Brooklyn Park Mayor Hollies Winston Talks Legislative Priorities for 2026
Brooklyn Park Mayor Hollies Winston outlined the city’s legislative priorities headed into 2026: help regulating group homes and funding to help expand the Community Activity Center.
Community Activity Center
Mayor Winston said the city wants to be able to offer more sports at the community’s gym and ice hockey center.
“We’re a diverse community and we want to be able to honor all of (the sports),” Winston told CCX Media’s Dave Kiser. “We want to bring basketball courts and more court usage so that we can have different sports there.”
Congregate Care Facilities
Winston said Brooklyn Park is home to more congregate care facilities–private single-family homes that house multiple non-related people, often as businesses, also called group homes. He said that is a strain on public safety.
“We’re looking for resources to support that but we’re also looking for some limitations when it comes limiting the growth of that because our public safety is just not going to be able to afford that level of growth,” said Winston.
Winston also said the city would like state funding to help train young people for careers in the bio-tech industry. This aligns with the city’s goal of creating a bio-tech district along the northern border along Highway 610.
“We’re looking to bring 5,000 to 10,000 jobs to the biotech center,” said Winston. “How do we train (young people) for these jobs that come with bio-tech? So we can build a machine where we know that if a youth does reasonably well in school, that they’re going to get a job paying 60, 70, 80K a year, and that funding will help us with that.”
