemmingsen-Jaeger remembers being a captain of the school dance team when the school decided to cut the program.
“We got organized. We went to the Board of the School District,” she recalled. “They listened to us and did not cut our school’s dance program.”
That was the spark for Hemmingsen-Jaeger to get involved in issues for the greater community. After graduating from college, she started working for Minnesota State. She got involved with union activities as her first exposure to lobbying. A paid parental-leave initiative interested her, so she lobbied her state legislator, who co-authored a parental-leave bill that eventually failed to pass.
Three years later, when she was pregnant with her second daughter, Hemmingsen-Jaeger brought her older daughter to the State Capitol during parental-leave rallies and, on the second time around, the bill passed.
In 2022, redistricting helped Hemmingsen-Jaeger win a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, and, since 2023, she has been a DFL state representative for district 47A, which encompasses parts of Woodbury and Maplewood.
“My uniqueness lies in my hard lab-science background. I look at things differently. I have that unique blend of science, policy and education. I make sure that the policies I support and put forward on behalf of the community are comprehensive.”
One such example was working with the Woodbury Police Department in 2023. That summer, the WPD noticed 13 Bitcoin ATM machines at retail locations that scammers were using to rob senior citizens.
Earlier, Bitcoin ATMs looked a lot like regular ATMs. Now many are combined: regular and Bitcoin. A senior citizen would be called and told, “We have your grandson in jail and you need to wire us.”
The police found that most people were “almost hypnotized” on the phone because they were being told not to hang up or talk to anybody. They were wiring tens of thousands of dollars to these Bitcoin machines. And once they get into those, the money is gone and untraceable.
“I met with the police department and asked how I could help,” Hemmingsen-Jaeger said. “Talking together brought out this idea of regulating these Bitcoin ATMs at a local level. My legislative assistant at the time did a huge amount of research, and we put forth a bill to regulate it. We also got the attention of Senator Jennifer McEwen of Duluth, who had a similar experience, so we actually combined forces and lined up our bills.”
The effort was successful. A few months after the law was in effect the WPD was already seeing that people who were scammed were actually getting their money back.
When asked why she would be able to make a greater impact as a senator, compared to a house representative, she replied that some of it is just a numbers game.
“As a house member, you are one of 134. In the Senate, you are one of 67,” she notes. “As a senator, you have the ability to represent 80,000 people versus, you know, 42,000 people, I think this allows me to have an even better understanding of Woodbury as a whole. … But I feel like as a senator, I will have a little bit more resources and time to really make sure that I’m looking at Woodbury as a whole and still maintaining that relationship with south Maplewood as well.”
When asked to highlight standout achievements in her last three years as house representative, Hemmingsen-Jaeger mentioned the 2023-2024 session.
“I mean, that will never happen again in a lifetime. The combination of the DFL trifecta, the surplus that was there, so much of it was one-time money. Like it really allowed us to catch up on a lot of things that had been neglected for 10 years.
“On a more local level, we got the sales tax exemption for the Central Park renovation in Woodbury. We got some money to go toward bonding for Central Park. That is really local, but that impacts us because we don’t necessarily have to raise property taxes.”
