Demystifying Vance Boelter’s unremarkable tenure on the Governor’s Workforce Development Board 

Few who served on the Governor’s Workforce Development Board with Vance Boelter have much memory of the man accused of assassinating Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and shooting Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.

“I think I remember one time breaking out in a small group (with Boelter),” said Carol Anderson, co-owner of Anderson Dairy Farms. “But I can’t tell you what we talked about, because I don’t remember. I mean, to me, the guy was just an average guy, right? There was nothing unusual about him … there was nothing memorable, I guess, about him.”

“I don’t recall a single thing about him,” Republican state Sen. Carla Nelson, R-Rochester, said. 

“I may have interacted once or twice with (Boelter), but otherwise did not know him,” said Steve Kalina, president and CEO of Minnesota Precision Manufacturing Association. 

“I mean, I’m sorry, man, wish I could remember this guy,” said Robert Blake, CEO and founder of Solar Bear Solar Installation Services. 

MinnPost spoke to eight current or former members of the Governor’s Workforce Development Board to get their accounts of the board’s work and how members are chosen, its relationship with the governor or any politicians, and how Boelter fit into the picture. The quotes above are from members who served on the roughly 60-person board with Boelter in 2019.

Looking back at available meeting minutes from Boelter’s two terms, his name only came up in a smattering  of motions to approve prior meeting minutes. 

Why focus on a board that few Minnesotans likely knew existed before this weekend? Because despite Boelter’s relatively unmemorable time as a volunteer appointee, online commenters have pointed to the board in attempt to explain the murder suspect’s politics and potential motive in the days following the targeted attacks against DFL politicians. 

While it is true that Boelter was appointed during both the Mark Dayton administration in 2016 and reappointed during the Tim Walz administration in 2019 – both DFL governors – the board is nonpartisan. 

The governor’s office is responsible for putting “thousands” of volunteers of all parties on a range of boards and commissions, according to an email from Walz’s office. These unpaid, nonpartisan, external boards are created by the Legislature and serve only as advisory bodies, the office confirmed.  

But the nonpartisan nature of the board didn’t stop people online from using it as a reason to falsely tie Boelter to Democratic leanings. 

This fueled a confrontation Monday between Democratic U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a friend of Hortman’s, and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah after Lee posted on X that he believed Hortman was killed because of “Marxists,” blaming those on the left and Walz. The posts have since been deleted. 

It was far from the only case where right-wing voices claimed online that Boelter supported Democrats. Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson called Boelter a “left-wing Tim Walz appointee,” as the Minnesota Star Tribune pointed out earlier this week, and a slew of people took to social media amplifying that misinformation.

Nelson, a Republican senator who has served multiple terms on the workforce board, said she is “not a huge X consumer” and tried to stay off of the social media platform following the weekend shootings. She said any violence should be condemned. 

“It’s irrelevant what his political persuasion is or was or isn’t,” she said. “I don’t know, and I don’t really want to know. People are barking up the wrong tree if that’s what they’re thinking about. I think we ought to be thinking about the survivors and the Hoffman family.”

‘Doing the administrative work of the state’

“It’s a pretty boring board, no one has asked me about it until now,” said David Dively, executive director of the Minnesota Council on Disability, an independent government agency.

But while the work may have felt tedious, the board has the important job of advising the state government so that Minnesota’s present and future workforce is being prepared for the industries projected to have the most demand for workers.

“All the stakeholders try to align state funding and local governments’ job training programs with the economic opportunities we think will be available down the road,” said Dively, who is a current member of the board and served with Boelter.

“It’s a pretty nondescript thing,” he said, describing how, until the weekend’s tragedy, the board flew under the radar as one of some 200 state boards, councils and commissions. “But I would say it’s not meaningless. … It’s just doing the administrative work of the state.”

Of the eight board members interviewed, most could not point to a specific accomplishment or outcome that they were most proud of during their time on the board. Some did have areas they were particularly pleased to have worked on, such as Anderson’s efforts to bring attention to rural Minnesota. Many suggested that their work was more about the nuts and bolts of how to get the government, educational institutions and the private sector on the same page regarding workforce needs than completing any marquee project.

According to federal and state statute, the Governor’s Workforce Development Board has to include “business and industry, community-based organizations, education, local government, organized labor, state agencies, the state Legislature, and other representatives of the workforce development ecosystem,” the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) said in an email.

The board has more than 60 members, DEED said, and includes representatives of the Disability Council, the four ethnic councils, other smaller agencies, and the Departments of Corrections, Education, Human Services, Management and Budget, and DEED, whose staff set the agenda and which has overall responsibility for the board. 

From the Legislature, it included two state senators and two representatives, split evenly between the DFL and Republican parties. Hoffman, DFL-Champlin, who is recovering after being shot on Saturday, is on the board, and was on the board while Boelter was a member.

The education sector is represented by vocational programs, community colleges and larger universities such as the University of Minnesota. 

“The suspect Vance Boelter was one of the members from the business sector,” former board member and Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz said in an email.

The board’s 2023 legislative report, the last one that listed Boelter as a member, concluded with 11 recommendations for policymakers, including increasing marketing for job training programs, opening up opportunities for Minnesotans living with disabilities, creating an Office for New Americans that would help refugees and migrants find employment and other services, and boosting Minnesota’s profile as a destination for workers through a publicity campaign.

Boelter’s time as a volunteer

According to the board’s webpage, Boelter was initially appointed to the board in 2016 while he was an executive at Western Refining. He later served on the board while he worked as a general manager of a Marathon Speedway gas station and in 2022 he was a general manager at a 7-Eleven. The 57-year-old from Green Isle served two three-year terms.

“We were both appointed under Gov. Dayton. Gov. Walz reappointed him and I was not reappointed,” Kautz said.

