A former Minnesota bar owner who now commutes two hours a day to sling suds in neighboring Wisconsin said Gov. Tim Walz’s restrictive pandemic-era lockdowns in the state “decimated” local businesses — and caused financial ruin for those who stood up for their livelihoods.
“I think he’s an evil man who overstepped his role as the governor. He took small businesses and ripped them up. He destroyed us,” Lisa Zarza, 52, told The Post.
“I had to leave the state to be able to legally work and make a living.”
She opened the Outpost Bar and Grill in Bay City, Wisc. in March 2022 after she said she was stripped of her licenses to operate Alibi Drinkery in Lakeville and Froggy Bottoms River Pub and Lily PADio in Northfield.
The new location is a solid hour drive from her home in Rosemont, Minn.
“I didn’t even know the name of our governor until he shut our state down,” said Zarza, a mother of three and grandmother of two who’s lived in Minnesota since she was seven years old.
She said when shelter-in-place and business closures first went into effect in March, 2020, “I did everything I was supposed to do. I wore my mask, I social distanced. I stayed at home.”
But as the months wore on and the state slowly reopened, salons, bars and restaurants remained under Walz’s closure orders — which weren’t completely lifted statewide until May of 2021.
By October, 2020, Zarza and a cohort of fellow bar owners had had enough and decided to defy the order.
“I stood up because he stripped us of our rights. It was a discrimination against certain groups of people and we were one of them. He didn’t have a right to do what he did to us,” she fumed.
But the short-lived uprising by local restaurateurs was swiftly crushed by Walz’s regime.
“I was threatened with arrests, I was threatened with fines. At the end of the entire lawsuit, my lawsuit including Attorney General fees was over $300,000. I filed personal bankruptcy,” she said.
Meanwhile, it was business as usual around much of the state, the bar owner raged.
“Everything else, literally Target, Walmart, Home Depot. Everyone was open 100 percent. The same exact order that shut us down, opened them all up,” Zarza recalled.
“He took away rights from the American people and from Minnesotans that he did not have a right to take.”
Now, her new location in America’s Dairyland is thriving — thanks in part to “thousands of people” in Minnesota and Wisconsin who come out to support her.
But when she learned Vice President Kamala Harris had selected him to round out the Democratic ticket in this year’s election, it resurrected the pain and hardship she experienced over the last few years.
“I almost dropped to my knees and I was sick. I was literally sick to my stomach. Everything that he did to our state came back. I rode an hour to work and cried the whole way,” the pub owner said.
“Kamala made a big mistake picking him as her VP. She thought she was getting some Podunk freaking farmer. She didn’t,” she added.
“We don’t want him running our country. Good god.”
Meanwhile, Zarza has welcomed the change of scenery.
“I love Wisconsin. I’ll never go back to Minnesota. I’ll live there for seven more months then after that I never want to go to that state again.”
