The most recent administrator, Keith Hiller, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, noted in an organizational assessment many anonymous staff complaints about the mayor, according to a copy of the report.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
PMT: Very Local Mayhem
Minnesota sometimes does not seem like a very big state; it's a place where local politics and state politics often merge. That's the case with a situation up in Nisswa, a town of 2,000 in "cabin country" in the middle of the state. I've been there, and it is a very pleasant little town with a great bike trail (the Paul Bunyan Trail) going right through the middle.
Nisswa is the home of a woman named Jennifer Carnahan, who was a state figure five years ago, when she was the state chair of the Republican Party here (and was married to U.S. Rep. Jim Hagedorn, who died in 2022). Things got weird in 2021, when a key supporter of hers, Anton Lazzaro, was indicted for child sex trafficking. In the wake of the scandal, she stepped down as state chair. She then ran for her deceased husband's seat in Congress, but came in third in the Republican primary. In 2024 she ran for mayor of little Nisswa, and won.
Then things got weird again. Here are some excerpts from an article in yesterday's Star-Tribune:
Carnahan is the former chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota after
getting pushed out of that job. She did not attend a special meeting
called Wednesday to discuss her conduct. More than 40 residents filled
the room the morning after a snowstorm dumped 8 inches in the area...
They called the special meeting after Carnahan recently claimed online
that she was physically assaulted by a resident. That resident had sent
Carnahan an email addressing what she felt was unfit conduct for a
mayor. The resident denied assaulting Carnahan, and prosecutors twice
declined to press charges...
Amid a mixture of comments, some of the complaints include: “Our Mayor is a bully, she’s political, and a terrible leader”; “The Mayor is a problem, period”; “The Mayor has no experience with City governance. She got elected and is now ‘top of the food chain.’ ”...
It started with an email that Sophie Foster, 27, sent the mayor on Nov. 20 after she said she overheard Carnahan in the Nisswa bar and restaurant where Foster works talking about ways to get Zahn off the council.
In an interview Tuesday before the meeting, Carnahan denied discussing this at the restaurant.
Foster emailed Carnahan and Council Member Joe Hall in defense of Zahn and asked Carnahan to apologize.
“Multiple of us overheard hostile/rude comments about him, which I’ve been told is not a new thing for you,” Foster’s email read.
Carnahan never replied to the email. A week later, after the city’s annual holiday lights parade, Carnahan said she was aggressively confronted by Foster outside the municipal bar Ye Old Pickle Factory.
I have so many questions, and none of them are really about the quite feisty mayor, Jennifer Carnahan.
So, the conservative town of Nisswa has a city-owned bar? That may be my new favorite form of socialism. And... said bar, rather than being called "The Nisswa Municipal Bar" or something is called "Ye Old Pickle Factory?" I'll be honest-- when I read that part of the article I was tempted to go to my car immediately and drive the 2 hours and 35 minutes to Nisswa to check that out. The official city web site lists Ye Old Pickle Factory as a "department," and one where "the beer hits the spot." The Yelp reviews are mixed, with a rating of 3.4 out of 5 and comments that refer to "frozen deep-fried food from Costco," "atrocious" service and an incident where a woman was shoved to the ground for wearing a mask at the heart of the COVID outbreak. Most interesting to me were the number of reviews that refer to the Pickle as a "dive bar"-- so it is not just a municipal bar, but a city-owned dive bar, and one where tourists are treated like dirt.
If I do go to Ye Old Pickle Factory, I will post photos. Promise.
