Positions Overview

By Bodo Diehn

Answers to questions on taxes, business issues, juvenile crime, health care, and the environment

Even our ex-governor has vetoed the legislature's attempts to give to business the majority of the tax cuts they had devised, while raising the taxes for homeowners in several school districts. As a small businessman myself, I am certainly pro-business, but I feel that business tax cuts should be enacted only after the needs of our children and other neglected constituencies such as state employees are taken care of, and that any tax cut must be equitably distributed. There is a tax cut that I would support wholeheartedly: a cut in the state sales tax. This is a tax cut that will benefit the average working person as much as their wealthy neighbors. All other tax cuts proposed to date have preferentially benefitted the rich and/or big business.

As the owner of a small business, what is your perspective on business issues?

Among my concerns for businesses big and small are capricious enforcement and the restoration of common sense in government. In fact, one of the best things this legislature could do would be to institute a State Office of Dispute Resolution to mediate between citizens and government. I believe that big companies often have the resources to look out for themselves, but that small business needs additional protection against excessive regulatory zeal I think that business has done quite well in the just-concluded legislative session. I do not plan to dismantle these gains even though I am uncomfortable with laws as Employment-At-Will which limits the appeals allowed a terminated employee.

What is your stand on juvenile crime?

Safe schools are one of my legislative priorities. School Boards must be given the tools and the spine to exclude gangs, guns, drugs and violence from the school grounds. As a safety issue, bus drivers need adult monitors to assist them. In more general terms, however, I think it is absolutely wrong to abandon all efforts at rehabilitation and instead immediately send youthful offenders to the adult prisons. The Senate has acted unconscionably in killing a bipartisan juvenile justice reform plan, backed by judges and experts, which had already passed the House where my opponent had in fact voted against it. Prevention and rehabilitation are always cheaper than incarceration, and that's where our resources should go. Then if an offender turns out to be incorrigible, it's time to lock him up and throw away the key.

What healthcare-related issues do you consider most important?

I intend to prepare legislation that takes the decisions about your health care away from an HMO or insurance company accountant and puts them back into the hands of your physician. We also need to expand AHCCS which is our Arizona Medicare equivalent. It needs to be accessible, though not free, to the many people who cannot otherwise obtain health care. In this context, can you believe that the legislature attempted to torpedo their own governor's "Kids Care" proposal to provide affordable health insurance to school children? Also, the legislature has shown a deplorable lack of leadership in failing to ensure that the Board of Medical Examiners sanctions misdeeds by doctors.

Do you have environmental concerns?

I am an environmental professional who makes a living helping people to conduct their businesses in environmentally responsible ways. I have discovered that most businesses sincerely want to "do the right thing". What gets in the way is the lack of outreach and support by the Department of Environmental Quality, and the more than occasional inflexible interpretation of rules. The existing rules could be used to achieve the aim of protecting our environment in better, faster, and less expensive ways. In more general terms (not because I lack specific proposals, but because such solutions cannot be described in a sentence or two), we must solve the Valley's air quality problems, protect more of our public lands from development while managing growth, and in general not allow wholesale deregulation. I will be happy to discuss with you specific approaches to solving these problems. We must also find ways to better deal and reason with environmental groups whom business interests and even some regulatory agencies now appear to consider their "enemies". I have little doubt that we will find a middle ground where all players can meet.

What makes you think you can represent this District?

The issues facing us are not Republican or Democratic, and neither are the potential solutions. What is partisan are the demonstrated failures of the present legislature to come to grips with the problems facing us. I am absolutely certain that there are as many Republicans in my District as are Democrats who are totally disgusted with a legislature that needed two years and three attempts to pass meaningful school finance legislation, and rejected lobby reform until they could engineer a veto of this legislation by an ex-governor who is now jail-bound. I count on these Republican voters to express their disapproval at the polls, and I promise that I will represent them in a nonpartisan way.