Candidate for
State Senator; District 8

Biography

Dennis was born in San Mateo and raised in Burlingame where he attended public schools from kindergarten through high school. He is a graduate of U.C.L.A.

During the first Bush Administration, Dennis worked in Washington, D.C. as a program director for a non-profit organization. In the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Dennis helped conceptualize and coordinate initiatives to facilitate private American aid to the newly independent republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1992, Dennis accepted an invitation from the Chairman of the City Council of Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania, to be an advisor on municipal reform. Dennis worked closely with a blue-ribbon committee of American mayors, Western ambassadors, Lithuanian Parliamentarians, and high-level advisors to the President of Lithuania to preserve the existence of, but restructure the form of local government. He was instrumental in concluding the Sister City agreement between Kaunas and Los Angeles.

While overseas, Dennis decided to return to school to obtain a law degree. He studied litigation in San Francisco and international law in Sweden, earning his doctorate in 1995. He passed the California Bar exam on his first attempt and worked the next few years for a small law firm in Benicia where he honed his skills as a general practitioner and occasionally served as a small claims court judge pro tem. Thereafter, he took a year off to care for his ailing grandmother, and then accepted a position in Redwood Shores at a prestigious aviation and insurance law firm. Since July 2001, he has worked for a small Burlingame law firm handling real estate, probate, and civil rights cases.

Dennis became politically active during the California presidential campaign of George W. Bush. Thereafter, he was elected to the Central Committee of the San Mateo County Republican Party where he has worked tirelessly to professionalize and modernize the local and state parties.

A "child of the Reagan Revolution" and life-long Republican, Dennis is a fiscal conservative, and a social moderate who believes that the government should tax less and stay out of the bedroom. He is pro-choice with respect to reproductive rights and believes that religion should be taught in Sunday school, not public schools.

In the year 2001, Dennis ran for his local school board, but very quickly discovered that his district's financial problems were caused in Sacramento, not locally. After the election, concerned parents and senior citizens asked Dennis to run for the State Legislature in order to reform the educational funding laws so as to improve the quality of education and protect homeowners from future property tax increases and attempts to overturn Proposition 13.

Dennis married his wife Bridget in 1999. Their first child, Elizabeth Nola, was born the next year and named after Dennis' two grandmothers. Their second child, Matthew, was born in 2001. Dennis and Bridget also raise Bridget's two teenage daughters from a previous marriage.