Candidate for
Member of the State Assembly; District 9; Democratic Party

Accessibility/Open Government: I've tried myself (on several occasions) to talk directly to my assemblyman, currently Dave Jones. So far, I've only ended up on his newsletter mailing list or heard from his staff. I can't even talk to the person who's supposed to be representing me! I pledge to make personally answering emails and phone calls a priority if elected. I will refuse to speak to lobby firms when there are real citizens that want to talk to me and not my staff. Now, I do realize that Assembly members get A LOT of phone calls and emails, and I know I won't get to them all in the same day, but if I put in the effort, I can get to personally replying to an email within a year without merely putting someone on my newsletter list. I will try to return every call and every email at some point. Also, some emails will take more time than others and may not be personally answered by me, but I will read every one and approve of my staff's response before I allow them to send it. I'm not going to spread myself thin, but I refuse to ignore the public as if I thought I was better than everyone. I firmly believe that if one is to represent the people, one shouldn't separate from them. One should immerse oneself into society rather than shun it. Furthermore, how can you fix a problem if you don't see it first hand? I'll tell you why politicians never do anything about the horrible parking problem in downtown Sac. It's because they always have their own personal parking space! The Capitol has its own underground garage where the senators and assembly members have their own little parking areas and can separate themselves from society. Don't want to dine with the riff-raff? They have their own cafeteria. And if that isn't exclusive enough, they can eat at the private Sutter Club! We need real people in the Capitol to solve the real problems we all face as a people.

Protecting Renters: And by Rent, I mean both for individuals and for businesses. I've noticed that even in this down economy, it's going up for both. I've seen landlords raise rent by exorbitant amounts, sometimes for NO REASON and effectively evict tenants by rent. And the worst thing is it is happening all across California. The landlords don't care about the people living on their property. Its all business with them. Some of the richer landlords can afford to just let their property sit empty until someone comes along who can pay. This goes for businesses too. The facts are that downtown is almost a ghost town right now, and getting worse every day. That is because the landlords are raising the rent on tenants and there's nothing they can do about it. For housing, the only current law on raising rent is that they have to give 30 - 60 days notice, depending on the raise. In the cases where rent is being raised 100%, the 60 days rent increase notice is effectively a 60 eviction notice. I propose a sort of rent control, which would tax landlords (of both individuals and businesses) who raise rent more than 20% in a given year. The tax would be substantial (about 50% of the raise), thus incouraging a limit on major increases. As with many things, I am in favor of using the old adage "the power to tax is the power to destroy".

Fixing the Budget: One of the main reasons I became a Democrat was my stance on spending. Now mind you, I'm not for spending money willy nilly on things that aren't needed. But if you look at the budget problems logically, you'll find that you CANNOT use only cuts to solve this problem. The Assembly and Senate both need to get to work and shore up this budget problem and then start thinking LONG TERM. That's been the problem with the budget thing this whole time. Just because things are a certain way at one point in time does not mean that it will be that way forever. Especially when it comes to the Economy. The Economy goes up and it also goes down. We need to plan ahead for the future by cutting the programs that don't work or aren't necessary and actually putting money away for when the economy slumps. What works in the microcosm (individuals for example) works in the macrocosm.