Issues

As a professional career and employment counselor, I know from first-hand experience that education and well-paying jobs are joined at the hip. If our state is to grow and attract high-skill/high-wage jobs, we must increase investments in our public education system at all levels: K-12 schools, community colleges, state universities, adult basic education, and worker training and re-training. A thriving, diversified economy with prosperous individuals and businesses will, in turn, generate the sustainable state revenues that will allow us to continue making appropriate investments in our public education system and other core state services.

A robust tourism industry is essential to the economic health of rural Arizona communities.The next Legislature must immediately identify a sustainable funding source so that we can reopen and keep open all of our state parks and highway rest areas. Arizona’s “welcome mat” creates thousands of tourism-dependent jobs all over the state and sustains the livelihoods of thousands of small business owners.

The next Legislature must end the practice of raiding the counties’ and cities’ share of state revenues. This practice merely shifts the tax burden to local citizens and does nothing to solve the underlying structural state budget deficit. The state government must not impose unfunded mandates on the counties and cities, either. That is just another form of unfair burden-shifting to local jurisdictions.

The federal government has utterly failed to fulfill its responsibility for border security and immigration policy. We must continue to vigorously pressure our United States Senators and our entire Congressional delegation to make comprehensive immigration reform a top priority in Washington, D.C. We’ve got huge problems to solve here in Arizona. Washington must do its job so that we can do ours. Any solution must include an effectively regulated guest worker program, so that citizens of other countries who want to work here can apply to enter the United States legally. That will help us dramatically reduce human trafficking and target those sneaking across our borders with criminal intent.

For a variety of complex reasons, our state has a structural imbalance between expenditures and revenues. There are no quick and easy solutions, but we must begin to address the roots of the problem in the next legislative session. I support approaching the problem along the lines of the report from the Arizona Town Hall gathering in the fall of 2009. To read the entire report, click here: http://www.aztownhall.org/pdf/95th_Recommendations.pdf