“These are not partisan appointments,” she added, a fact that was echoed by all board members interviewed.

“There’s been a lot made about the fact that this individual is appointed by different Democratic governors,” Dively of the Disability Council said. 

“But I would have a hard time personally seeing anyone on that board as a partisan actor. I’m not sure if politics or partisan phrases even come up. It’s just a very nonpartisan, apolitical place, has been my experience,” he said. Anderson and Kalina both concurred with that description of the board.

Reflecting this, the board’s minutes and presentations do not credit individuals with any outcomes or ideas generated, so it is hard to get a sense of what Boelter might have contributed. 

One thing that he is cited for handling at a number of meetings, though, is the fairly mundane task of moving to approve the minutes of the previous meeting. 

“Dr. Vance Boelter made a motion to approve the Minutes,” was a phrase that came up several times in the documents.

How workforce board members are appointed

To get appointed, “you do not work through a political party or through your local representative. It goes right through the Secretary of State’s Office,” Carol Anderson said.

After someone applies through the secretary of state, a background check is conducted at the outset of a volunteer’s three-year term and again every time a member is reappointed

“When you apply for this board, they will look at your resume and they’ll also do a criminal background check. … I’ve had that done many times when I am reappointed,” she said.

“How deep they go, I don’t know,” she added of the background check.

Another member from Boelter’s time on the board is Nerita Hughes, who was responsible for gender pay equity issues on the board and is a former chair of the state’s Council of African Heritage, described it as a “thorough background check.”

“They even did a tax background (check), where they will pull your taxes,” she said.

Boelter did not have a criminal background, only three parking violations and a speeding ticket, all between 2017 and 2019, according to Minnesota court records.

“I will equate it to applying for a job,” Hughes said. “You send in your resume, you send in your interest letter which addresses why you would want to serve on that board and what skill set you are going to bring to that board.”

As for qualifications, members are chosen based on the board’s needs and the availability of applicants. Dively of the Minnesota Disability Council said there was a perennial shortage of qualified applicants for the hundreds of open positions on boards and commissions.

Parts of the website for the Minnesota secretary of state were down for maintenance through Wednesday, but an archived version of the site’s application portal showed that there were 525 vacant seats across all Minnesota advisory boards and commissions as of May 28, 2025.

“That sounds about right,” Dively said.

This participatory form of government, where private citizens rub shoulders with lawmakers and government officials to find shared solutions to common problems, has generally been seen as an asset that boosts civic engagement and buy-in from the public.

The same goes for how broadly accessible public servants are to Minnesotans, at the State Capitol and elsewhere, which was often seen as a net positive for the public and government.  

But the events of the weekend showed that this can be a liability as much as an asset. In response to the fact that Boelter knew the home addresses of numerous lawmakers, the state is working to scrub private information about individual employees from various government websites.

“My understanding is that they may have taken down the [Secretary of State] site to do some privacy checks,” said Dively, himself a state employee at the Minnesota Council on Disability.

“Interactive, open, transparent government is not always aligned with safety, right?” he said. “It’s a tough spot for state officials.” 

The damage done from misinformation

Larry Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, has spent over three decades studying public opinion, elections and public policy. He watched closely as people took to the internet to speculate about the weekend shootings. 

“Immediately you saw conservative podcasts and social media seizing on unfiltered positions using the workforce commission as confirmation he was actually a loyal Democrat,” Jacobs said. “It has since come out that he is actually conservative.” 

Jacobs pointed to the papers found in Boelter’s vehicle that included the names of Democrat lawmakers and abortion-rights advocates. The Star Tribune reported that data released by the Minnesota DFL showed Boelter voted in the presidential primary election but not as a Democrat. The Minnesota Republican party did not release data, with a spokesperson saying the party considers that data to be private under current law.

The Associated Press also reported earlier this week that those close to Boelter said he was “highly religious” and conservative and that he had attended rallies for President Donald Trump.

But this didn’t quell the online speculation, and many will not see or believe the facts that have emerged after false claims were made, Jacobs said. In his long career studying public opinion, the professor and researcher said people’s ability and willingness to process and critically think about information presented to them has shifted. 

“It wasn’t that long ago in which you had fact checking, and in which politicians who said false things would be called out, and even sometimes they would apologize or issue corrections,” Jacobs said. “And those days are just a memory.” 

Now there’s a vast network of people on social media, podcasters and other political voices that “literally manufacture stories,” he said. 

This happens when people find a “kernel” of information as news breaks, Jacobs added. “People are going to take it and then spin the yarn they want out of it,” he said.

This sort of twisting of a narrative isn’t exclusively occurring on the right, Jacobs noted. MPR News had Jacobs on a live show Monday. During the segment, a caller tuned in and “berated MPR for talking about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania,” Jacobs said. “They said, (the Trump assassination attempt) never happened.” 

This is a product of the same phenomenon, Jacobs said. Following the attempted assassination, evidence continued to emerge. “We’ve got FBI reports, we’ve got local television, we’ve got local law enforcement, we’ve got an individual who was killed at the site,” Jacobs said. 

Once a narrative has been spun, it’s hard to unspin it from the minds of those consuming misinformation, he said. 

“People just have a flight of fancy, and their own ideology and prejudices enter into the reality that they want to create,” Jacobs said. “I think that’s the change. We’ve gone from a world in which people had certainly partisan attachments or policy preferences, but it was constrained to some extent by the reality of the situation. Now we’re in a world where people are manufacturing storylines through their partisan loyalties and their political ideations.” 

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This story was written by Shadi Bushra, MinnPost’s data journalist, and Winter Keefer, MinnPost’s metro reporter.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

MinnPost is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization whose mission is to provide high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota.