League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Santa Clara County, CA November 2, 2004 Election
	Sally J. Lieber Answers Questions Candidate for Member of the State Assembly; District 22

Read the answers from all candidates.

Questions & Answers

1. What does California need to do to address the current budget crisis?

Our Legislature and the citizens of our state must do several things to address our current budget crisis and to move our state forward.

First and foremost, we must prioritize our state's needs with an eye toward the future, planning for the outcomes we need in education, healthcare and environmental protection.

Second, we must cut spending, increase efficiency and bring in new revenues through increased economic activity.

Third, we must address the problems that plague our budget process and consider needed reforms such as reducing the number of votes needed to pass a responsible budget and budgeting on a multi-year cycle.

2. What should the state's priorities be for K-12 education? For the Community College System?

Education has the greatest return-on-investment of any type of spending that our state does. It is time to nourish our schools, pre-K to 16, with the funding that they need to provide a world-class education for every student.

Several important objectives should be focused on:

1) Planning for lifelong education, from pre-school for all children, to career training and re-training.

2) Replacement of aging infrastructure with modern, healthful, energy-efficient buildings that leverage the fact that one-fifth of all Californians spend the work-day in a school building.

3) Strengthening higher education to ensure our long-term competitiveness and provide educational opportunity for our diverse population.

Our community colleges provide a vital point of educational access for all Californians. Their role in our system of higher education should be strengthened to ensure that full-time, qualified faculty are available and course offerings are maintained.

3. What measures would you support to address California's water needs?

I strongly support several strategies to meet our state's water needs:

1) Aggressive pollution prevention--taking toxics out of manufacturing and out of the products we buy to reduce the chance that they end up in our water and have to be cleaned up at great cost.

2) Making water conservation part of everything we do--reducing unneeded consumption saves clean water and reduces energy costs.

3) Responsibly planning for needed infrastructure--particularly in our vulnerable Hetch-Hetchy system.

4) Acting as responsible stewards of our environment to help reverse the impacts that global warming will have on our precious supply of clean, safe water.

4. What should the Legislature be doing to address the needs of Californians without health insurance?

To address the needs of those in our our communities that are uninsured and be reponsible to taxpayers, the Legislature must ensure greater accountability on the part of corporations doing business in our state, leverage federal resources for healthcare and work toward a system of single-payer, universal coverage healthcare.

Low-wage employers like Walmart, that provide a 'fast-track' for their workers to access public benefits, should be held more accountable for the costs they push off on taxpayers. The citizens of our state can be very powerful 'agents of change' by demanding this accountability as consumers.

Our Legislature and Governor must also work to change the state policies that prevent us from bringing more of California's tax dollars back from Washington D.C. Healthcare is an area where we can begin to address the imbalance of payments that makes California, and its taxpayers, net donors to the federal government.

We must also work to achieve a single-payer, universal-coverage system of healthcare. I was proud to co-author SB 921, a bill to provide healthcare for all, in our last legislative session and I plan to continue to work toward a system that prioritizes people over profits.