The mayor of Champlin, Minnesota, is refusing to fly the state's redesigned flag and challenging Gov. Tim Walz to put the question before voters, a direct rebuke to a process that bypassed the legislature and handed the decision to a small, hand-picked commission.
Mayor Ryan Sabas told Fox News Digital that no issue in his nearly decade-long tenure in city government has generated more public outcry than the flag swap. The Champlin City Council voted in February to keep flying the original Minnesota state flag, and Sabas says the city is within its legal rights to do so, or to fly no state flag at all.
"These are the people's flagpoles. This is the people's decision," Sabas said.
The backstory matters. In 2023, the Democratic-controlled Minnesota legislature created a 13-member commission, the Minnesota State Emblems Redesign Commission, to replace the state's traditional 1893 banner. The commission approved a new design, and Minnesota raised the replacement flag on May 11, 2024.
The commission's own final report described a process that included "extensive public input, a design contest that drew over 2,500 entries, and many hours of deliberations." It said the resulting designs "reflect the spirit of Minnesota, the people, the land and water, and the history of our state."
Sabas sees it differently. He told Fox News Digital that the Democratic trifecta, controlling the House, Senate, and governor's office, chose to route the flag redesign through a select committee rather than through the full legislative process.
"Two years ago, the governor and the Democrats had full power of the House, Senate, and the governor's seat. They chose they wanted to change the state flag, which they legally have the ability to do that. But instead of bringing this to the House, through the Senate and all voting on it, they picked select members of a committee and that's who chose the flag."
That distinction, between what is legally permissible and what is democratically legitimate, sits at the heart of the dispute. Sabas isn't arguing the legislature lacked authority. He's arguing it ducked accountability.
Champlin is not alone. Around a dozen towns and counties across Minnesota have refused to fly the new flag, and some Democrats in the legislature have responded by seeking to crack down on those holdouts. The threat of punitive action against local governments that won't comply has only hardened the opposition.
Sabas said it cost Champlin alone $40,000 to replace the old flags, money the city spent before the council ultimately voted to go back to the original. He described the public response as lopsided, estimating "at least a two-to-one majority" in favor of keeping the earlier 1983 version of the state flag.
Champlin City Council member Tim Huttner backed up that assessment. Huttner said he held a roundtable with constituents before the council's vote, and the result was overwhelming.
"100 percent" of roundtable attendees expressed support for flying the original flag.
Huttner said he told his constituents plainly: "I don't have an opinion. I work for you." He added that while the city cannot legally place the flag question on a municipal ballot, nothing prevents the state from putting it on a statewide one.
"I respect our city legislators, I respect our state legislators, but sometimes you've got to redo a redo. I believe this is one of those times."
Republican state Sen. Mark Koran offered a sharper critique. Koran told Fox News Digital that the 13-member redesign commission represented only "about 13 percent of Minnesota's population." He described the commission's makeup as driven by identity-group representation rather than broad democratic input.
"Native Americans, Hispanic, [LGBT], you name it, every special group was identified. So, that was really reflective of how all governance [in Minnesota] has been done by a small group of people that they've pandered to under the guise that they've been oppressed and they've given them the strongest voice."
Koran acknowledged the flag issue "may seem unimportant at one level," but argued the process behind it revealed something deeper about how the state's Democratic leadership governs. He called it "a direct assault on hard-working, legal U.S. Minnesotans" and said the flag redesign reflected "almost how all of [Minnesota] legislation has been implemented."
That pattern, a small group of insiders making decisions that affect millions, with minimal public buy-in, is a recurring complaint from Minnesota Republicans pushing back against the Walz administration.
What makes Sabas's challenge notable is its tone. He isn't throwing bombs. He described his relationship with Walz in measured terms, saying, "I've always felt that he's someone who does listen to me when I have something to say."
But the mayor isn't backing down, either. With Walz in his final year as governor, Sabas framed the flag question as an opportunity for the governor to build goodwill rather than force compliance.
"So, I challenge the governor in his last year of being governor of the state of Minnesota to really find a way to unite. Unite Minnesotans, unite us, Republicans, Democrats, people that don't know which side they are on, unite us."
Sabas called on the legislature to "have the opportunity to do this legally and do it right", a pointed suggestion that the original process fell short of that standard.
Fox News Digital reached out to Walz, Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, and Minnesota Senate President Bobby Joe Champion for comment. No responses were reported.
The silence is itself telling. When a Minneapolis-area mayor, not a rural firebrand, but a local official from the suburbs, publicly challenges the governor to let voters weigh in on a state symbol, and the governor's office says nothing, the message to citizens is clear enough.
The broader tensions surrounding Walz's leadership extend well beyond the flag. His administration has faced accusations of stonewalling congressional probes into massive welfare fraud, and critics have questioned his credibility on other high-profile accountability matters. The flag dispute is smaller in dollar terms, but it touches something that runs deeper: whether ordinary Minnesotans get a voice in how their state represents itself.
Flags are symbols. But the process that produced this one is the real issue. A legislature with unified Democratic control chose not to vote on the redesign itself. It outsourced the decision to a commission whose composition, by Koran's account, was engineered for demographic representation rather than democratic breadth. The result was a flag that many Minnesotans never asked for and actively dislike, and a price tag cities like Champlin had to absorb.
Now, rather than revisiting the question, some in the legislature want to punish the communities that won't comply. That impulse, to coerce rather than persuade, is what turns a flag dispute into a governance crisis.
Sabas called the new design "ugly." Many of his constituents apparently agree. But the deeper objection isn't aesthetic. It's procedural. Citizens were cut out of a decision about their own state's identity, and when they objected, the response from the capitol was not to listen but to threaten.
If Walz truly wants to unite Minnesotans in his final year, the path is simple: let them vote. The fact that no one in his administration seems willing to say that out loud tells you everything about who this government actually serves.
